Oh my gosh, I feel so down after paging through this thread.
Anything by Stan Rogers, because of his untimely death and rich somber voice, especially the live version of “Down the Road” since it was about him seeing you next time he’s around, and he died a few days later.
His Last Watch about a man who has been forced to retire after years of working with ships:
They dragged her down, dead, from Tobermory,
Too cheap to spare her one last head of steam,
Deep in diesel fumes embraced,
Rust and soot upon the face of one who was so clean.
They brought me here to watch her in the boneyard,
Just two old wrecks to spend the night alone.
…
And Marianne Faithfull’s Ballad of Lucy Jordan from the Thelma & Louise soundtrack, about a woman who goes nuts in her traditional housewife role:
At the age of thirty-seven she realised she’d never
Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair.
I thought of another couple, both by Loreena McKennitt:
Skellig
…
Beneath these jasmine flowers
Amidst these cypress trees
I give you now my books
And all their mysteries
The Highwayman (basically Alfred Noyes’ poem set to music):
…
He turned, he spurred to the west
he did not know she stood
bowed with her head o’er musket
drenched with her own red blood
And also, by Pink Floyd:
High Hopes
…
There was a ragged band that followed in our footsteps
Running before time took our dreams away
Can’t believe I didn’t think of it when this thread was fresh, but it came up today on my iPod–the very ultimate in ‘sad songs,’ I think, has to be “In the Year 2525”, by Zager & Evans.
Now it’s been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
The first song that made me cry was “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks (I was young):
Goodbye to you, my trusted friend.
We’ve known each other since we’re nine or ten.
Together we climbed hills or trees.
Learned of love and ABC’s,
skinned our hearts and skinned our knees.
The last song that made me cry was “Hurt” as sung by Johnny Cash:
I hurt myself today
to see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
the only thing that’s real
This song has a certain significance as I listened to it a lot when I got dumped long ago by my now-wife. It’s weird to listen to this song now and remember how I weeped while listening to it all those years ago. You know, cause all that emotion is gone. But it’s still a sad song, the guy feels rotten cause he’s, ah, alon, and because he feels like he didn’t do enough, and that he did too much. So, yeah, I was a weepy mess.
Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris may seem unlikely collaborators, but their new duet album, All The Roadrunning is extraordinary. Heard out of context this song appears to be a simple lover’s lament, but once you know it’s about 9/11, it’s wrenching, and immutably sad.
*If This Is Goodbye
My famous last words
Are laying around in tatters
Sounding absurd*
Check out the ancient Phil Ochs version of this song. It’s just him and a guitar but the melody is simpler (and better, IMO) and his delivery is so urgent that you can hear the hoofbeats. Most. Haunting. Song. Ever.
OK, first, my apologies that no moderator saw this thread sooner. But, better late than never.
Now: as some of you have noted, we do not permit quoting full song lyrics on these boards. It’s usually a potential copyright violation, and we don’t want to get into hassels. For details on the rules, see Forum Rules: PLEASE READ and note Post #2.
The appropriate way to provide song lyrics is to post a line or two and then provide a link to a website that has full lyrics (and presumably has the rights to do so.)
I have therefore gone through the thread, deleting anything that looked too long.
I apologize if some of you did, indeed, quote only a snippet. There were many (MANY) posts that quoted what looked too long to me, so I clipped out all but the first two lines (or first complete thought.) I did NOT try to edit for the most meaningful lines. I did NOT try to look up the song to see whether you really quoted an appropriate amount.
If you think I have wrongfully chopped down an appropriate length, or if you want to provide a link, or if you want me to further edit your post in any way, please email me and I’ll get to it as soon as I can. Be specific, I cannot restore deleted lines with an “undelete” so you’ll have to email me with the link, the lines to put back, etc. and I will do my best.
“Honey”, by Bobby Goldsboro. Tear jerking, tear your shirt off and claw your breast, fall down and just cry, pure SYRUP lyrics. (closely followed by is “In The Autum of My Life”)
If you don’t contemplate suicide after listening to this, you are definitely not subject to depression or bi-polar disorder.
I can’t recall this title, but if I could, it would be the five star winner:
lyrics that I can remember:
“Bobby, I’ve never had to die before,
Don’t know if I can do it,
But if you lean on me,
Baby, we’ll get through it…”
Yes, that sounds like it, Khadaji. I should of included a disclaimer that those lyrics were as best as I could remember. But that sounds like you nailed it.
Plenty of great input here. I’ll add one for the ‘end of a long relationship’ theme:
Latter Days by Over the Rhine
What a beautiful piece of heartache, this has all turned out to be.
Lord knows we’ve learned the hard way, all about healthy apathy.
Where’ve you been?" sung by Kathy Mattea. About a long-married couple in a nursing home:
They’d never spent a night apart
For 60 yrs she heard him snore
Now they’re in a hospital
In seperate beds on different floors
Very, very sad. I first heard this song on some round-table style country music show with several female artists sitting around singing songs. Mattea had not even recorded the song yet – she was working on the album that it would be on. She explained that she had written the song about two relatives of her husband’s. She sang it and her voice broke on the last chorus. She said something like, “I have to keep practicing this one – I can’t seem to get through it without crying!” Then the camera panned back and you could see that every other woman on the panel was also crying. And, sitting at home, I was crying like a lunatic, too!
Another sad one – “He Would Be Sixteen” sung by Michelle Wright (scroll down to the fifth song). About a woman thinking about the son she gave up for adoption:
He would be sixteen she never even got to hold him
And nights like this hurts to miss the son she’s never seen
He would be sixteen he would be sixteen
Finally, one that always makes me cry because it came out during one of my husband’s deployments, when I was, well, missing him… It reminds me of that deployment (and all of his other deployments) – This is Me Missing You by James House. Here’s a link to the video, which always makes me cry – especially the very end, where it cuts over to actual footage of soldiers returning to their families.
Wall of Voodoo singer Andy Prieboy’s Tomorrow Wendy best known version by Concrete Blonde:
It is complete now - two ends of time
Are neatly tied
A one-way street, she’s walking to the
End of the line
And there she meets the faces she sees in
Her heart and mind
They say -Goodbye- tomorrow, Wendy’s,
Going to die
