Dante’s Prayer by Loreena McKennitt
drunkard logic and providence by The Fat Lady Sings
These Are Days by 10,000 Maniacs, which is a happy song, but puts me in that mild melancholy when I hear it
This thread is getting long, but here are some as-yet-unheard additions. I second many of the others.
Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s **“Country Girl.” **
Neil Young’s **“A Man Needs a Maid” **and "The Needle and the Damage Done."
Almost anything by The Cranberries.
Almost anything by Suzanne Vega.
**“The Long Black Veil,” **by The Band or The Stones/Chieftains (or Johnny Cash, I’m sure, though I never heard his version).
**“Ballad of a Thin Man” **and **“Desolation Row,” **from Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.”
**“Up to Me,” **Bob Dylan (only found on his “Biograph” compilation, I believe). It starts with the lines *“Everything went from bad to worse,” *goes through 12 woeful refrains, the last one starting *“If we never meet again, baby remember me …” *Haunting.
Basically it looks like minor chords, sad subjects, lonely male vocals or breathy female vocals are the key to haunting sounds. YMMV.
Zeb
LOL zeb
breathy female vocal was my criterion for choosing Carly Simon’s "The Three Of Us In The Dark"
“The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” When I was young the song used to make me think I was being watched, and now it makes me feel as desolate as the desert.
No one has mentioned Estranged by Guns N’ Roses?
That’s the first song I thought about.
Prison Grove on Warren Zevon’s new album is very haunting.
This is similar to another thread I posted to a while back, for “Songs that make you cry.” I posted so many songs to that one ( returned 3 times) that I was afraid people would get the impression that I sit on the floor in front of my CD player all day, box of Kleenex at my knee, while the room steadily fills with my tears…
Some friends of mine and I were talking about the movie “Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang,” one that all of us love for some reason. It has the right measure of weirdness and whimsy, while still being a legitimate children’s story that adults can enjoy. I mentioned that of the whole movie, the musical number and scene that I loved the most is “Doll on a Music Box.” We all decided that it touched something in all of us, a longing that we all share in some way, and was bittersweet and poignant for such a silly children’s movie.
To me, that’s why certain songs haunt me. They function on more than one level at the same time, almost like irony, and remind us of something we tend to push back away from our thoughts.
November Rain by guns and roses
The show must go on , either Freddy Mercury , or Queen , was never sure if it was a solo or group
Silent lucidity , QueensRyche
Declan
I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight - Cutting Crew
American Pie - Don Mclean
Who Wants To Live Forever - Queen
Moonlight Sonata - Beethoven
And the most recent song to give me a severe case of the chills:
Gollum’s Song - Emiliana Torrini (the song playing during the credits of Two Towers)
39 by Queen
Lucky Man by Emerson Lake & Palmer
Belzebub’s Laughter by Hoyt Axton
Come and Dance by Janis Ian
Don’t Drink the Water by Dave Matthews band.
I just saw Kill Bill and I found the opening song “Bang Bang” (originally by Cher, I believe) to be haunting.
Also, Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkins.
Damn, you beat me to it. The song is haunting enough as it is, but the way it was presented in the movie, as an almost literal description of what had just happened, was really heavy.