I Soundtrack My Life, Do You?

The top five 'Sad Girl' songs to get you in your feelings

It is 4pm on a dreary Melbourne weekday, and I am listening to Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department… again.

The opening guitar of ‘Down Bad’ plucks mournfully and I let myself be swept away on a tide of melancholy lyrics like I’m not a happily married mother of two. Tay croons that she’s ‘Down bad, cryin’ at the gym,' and her lyrics touch a place that sometimes feels fresh to me, even though it’s a long time since I’ve been dumped. 

For the uninitiated, Taylor likens a short intense romance to an alien abduction; shown celestial highs and then dropped back to earth, stranded. A basic metaphor aside, it still hits.

I clearly remember the music of my first love and heartbreak. After it ended, I caught the long train home to my parents house and stared out the window, listening to the same three songs on repeat. They were all bands he had shown me. Classic. Pathetic!

Shamelessly engaging in what the kids call, ‘main character energy’, I leaned against the scratched and graffitied Perspex glass as though I could see myself in a film scene. ‘New Slang’ by The Shins strummed gently in my tangled headphones (pre air bud) and I let the full body sadness envelop me. 

(Pictured: Natalie Portman in Garden State. Aka the role that launched a thousand Manic Pixie Dream Girls and my love of seeming mysterious with headphones)

But this was not the first time I had experienced that film-like sensation. It has always been this way with music for me. Long drives in the family car, the bus to school, a plane trip, walks after school. On one school drop-off, Dad refused to listen to anymore of my burnt CD’s of the Scrubs soundtrack because he ‘couldn’t hear anymore of that rubbish.’

In order to deal with the emotional excess allocated at birth, I have always turned to a brooding walk. The ability to soundtrack that melancholy was revolutionary. At first scored by a discman, and later by an iPod shuffle, I honed that masochistic pleasure in leaning into a miserable mood. I contend it’s therapeutic to wander the mental moors for a short time. 

Ranging from ‘is she ok?’ to soul-shattering, here are some tracks so you can too pretend you have been devastated in some abstract but profound way. These are my all time top five bummer tracks.

Disclaimer: I am fairly un-snobby in my musical tastes and I will never profess to be a taste-maker. Anyone who listened to me perform ‘Breathless’ by The Corrs at a karaoke bar for my birthday this year knows this to be true. Listen with caution.

1. Cool about it- boygenius

Surely a nod to Nico’s “These Days”, this song articulates the pain of trying to play it cool whilst your heart is shattered by some dude in a dive bar. 

“But we don't have to talk about it

I can walk you home and practice method acting

I'll pretend being with you doesn't feel like drowning

Tellin' you it's nice to see how good you're doing

Even though we know it isn't true

2. MAPS- Yeah Yeah Yeahs

   

Supposedly, this song is about Karen O’s breakup from her boyfriend Angus (MAPS= My Angus Please Stay). If legend is to be believed, you can see the moment she sees him walk into the film shoot for the music video, and watch her face crack with the emotion of it. Sometimes simplicity says it best; ‘Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.”  

3. “For Emma”- Bon Iver

Bon Iver definitely comes under the musical banner of ‘words and vibes’ for me. This is the best kind of music for acting out any delusions that you are the protagonist in a cool independent film. This song also holds strong place-memory for me traveling in the Ireland when I was 19 at the peak of this kind of delusion.

Above: 19 year old woman experiencing the beauty of Irish landscape thinks she’s having an epiphany about her place in the world.

4. “Someone Great”- LCD Soundsystem

A little tech palate cleanser. Feels like a bop, but don’t be fooled, because those lyrics will get you. There’s a universality to grief, and as one of the top comments on YouTube says: “Still the most emotionally devastating song you can dance to!”

5. Sense and Sensibility- Combe Magna (Composed by Patrick Doyle)

This is a bit of a wild card, but is a prime example of the devastation a film score can wreak when paired with an emotive performance by Kate Winslet.

Let me take you to the moment: Marianne Dashwood stands on the hill overlooking the estate of Willoughby, the man who has broken her heart, and recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no! It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken." Willoughby. Willoughby. Willoughby.

Good to see Marianne engaging in her own sad, Shakespearean misery. I bet she would have loved an iPod out on that rainy hilltop.

 

I’d love to know the songs on your playlist? Please leave a comment and let me know.

No Worries If Not!

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