mainly music

[kattahj]

Wow, I'm so busy of late it's not even funny. An example: after all these months, roseveare has started sending me beta comments for the late chapters of Symphony, and I have found no time to do even the simple stuff

Comments

[lilith_morgana]

Ack, "Elin i hagen". *sobs* I have similar reactions to "Maria går på vägen" although I suspect it's meant to make you angry rather than sad. :)

I am very sentimental sometimes and like to be sad to Jackson Browne's Late for the Sky which is just so... ah.

You never knew what I loved in you
I don’t know what you loved in me (OMG so sad.)

[kattahj]

Hey, I have that Jackson Browne song! *digs out collection and listens*

Hmmm... It's pretty, and kind of sad, but it's not sob-sad for me. Not enough blood and mayhem, perhaps.

And Maria går på vägen is strangely enough a kind of morbid enjoyment to me - instead of getting sad and angry I wallow in the gory details...

[isagel]

I'd almost forgotten that "I en sal på lasarettet" existed! My dad used to have a weird fascination with it. Possibly, it's the most morbidly sobby song ever written.

[kattahj]

It so is. I mean, as far as I can tell, it must exist so that little girls can see how many verses they can sing before they start sobbing.

[nancyblackett]

Eek, Tom Lehrer! *Insert fangirl squeal* I am pretty much obsessed with Tom Lehrer, and most people haven't even heard of him. I weep for humanity. :D The four songs you've put up would probably all go in my top five, but my all-time favourite (at the moment, at least) has got to be 'In Old Mexico' (...in that moment of truth I suddenly knew that someone had stolen my wallet...).

I try not to listen to songs that make me cry very often, but the ones I can think of off the top of my head are 'Thinking About You' by Ash, 'Same' by Snow Patrol, and, of course, 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', that'll do it every time.

Good luck with your thesis!

[kattahj]

The four songs you've put up would probably all go in my top five, but my all-time favourite (at the moment, at least) has got to be 'In Old Mexico' (...in that moment of truth I suddenly knew that someone had stolen my wallet...).

Ooh, I haven't heard that one! Must go check it out!

One of my high school music teachers let us sing The Irish Ballad, which sent me on my first Lehrer craze. Thean a couple of weeks ago a guy sang a Swedish translation of the Irish Ballad on TV, which reminded me of Lehrer all over again, and so I started downloading. It's great fun. I'm trying to learn the Vatican Rag by heart - the middle part is hard to remember the melody of!

I try not to listen to songs that make me cry very often, but the ones I can think of off the top of my head are 'Thinking About You' by Ash, 'Same' by Snow Patrol, and, of course, 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', that'll do it every time.

Funny, I never cry from Bridge... I'll check out the other two, though.

Good luck with your thesis!

Thanks!

[nancyblackett]

Now why didn't I get cool music teachers like that at school? We were lucky if we got to sing anything that wasn't in Latin or French!

I got hooked on Tom Lehrer because of my aunt - she gave my Dad a copy of 'Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer' (which contains the sheet music to nearly every song he wrote) years ago, and in my family we tend to have a lot of sing-songs round the piano. I know, I know, it's very embarassing. Anyway, I learnt to sing all the songs myself years before I ever heard Tom sing them. I got a CD copy of 'That Was the Year That Was' about a year ago and realised that they actually sound a lot better in an American accent, without my Dad swearing as he messes up the accompaniment. ;)

[kattahj]

Our music teachers were very into the modern stuff - of course, most of them considered "modern" what had been popular in their own teens, which means lots and lots of music from the 60s and 70s. Probably a reason why I still think all the best pop songs were made before I was born.

I didn't manage to find In Old Mexico sung by Tom himself, but I did find this lyrics and midi site. And then I audio searched We Will All Go Together and managed to find a mp3, so now I have yet another song on my hard drive!

[mpoetess]

My earliest sad-song was The Golden Vanity about an English ship in danger from an approaching Turkish one, whose Captain offers gold and silver and his daughter's hand to anyone who can swim across and sink the enemy ship. The 15 year old cabin boy swims across and sinks the ship, but then the Captain won't pull him back aboard, because he doesn't want to give up his money or his daughter, so the boy drowns. The crew finally pulls him up but he dies on the deck, and they wrap him in his blankets and bury him at sea. (And there's a sort of cautionary ending that points out that there's still enemies out there, but they've got no more brave cabin boy to save them.)

[kattahj]

Ooh, I know that song! "There was a ship sailing on the lowland sea, and the name of the ship was the Golden Vanity..."

I never found it very sad, though. Possibly because the tune is so cheery.

[mpoetess]

*nod* It is a very jaunty tune; it doesn't make me cry now. I didn't really have a handle on musical moods when I was that young, though -- I just knew the story was sad.

[kattahj]

Yeah. I think ESL is a problem - by the time I could sing English and get what it meant, I knew a happy tune from a sad one.

[love2loveher]

I you want tear-jerkers, look no further than American country music. If you can get over the Cliche's, the first two the come to mind are: Two Teardrops, and Take the Girl.

Two Teardrops is the story of how two teardrops were formed, one happy, one sad. Incredibly cheesy, but when it first came out it brought tears to my eyes, which doesn't happen much. Of course, I could have just been emotional that day/week/month, but who knows.

Take the girl is your traditional country theme, where the same words are said with a different meaning each verse. When Johnny's a boy he asks his dad to not take the girl fishing, when he's an adult he asks a mugger to not take the girl hostage, and a few years later he asks God to not take the girl from this life.

I'll have to think about some others that I can be more proud to have listened to.

[kattahj]

Okay, will check them out - could you give me a line of lyrics or something to use in the search?

[kattahj]

I checked Don't Take the Girl and I think I probably *would* have started crying if the wav file hadn't ended after the first verse - the words itself couldn't do it. And the melody was so monotone that it was clearly a song for listening, not for singing. Else I would have tried singing it myself to see what would happen. (All of my crying songs are for singing rather than listening.)