Even the strongest among us get the blues: You can’t get out of bed, you don’t want to talk to a single other humanoid, and you just want to close the curtains and turn on the music. The songs you choose for those miseries have to be just right.
Adam Brent Houghtaling is something of a connoisseur of the melancholy moment. Perhaps to cheer himself up, he’s put that expertise to use by producing a kind of encyclopedia of the best soundtracks for lonely days and nights. It’s called This Will End in Tears: The Miserablist Guide to Music.
The book highlights the many components of a sad song — harmony, melody, tempo, lyrics and more. But Houghtaling says what’s most important is how those elements interact.
“I think it’s a number of factors, but none of those things necessarily by themselves create a sad song. There’s certainly lots of happy songs with lots of minor chords in them,” he says. “Certainly, lyrics play a big part. I think in narrative song, just like reading a novel, there’s an opportunity to plug your own experiences into the song. I think that really helps create a connection with sad music.”