It seems kind of weird to write about sad songs on a blog about what is making me happy, but a song itself doesn’t have to be happy in order for it to bring joy to my life it just has to be good. Sometimes you need a sad song to wallow in or to set a certain mood. I often find melancholy music to be profoundly beautiful. Right now I’m happily not enjoying these songs because I myself am sad and need to wrap myself in music that expresses what I’m currently feeling, but their bittersweetness is something I’m digging at the moment anyway.

You Never Need Nobody is a gorgeous song by Brooklyn-based country music act The Lone Bellow. It’s a song about trying to win the love a woman who will never love you back. The music and harmonies in the song particularly over the bridge when they sing

Give me your hardest fever
Loudest scream in the crowd
Darling these good times
Can’t change, the way I feel bout you now
Give me your hardest fever
Loudest scream in the crowd
And all of these good times can’t change
the way I feel bout you now

is what completely drew me into the song the first time I heard it. I still find it amazingly beautiful.

I just recently heard Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez for the first time and fell in love. I don’t know where I missed this song, but looking up information on it I see that it’s a cover an electronica song by The Knife that he did all the way back in 2006. Having now listened to the original version I love this one all the more for how it has created such a beautiful, sorrowful song out of something that was completely different.

Josh Ritter’s newest single, Joy to You Baby is a heartbreakingly beautiful song about the end of a relationship and wishing the best for the person you’re no longer with. I absolutely adore these lyrics

If I never had met you
You couldn’t have gone
But then I couldn’t have met you
We couldn’t have been
I guess it all adds up
To joy to the end

Even though relationships don’t always work out it doesn’t necessarily mean we wish they had never happened.

What sad songs make you happy?