Sad Songs

I've been mulling over the possibility of lists for a while now, but until I hammer out some solid top 10s in at least a handful of categories I figured I'd do a little piece on some of the saddest songs I've heard just to get some writing done.

Beck - "Heaven Hammer"

My father walked out when I was about 11 years old. I never quite forgave him for that. He was for the most part an absentee regardless (civil engineer, we ended up moving often, including a narrowly avoided move to Israel) and a manic depressive who for every positive trait he instilled in me (love of music, comic geekery, tech knowledge) he left two profound emotional scars for his cold treatment and sometimes violent outbursts. Despite all his odd behaviors,  the family maintain he loved me deeply and looking back I can see he definitely did in his odd little ways. He'd always buy me obscure or out there albums for me when he visited record stores (through him I discovered Alice in Chains, Slayer, Aphex Twin, you name it).

The last record he bought for me was Guerolito, a terribly underrated Beck remix EP with a lot of damn catchy tunes. He loved "Heaven Hammer", and mentioned once that it sounded like a song Sting wrote (I have yet to discover exactly which one) and we listened to it often. Listening to that song was the very last thing we did before he told me he'd see me "next week" and he drove home one day in January. He died in a head-on collision with a truck that night. Ever since I haven't been able to listen to the song, until today, and even now it brings me to a bitter mix of angry and sad tears. As much as I resent him for what he had done to me, I somehow can't help but miss him.

Shigeaki Saegusa - "A Boy In Green Noa"

I have absolutely no shame admitting that Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam is one of the most profoundly emotional television series I have ever viewed. Rarely does TV, let alone 80s animation, affect me on any sort of level aside from maybe providing some laughs or a "FUCK YEAH" or two. The show starts off as a pretty typical giant robot show, but it builds to a fucking crescendo of death and despair, ending with just about everyone (both heroes and villains) dying and usually quite horribly. The last two episodes in particular are a nonstop killfest where we see women and children slaughtered in unflinching detail (at least by 1985 standards).

Saegusa's score for the series has always been a favourite of mine, he eschews typical generic cartoon music for a broad combination of funky jams, melancholy strings and heroic brass that puts most film scores to complete and utter shame. I was very, very close to giving this spot to "Riders In the Skies" (the titular song of the final episode), but there's no denying the song that's always hit me the hardest is the ending theme.

Well, to the English adaptation, at least. The Japanese version of the series closed with the ridiculously cheesy Neil Sedaka-composed "Believe in the Starry Sky" (a song I can't even say I enjoy for any sort of irony value) while due to rights issues the English credits play to "A Boy In Green Noa", a pretty low-key jazz piece that plays as incidental music in the first episode of the show. The song never stood out to me as particularly strong at first and I often ignored the closing credits anyway since, like so many other shows, they end with an obnoxious "NEXT WEEK'S EPISODE" preview where this generic movie voiceover type announcer artfully finds a way to spoil every plot twist of the coming installment. I left the last episode playing as "fin" appeared onscreen in a haunting white typeface and instead of fading to black or cutting to a more subtle credits segment, it just plays that fucking song.

I somehow managed to fight back tears during the episode, but the second the smooth clarinet intro hits I start fucking bawling. Almost every time I've heard it since, I've either literally burst into tears or at very least felt like it. Led to one particularly great moment where me and my uncle were waiting in line to see a performance of Fiddler on the Roof at the local community theatre and I started to pretty loudly sob when this song popped up on randomize while listening to my MP3 player. I sincerely apologize to anyone weirded out by that.

Marco D'Ambrosio - "Into The Sea" (was unable to find existing stream or upload this to YouTube, sorry)

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, tech wizardry aside (mastered at Skywalker Sound), had pretty poor music. It's well mixed and not overscored, but the music itself lacks something. At best it's unmemorable and at worst it's difficult to ignore how decidedly average it is, but my god, the music that plays over Joseph's eulogy for his fallen comrades in the last episode is heartbreak sad. Ambient music has this real power to it, and with all the showy instrumentation and attempts at multi-ethnic flair stripped away, D'Ambrosio shows he knows what a melody is and on top of that manages to construct a piece that has two sharp drops to the depths of despair for every bittersweet rise.

In context the piece is sad, but I've found it's sort of become a multipurpose sad song in my life. Remarkably wussy story, but for a few years I modded on a fairly popular and now almost totally forgot forum called The Revird. It was a pretty tight community of oddly classy and smart geeks who went there to post lengthy discussions about obscure, outdated politics, old movies, whatever. The rules were pretty lax, but we enforced them good and we never had much trouble. One day the admin gets bored and just decides to quit the internet for a while. Under new management we run a few months (by this point I'm the oldest remaining staffer there) and then we all mutually decide it'd be for the best to retire the site. Logs weren't even kept, to my mind, so it's really lost in the depths of the net, and embedded in the site's farewell thread (music embeds were pretty common in special discussions) was "Into The Sea".

It was our swan song and still holds a weird sort of resonance in relation to the site to this day. I believe that was the only time I've ever actually cried about something on the internet, pretty much everyone just disappeared and I've only spoken to a handful of those guys since. Our tightknit community is now totally nonexistent and an attempted relaunch of the site by a late-joiner went over pretty badly, so now most of us don't really speak too often.

Philip Glass - "Prophecies"

I know it sounds like a strange choice, but I regard Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi as the greatest film ever made. It is wordless, plotless and almost entirely devoid of substance, but never has a film simultaneously filled me with joy, disgust, fury and sadness. I'm not even much a fan of still life/nature documentaries, but this film amazes me more and more every time I see it. It is visual perfection without lavish effects or a huge budget, and the gorgeous images are complimented by an absolutely unforgettable score.

"Prophecies" hits at the very end of the film. A long shot of a rocket launching, then exploding. A small piece of burning wreckage plummets toward Earth in slow motion while mournful organ plays over an ominous chant of "Koyaanisqatsi" for an almost punishing eight minutes and eleven seconds. Like "Into The Sea", "Prophecies" is still just as impactful in other contexts, as well. Whatever you can say about the film itself, Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen has an utterly brilliant soundtrack and the selection of this piece and the similarly excellent "Pruit-Igoe" for Dr. Manhattan's exile on Mars scenes couldn't possibly be a better one. As soon as I heard the organ kick in tears immediately began to well up in my eyes and by the end I was sobbing. The scene in the original film itself gets me every time, too. The burning metal plummeting for what seems like forever is made all the more bleak and tragic by the slow pace and ominous chords.