Create the best Sad Song Compilation Album ever...

[Robb]

Everyone gets to pick 2 songs.

I'll contribute Pizzacato 5's "Baby Love Child", and Grandaddy's "Saddest Vacant Lot in All the World".

[Salviati]

1. Aimee Mann - Save Me

and PJ harvey - The Dancer

[SiobhanClancy]

2. And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.....

and Carrickfergus.

[SheilaT]

3. The Green Fields of France

about a young Irish soldier who died in battle in 1916.

Well, how'd you do, Private Willie McBride,
D'you mind if I sit down down here by your graveside?
I'll rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
Been walking all day, Lord, and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died "clean,"
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

CHORUS:
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they sound the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er ye as they lowered ye down?
Did the bugles sing "The Last Post" in chorus?
Did the pipes play the "Floors O' The Forest"?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that loyal heart are you forever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger, without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Well, the sun's shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it's still No Man's Land;
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

And I can't help but wonder now, Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "the cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it's all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

It was written by Eric Bogle, who also wrote Waltzing Matilda, another sad and beautiful song about WWI.

added on edit: This song never fails to move me to tears every time I hear it.

[jpgray]

4. Let's see

Robert Wyatt's cover of Chic's 'At Last I Am Free'--really, it's sad, trust me. :)

The Beach Boys--'Don't Talk'

[RandomKoolzip]

16. "Shipbuilding" is even sadder, IMHO....

"Nothing can Stop Us" is definitely one of the greatest albums EVER...."At Last I Am Free:" now if ever there was a song for my funeral, that'd be it.

[m-jean03]

5. Dublin Lady

by Andy Stewart
http://www.andymstewart.com/sounds/dublin-lady.mp3

And "Wild, wild sea" by Sting

[loftycity]

6. Pat Metheny's "Secret Story" CD a song named

"Tell her, you saw me." Very, Very sad.

[scottcsmith]

7. My two: The Cure & Joy Division

100 Years -- The Cure
Decades -- Joy Division

100 Years
It doesn't matter if we all die
Ambition in the back of a black car
In a high building there is so much to do
Going home time
A story on the radio

Something small falls out of your mouth
And we laugh
A prayer for something better
A prayer
For something better

Please love me
Meet my mother
But the fear takes hold
Creeping up the stairs in the dark
Waiting for the death blow
Waiting for the death blow
Waiting for the death blow

Stroking your hair as the patriots are shot
Fighting for freedom on television
Sharing the world with slaughtered pigs
Have we got everything?
She struggles to get away . . .

The pain
And the creeping feeling
A little black haired girl
Waiting for Saturday
The death of her father pushing her
Pushing her white face into the mirror
Aching inside me
And turn me round
Just like the old days
Just like the old days
Just like the old days
Just like the old days

Caressing an old man
And painting a lifeless face
Just a piece of new meat in a clean room
The soldiers close in under a yellow moon
All shadows and deliverance
Under a black flag
A hundred years of blood
Crimson
The ribbon tightens round my throat
I open my mouth
And my head bursts open
A sound like a tiger thrashing in the water
Thrashing in the water
Over and over
We die one after the other
Over and over
We die one after the other
One after the other
One after the other
One after the other
One after the other

It feels like a hundred years
A hundred years
A hundred years
A hundred years
A hundred years
One hundred years

Decades
Here are the young men,
a weight on their shoulders
Here are the young men,
well where have they been?
We knocked on doors
of hell's darker chambers
Pushed to the limits,
we dragged ourselves in
Watched from the wings as
the scenes were replaying
We saw ourselves now as
we never had seen
Portrayal of the traumas and degeneration
The sorrows we suffered
and never were freed
Where have they been (4)

Weary inside, now our hearts
lost forever
Can't replace the fear
or the thrill of the chase
These rituals showed up the door
for our wanderings
Opened and shut, then slammed
in our face
Where have they been (4)

[ironflange]

8. Just one from me:

Ode to Billie Joe. Nothing sadder.

[absyntheNsugar]

9. It Must contain "I Just Wasn't Meant for these Times"

By the Beach Boys

[jpgray]

11. Or the better known 'I Just Wasn't MADE for these Times'

By the Nitpicker Trio, I believe that was.

:D

[fameless]

10. Some Nick Drake...

obviously.

[SheilaT]

12. Another

paean to unbridled sentimentalism is Those Were the Days.

