Cherie and I recently had a discussion about songs, specifically sad ones.  Songs that just depress the hell out of you.  Songs that make you search for a sharp kitchen implement because if Rick Springfield can never find a woman like that, then what is the point?

I love sad songs.  I love them like a fat kid loves custard.  And I went through my various playlists and compiled my favorites.  I encourage you to play along:

1. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” – Hank Williams, but I like the Johnny Cash version better.  Johnny Cash could sing about puppies and happy unicorns and manage to evoke nothing but deep despair.  I love him for it.
2. “Ordinary World” – Duran Duran.  They won’t cry for yesterday.  There’s an ordinary world.  That you’ll never see, because you broke up with Simon and left him crying alone with reruns of Father Ted on BBC One, you heartless bitch.
3. “Wild Horses” – Rolling Stones.  The first song I ever heard that suggested killing yourself for love was a completely acceptable reaction to hard times.  “Let’s do some living after we die” was emo before the first emo kid cut himself a fauxhawk.
4. “Lodi” – CCR.  The touching and uplifting ballad of a luckless guitar player stuck in either New Jersey or rural California with no train fare home to some place that is not New Jersey or rural California.  (Please tell me–is he singing about New Jersey or Cali???  I never knew.)
5. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” – Bob Dylan.  Okay, so I basically could have picked any Dylan song besides “Lay Lady Lay” and it would have fit just as well–every song from Dylan’s heyday was either about dying in a war, a woman who done you wrong, leaving a woman who done you wrong to die in a war, or the police beating up hippies.  And of course “Mr. Tambourine Man”, about trying to forget all of the above.  With DRUGS.  But “Hard Rain” is his only song about road-tripping across the countryside.  After the inevitable nuclear holocaust.  Yeah.

Try and have a good weekend now.