Pop Songs with Slow Depressing Music

That’s a really, really good song. It’s not really “depressing”, though. It’s gripping. It’s an epic story-song that gradually builds up to a spooky climax (and I’m not sure if I can think of any other song, ever, that’s quite like it).

Musically, it builds tension by almost never straying from a dominant 7th chord, so that the vocals take precedence over the chord changes and you’re kind of perpetually wondering what’s going to happen next. Kind of like the late great Harry Nilsson’s Lime In The Coconut, which I think literally has just one chord (a dominant seventh which might also add a ninth in some measures, I seem to recall.) The arrangement gets dissonant towards the end.

Strings doing glissandos and pull-offs always do have the effect of sounding like “someone falling.”

Really good song.

Angel by Sarah McLachlan
Say Something - Great Big World with Christina Aguilera

both Top 40 hits.

Other Australian and British ones I can think of didn’t chart in the US. So maybe it is less of an American thing.

Sorry, but even Trent Reznor agrees with me that Johhny Cash’s cover of that song is far superior.

I would also put forward the entire discography of Leonard Cohen, the grocer of despair himself. The heavily covered Hallelujah is the obvious track, though I’ve think that Famous Blue Raincoat is the best fit for this thread.

How about the Gary Jules version of “Mad World”?

I never said anything about which version was superior.