No tears left to cry
With the Manila monsoon season in full swing, it’s time to bring back the Sad Song playlists.™
In any coming-of-age story comes an encounter with a sad song at the exact moment in your life that it’s meant to speak to you. So much has been written about music as a balm; of how sometimes it is enough that each word in a song feels like you’ve said it or heard it some other way in your life — like these sorrows had past lives before they became yours. Now, you have something to sing along to when all other words leave you.
As the rain starts to hit more heavily in these parts, it feels like a good time to revisit a Young STAR classic by Regina Belmonte (that we can’t even find online): a list of sad songs originally published one rainy season in the early aughties. Taking it as an inspiration below is another list — not as a “best of” or anything definitive — but as a selection of our personal salves. Read on for the first half, and head on over to youngstar.ph for the rest. Liars - The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack (2006)
When something is repeated, it could function as emphasis, as with the Hebrew language, or it could very well be that you’re trying to convince yourself to believe in a lie. The Other Side of
Mt. Heart Attack lives in that tiny space where the difference in the meaning of repetition dwells together, where you’re not quite convinced of the sparse promises, but you allow yourself to believe in them, too. (Carina Santos)
The Mountain Goats - Autoclave (2008)
“I am this great, unstable mass of blood and foam,” John Darnielle sings, defiant and pitying, announcing that he’s undeserving of the homecoming that comes with intimacy. Upon learning about bacteria that thrives in an environment that’s supposed to kill it, he writes: “This got me to thinking about people whose hearts involuntarily pulverize any good feelings that come within a city block of them.” (C.S.) Ang Bandang Shirley - ‘Di Na Babalik (2013)
I’ve heard this song so many times: at a gig, on loop after a heartbreak, leaking tinnily out of some speakers; but it never wears out its veneer — its reluctance to cross the finish line, to move on. No one knows the comforts of a lost love better than this song does. In fact, it willingly embraces it. Because at times, the memory of what is gone is the only thing that keeps us alive, for better or for worse. (Don Jaucian) Frightened Rabbit - Nitrous Gas (2013)
This year, Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchinson was found dead on the banks of Scotland’s Firth of Forth, lending a somber and chilling tone to what he called the expansion of an often-flippant phrase, “I wish I was dead.” It’s a song for when life gets too heavy, and you need a song you can sink into — just for four minutes — so you don’t drown inside yourself. (C.S.) Lykke Li - Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone (2014) There is a point in Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone where it almost disintegrates. Each word has been sung like a decaying mantra, relying on friction to burn through pleas to “love her scars” so she can sew herself back together. But by this time, her love is at its breaking point, scorching even in the way it asks for recognition. (D.J.) Björk - Stonemilker (2015)
Björk once confessed that she struggled writing sad songs, because she hated the dark headspace they put you in. Years later, could she have imagined herself writing Stonemilker? It’s an elegy to a love that is dying, a seven-minute snapshot of the moment you realize you owe one another emotional honesty to begin to leave this love behind. (Apa Agbayani) Carly Rae Jepsen - When I Needed You (2015)
An impossible sorrow creeps out through the ’80s synths and drum breaks on Carly Rae Jepsen’s When
I Needed You. It’s a song anyone can dance to and it describes a hurt that pretty much anyone can relate to: thinking the world of someone who thinks so little of you. “I’m not myself,” Carly blurts out between verses, and you feel it. (A.A.) Ourselves The Elves - Uncertainly (2015) Uncertainly is like gravity, a wash of waves that take you in its undertow whenever it comes on. The storm of feelings it contains — the confusion, the excitement, the regret — is purely plaintive, so distilled of its essence that it’s hard to feel anything else when you’re listening to this song, or even afterwards. (D.J.) Sufjan Stevens - The Only Thing (2015)
How do you make a list of the things that keep you alive? From “driving this car/half-light, jackknife, into the canyon at night,” specifically. Sufjan Stevens tries, knowing that the experiences that sustain him are no longer within reach for a loved one lost. And when I hear it, it feels like my hands are on the rope, too, pulling both sides of that tug-of-war. (Jam Pascual) Mitski - Your Best American Girl (2016)
Amidst quiet breaths and roaring guitars, Mitski’s Your Best American Girl paints a love doomed by a difference in worlds — when you try to fit yourself into someone else’s world yet the distance is simply too great to bridge. One of Mitski’s greatest gifts is her concision, and she fills the song’s brief runtime with hurt after hurt after hurt. (A.A.)