It's a look back at care free youth. "Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end. . ."

The lines I like best are at the very end,
"Oh, my friend, we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same.."

I find it so easy to wallow in nostalgia.

[fudge stripe cookays]

13. "Walking in the Woods" by The Pursuit of Happiness

It's about a guy who sees a pretty girl on a train, and wants to talk to her, but chickens out.

Several weeks later, he's riding the same train, and is reading the paper, when he sees an article with her picture, and it says that the girl was brutally murdered. He feels guilty and sad and horrible all at the same time.

Uplifting, you bet.

[sarahbellum]

14. "no name no. 5" by elliot smith and

it's a tossup between anything by pink floyd.

[RandomKoolzip]

15. "Oooh La La," the Faces and "Lullaby," Ben Folds Five.

If we could pick more than two, I'd be here for days on this one thread...(I love sad songs)

[jpak]

17. Nine Million Rainy Days - Jesus and Mary Chain

total bummer

[FunBobbyMucha]

18. "YMCA." No really,...

...the version performed by a band with strings in the film "Longtime Companion." It's performed at an AIDS awareness benefit before the movie's main characters, who have witnessed the decimation of the NYC/Fire Island gay community over the course of one short decade. It's so poignant.

And I can't hear Warren Zevon's cover of "Back in the High Life Again" without getting choked up--he growls the song like a prayer uttered by a man who has lost all capacity for faith. "Keep Me In Your Heart" is heartbreaking as well.

[Whitacre D_WI]

19. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" has to be...

...the most fucking depressing song ever.


And, since we get two, I'll just say throw on anything from Nico's "The Marble Index."

[darkstar]

23. I second this one

I thought I was the only one. I'd point out the overwhelming saddness of the way the melody undercuts the lyrics. Perfect example song meaning beyond lyrics, IMO.

edit:

Chrissie Hynde's version really does it. The vibrato in her voice only adds to the melancholy proceedings. God, the way she delivers "Through the years we all will be together...."

[SoCalDem]

20. Any two "Dead teenager" songs from the 60's

http://www.cod.edu/People/Faculty/pruter/Horror/deadteenagers.htm


Dead Teenagers and Melodrama



One peculiar trend in popular music that came along in the early sixties was dead teenager music. These songs told the story of teenage love tragically cut short by the grim reaper. Now, while this type of song would seem to belong in the genre of melodrama rather than horror, they share many of the same themes that characterized horror music of the rock 'n' roll era. One was the connection of teenage romance with destruction. Love has the potential to be tragic, and even more of the case in the songs dealing with suicide, love brings about tragedy. Notably, and it's made explicit in "Ebony Eyes," by the Everly Brothers, and "Tell Laura I Love Her," by Ray Peterson, death cuts short these romances prior to marriage. Therefore, these romances can remain in a state of eternal pre-sexual purity, once again upholding the prohibitions against sex at that time, similar to the prohibitions against sex in horror. In a way, death saves these loves from being defiled by carnality, but the alternative, death, is hardly a superior option, thus illustrating the social rules that govern behavior and thought and lead to destruction, to horror.

Cars and Motorcycles:
“Teen Angel,” Mark Dinning

“Tell Laura I Love Her,” Ray Peterson

"Car Crash," The Cadets

“Leader of the Pack,” The Shangri-Las

“Last Kiss,” J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers
Suicide:
"The Pickup," Mark Dinning

"Patches," Dickie Lee

“Endless Sleep,” Jody Reynolds


Other and unnamed:
“Ebony Eyes,” The Everly Brothers

"Laurie," Dickie Lee

"Ballad of an Angel," Bobby Swanson

"Death of an Angel," Donald Woods and the Vel-Aires






Of course, this trend was ripe for parody. The whole concept of these songs was more than a little ridiculous. The Cheers' "Black Denim Trousers and Motor Cycle Boots" (1956) preceded the trend of dead teenager music that really began with Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel" in 1960. Thus, the concept was humorous even before it was serious. Jimmy Cross' "I Want My Baby Back" takes the dead teenager song to the extreme by having the speaker exhume his dear departed girlfriend and live happily ever after with her corpse. On one hand, this negates the notion of eternal pre-sexual purity and, on the other, plunges the dead teenager song more fully into the horror genre with a suggestion of necrophilia. "Leader of the Laundromat," by the Detergents, parodied a specific song rather than the whole trend of music. Such parodies and answer songs were common in the rock 'n' roll era but now are moribund, with only "Weird Al" Yankovic continuing the tradition..

