I may be interpreting the 30 Day Song Challenge prompt (“a song that reminds you of something sad”) a bit liberally with my pick today. As much as I tried, I couldn’t think of a song that reminded me of any particular sad thing. There aren’t any songs that I associate with my grandparents’ funerals, or the events of 9/11 or a bad breakup, that is to say, specific people or things or events that made me sad. There are, on the other hand, songs that point broadly, but non-specifically, toward some past sadness of mine, though without a singularly identifiable referent for that sadness. Rather, they’re songs that stand as road-signs in my heart and mind, signs that say something like “DO NOT PASS” or “DANGER AHEAD,” signs that I’ve subconsciously placed along paths I’ve already traveled but perhaps fear I may forget are perilous. These songs are categorically different than “songs that make me sad,” because it isn’t the songs themselves that make me sad, but rather some very real, antecedent state of mind or state of affairs to which they at some point in time served as the soundtrack. They don’t remind me of some thing sad, they don’t make me sad. They remind me of being sad.
I’m not sure what to call that category of songs.
My pick for today reminds me of a time in my life when I had a semi-extended bout with sadness. I was under a considerable amount of stress professionally, I was battling health problems, I had undergone an unpleasant falling-out with some close friends, I was struggling to make ends meet financially. I couldn’t seem to catch a break, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I was, at best, treading water. We’ve all been there, I’m sure, and it’s a tough psychic space to be in. You can’t seem to make any progress because nothing you do appears to diminish the ever-increasing pile of Things That Must Be Done. It’s whole lot of one step forward, two giant leaps back until… well, until you find it difficult to even bother with the one-step-forward bit anymore. That last concession is the lowest point, when sadness gets disconnected from any particular thing and starts to become a blanket that covers everything. That’s the sort of sadness that begins to feed itself and, because its resources are limitless, becomes very hard to starve.
What I should have been listening to at that time is my pick from Day Two of this Challenge (“a song that clears your head”), but what I was listening to at that time was the song below. Over and over and over again. It’s the title track from the Avett Brothers’ 2009 album I and Love and You.
Both lyrically and sonically, this song captures a lot of what protracted sadness felt like to me, and it continues to serve as a reminder, every time I hear it, not exactly of some particular sad thing, but of the feeling of sadness. The refrain is a brilliantly-phrased solicitation: Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in / Are you aware the shape I’m in? Of course, a person begging for hospitality ought not need to demonstrate his or her need for respite as well. There is something very site-specific about sadness, something very subject-specific about it, which has a tendency to make it very lonely and thus makes the question “are you aware the shape I’m in?” a particularly poignant one. As I said above, what such a person needs most is someone like Bill Withers, something like an unconditional invitation to “lean on me,” someone to help carry the load that can’t be borne, a hand to reach down and draw one out of the pit of despair.
But there’s a “catch” in the Avett Brothers’ song, which gives one both pause and good reason to worry that perhaps the Burdened in this instance finds himself incapable of being unburdened anymore. The song really delivers its coup de grâce in the break, and again at the end, when Scott Avett sings:
Three words that became hard to say
I and love and you
Upon reflection, perhaps that is something specific enough to satisfy the prompt for today. The “something sad” this song reminds me of is finding it hard to say the three words “I” and “love” and “you.” In combination, that tiny triumvirate of phonemes, whether delivered or received, is the only way out of the solipsistic morass that is sadness, after all. And the inability to either deliver or receive them might be the very definition of sadness.
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Here’s your quick-access link to the entire 30 Day Song Challenge 2014 prompt-list and my picks for each day.