Just looking for good songs along the type such as Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes”…stuff that a depressed or sad person might be able to find a connection to…
love you should have come over
and
hallelujah
by Jeff Buckley
Leonard Cohen - Take this Waltz
Nick Cave - Darker with the Day
Collective Soul - The World I Know
Concrete Blonde - When I was a Fool
Tom Waits - I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You (and pretty much all of his stuff)
Mark Lanegan - the album Whiskey for the Holy Ghost
Those are all artists I like to listen to when I’m wallowing.
Veruca Salt - Loneliness Is Worse
Trust me, if you’re not crying by the second verse, you’re not sad.
Cindy Lauper’s Sally’s Pigeons and Time After Time
Billy Joel’s Where’s the Orchestra and Souveneir
(Somewhere Along the Line is a good one too, but’s it’s not quite a ballad, is it?)
Alice Cooper’s I Never Cry and How You Gonna’ See Me Now?
The Eagles’ Victim of Love
Meatloaf’s Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad
Yeesh. I think I’m depressed, now, too. But those tunes do get you through a bad funk, sometimes. Which is really irony at work, isn’t it?
For nostalgia about your childhood, listen to **Secret Gardens of the Heart{/b]. I think Judy Collins did it about thirty years ago. It takes my breath away.
Betty Buckley singing When There’s No One from Carrie (the musical based on the movie based on the Stephen King novel).
I will offer up a few that do not depress me personally, but where the tale in the ballad is tear-your-heart-out depressing.
Bruce Springsteen -The River
Nick Cave/Kylie - The Wild Rose
Stretching somewhat, but the poem on which the video to Fleetwood Macs Everywhere is based is also a really depressing “Ballad”.
Me? I can’t keep a dry eye when I hear Bright Eyes, but that’s not really a ballad.
“Ride On” by Christy Moore.
Anything by Bright Eyes. What kind of depression are you looking for? He covers all the bases.
Lou Reed’s album “Berlin” is pretty much universally acknowledged to be the most depressing music ever committed to vinyl. When I want to have me a good, long cry, that’s the one I turn to.
The extraordinary folksinger Meg Christian introduced an admittedly whiny ballad she wrote by saying, “I played this song for a friend and I asked her what she thought of it. She thought for a second, then replied, ‘There’s one thing you can say about self-pity. It’s always sincere.’”
I’m not sure who recorded it first, but The Pogues’ “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” is probably one of the saddest ballads EVER written. My mother and I both get misty when we listen to it.
Not too long ago we did a thread on The Saddest Songs in the World. Not all of them are ballads, I suppose, but still ought to have some good mentions in there.