“Black Denim Trousers and Motor Cycle Boots,” The Cheers

“I Want My Baby Back,” Jimmy Cross

"Leader of the Laundromat," The Detergents

---

"a tragic sample"



JULIE'S SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY
SPOKEN
What's your hurry Jim? One more drink won't hurt nothin'
Well okay I said buth then I got to be runnin'
you see my little Julie just turned sixteen today
and tonight she is going out on her very first date

Lord knows I never been much of a father
Probably spent more time right here than I have at home with
my daughter
So tonight I'm making up for a lotta lost time
a lot of hurt feelings and a lot of broken promises

CHORUS

For once in my life I'm gonna do something right
I'm gonna be home for my Julie tonight
Its her sixteenth birthday (spoken) and you know its her first
date
This is one promise that I'm not gonna break

Aw come on, have one more Jim...you got plenty of time
But that one led to many and I lost track of the time
When I looked at my watch it was a quarter till eight
So I left in a hurry since I was already late

As I got closer to home I started to think
Won't do me no harm to have one more drink
So I reached for the bottle I kept under the seat
When I looked up, my whole life passed right in front of me

Next thing I remembered I was just comin' to
In a hospital bed and right then I knew
That I'd caused something awful to happen last night
On my way home to Julie to set myself right

At the foot of the bed stood my best friend Lou
He walked to my side and asked what he could do
I said, "Lou, I know I won't make it but don't let me die
Not knowin' the truth 'bout what happened last night

He said, "Jim, you lost control, crossed the yellow line
Hit a car head on and Lord I wish I was lyin'
Cause a young man was injured and a lovely girl died
And I thought about that last drink and tears filled my eyes

Ed note: You know what's going to happen next, don't you?

I said Lou, should I pass on before she comes in
Be sure and tell Julie how sorry I am for spoilin' her birthday
He said, "Jim, you can save your breath
Cause when you meet her in heaven, you can tell her yourself

Raise your hand if you were blindsided by that revelation.

No one?

Didn't think so.

Anyhow, I still think the Julie in the picture is a runaway teenage prostitute.

[Beer Snob-50]

24. 7/11 by the Ramones

it is along the same lines and (in my opinion)has the following classic line- "I hugged and kissed her and said goodbye. Last thing I knew she didn't make it alive. ON coming car, running out of control, it took my baby and it took my soul." Great Stuff!!

[sir_captain]

21. How about these?

Pink Floyd--Wish you were here
The Beatles--For no one

[darkstar]

22. Tom Waits' "Kentucky Avenue"

eddie graces buick got 4 bullet holes in the side
charlie delisle sittin at the top of an avocado tree
mrs stormll stab you with a steak knife if you step on her
lawn
i got a half pack of lucky strikes man come along with me
lets fill our pockets with macadamia nuts
then go over to bobby goodmansons
and jump off the roof

hilda plays strip poker
and her mamas across the street
joey navinski says she put her tongue in his mouth
dicky faulkners got a switchblade
and some gooseneck risers
that eucalyptus is a hunchback
theres a wind up from the south
let me tie you up with kite string
and i'll show you the scabs on my knee
watch out for the broken glass, put your shoes and socks
on and come along with me

lets follow that fire track
i think your house is burnin down
the go down to the hobo jungle and kill some rattle
snakes with a trowel
we'll break all the windowa in the old anderson place
and steal a bunch of boysenberrys
and smear em on our face
i'll get a dollar from my mamas purse
and buy that scull and crossbones ring
and you can wear it around your neck on an old piece of
string

then we'll spit on ronnie arnold
and flip him the bird
and slash the tires on the school bus
now don't say a word
i'll take a rusty nail and scratch your initials on my arm
and i'll show you how to sneak up on the roof of the
drugstore

take the spokes from your wheelchair
and a magpies wings
and tie em to your shoulders and your feet
i'll steal a hacksaw from my dad
and cut the braces off your legs
and we'll bury them tonight in the cornfield

put a church keey in your pocket
we'll hop that freight train in the hall
and we'll slide down the drain all the way
to new orleans in the fall

[CO Liberal]

25. "Honey" by Bobby Goldsboro and "Seasons In The Sun" by Terry Jacks

Two of the sappiest songs of all time.