The Curious Nature of Sad Songs

Just a few days ago I chose to attend a showing of the film Paddington 2 with my folks at our local theater. It was a delightful little movie and I urge you all to see it.

It's also one of the few movies that has ever caused me to tear up in a theater.

Now, that might seem odd to you because it's not a sad movie. It's not even a perilous movie. Surely the trials of a bear from Darkest Peru doesn't possess the oppressive weight of a Schindler's List and cannot be compared to whatever normal people tend to cry at, yet here we are. At 28, I'm forced to confront the simple fact that I'm now the sole owner of tear ducts that have been laid siege to by sentimentality and the passage of time. 

That's not to say I was ever the stalwart sort in my younger years, of course, because I certainly was not. I tended towards displays of anger that were brought about by the entirely psychologically-recommended strategy of "Ignore all problems until they rise up like a tsunami and crush you under the collected weight of your subconscious" and various other eruptions of unpleasantry, but I never really got around to crying that much. Truth be told, aside from a mental breakdown or two, the only ordinary occurrence that drove me to tears was the death of my beloved terrier named Max. That happened when I was 21, we had to put him down, and I almost punched a coworker in the face because he greeted my tragic news with "Well it's only a dog, right?". 

I'm a calmer person these days, but I still think he should've felt that comment for a few days. So I suppose we all have our flaws.

Then I turned 22 and something odd and completely unavoidable happened. I got a little older. Day by day I aged and life took on fresh meaning as I died a little more with every tick of the second hand on a very small and inconsequential clock. The version of me that had been beholden to pervasive dark thoughts and wonder in the face of mortality began to see flickers of life and weird bright colors in the face of the shadows that I'd always loved. Hell, even the songs that had driven me through my tumultuous teen years no longer had quite the hold over me that they'd once possessed.

I got a little older and sad songs held a different meaning and happy songs a greater allure.

I was a metal kid, see. I got through my days of teen angst, where my only real issues were acne and an unwillingness to socialize with people my own age, with the bolstering of tragic tunes and the calming thunder of a double bass where the lyrics were a haven for all the things I wished to think about. The simple fact of the matter was that I loved sad things. I have always found a certain allure to the nature of sadness and grief because they are emotions that linger with far more tenacity than your everyday happiness might show. Sing someone a happy song and there's a chance they'll relate, but sing someone a sad song and there's no doubt they've been there a time or twelve before. It might've been last week, last month, or last year, but they've been there and in many ways I knew I would soon be too. 

That's the important part though, right? The tail end of that sentence is what matters. Because you see, the strangest thing I found in life is that the tragedies in art, whether it be film, music, or words, are far more comforting when you've never felt their truth. I sang along with gusto to songs that told tragic tales of infidelity, a truly heart-wrenching topic for any betrayed fourteen year old. My fists clenched when I saw superheroes forged in the fires of dead parents even though my own remain happily alive to this day. And I soaked in the glorious prose of writers who knew only psychological torment in the faces of their loss, convincing myself that I could relate to them in my bedroom as I pondered the unfairness of having to mow three lawns on a sweltering July afternoon.

In my defense, North Dakota summers can be quite sweaty. 

Yet I digress. Because for all my pining for the life of strong emotion and pain that my artists had experienced, I was blissfully unaware of life and the peculiar nature of its tolls. All I knew was that I didn't understand these finer points of the human existence and the treacherous slopes that inspired these works and in a very Promethean way, I wanted them for myself. I wanted to hear the songs and understand their meaning, to see the movies and understand their violence, and to read the poetry while finally feeling their longing. And then I got older, I grew up, and I realized that it's so much easier to love the sad things in life when they haven't yet happened to you. 

The simple fact of the matter is that secondhand emotion is easy to throw yourself behind because you've haven't had to do a damn thing when it came to the legwork. You can be a happily single man raising a triumphant fist in support of someone who has overcome wanton infidelity, but when you see your life crumble around you in the wake of deceit and betrayal then suddenly those songs aren't as easy to hear. When you see a pet grow frail and old, the movies where a dog dies are now something you can relate to. When you have a child, films with children in peril are not merely the adrenaline rush they once were. And when you lose a loved one, the tales of what used to be are accompanied by a weight that was never there before and you find yourself wishing not for the breadth of experience to understand those notes, but for the times in your life when you didn't yet know their meaning. 

Why? Because human beings are fickle creatures. They wish for things they don't yet have, only to get them and realize that they were never really what they wanted at all.

Me? I'll always enjoy the sad things in life because they make me feel and when they make me feel, they make me appreciate all that I've had and still have in this world, however fleeting those things may be. But as I grow older, day by day and minute by minute, I hear a catchy tune that fills me with joy and I see a happy movie about a bear in London, and I'm momentarily transported back to the earliest parts of my life when all I knew was blissful joy and the potential for an everlasting happiness that settles like a hazy fog and never leaves.

Life's not like that, of course. Happiness is an emotion and as such, it is never a constant. It's truly no more lasting than a snowflake on bare concrete. But it still has merit and every sliver of it contributes to a greater structure built on the backs of memories of who we once were and who we hoped to be. It just so happened that, for all my desire to be a tragic poet who could relate to the most mortal aspects of life, I was also a little boy who wanted to go on peril-free adventures with a small bear who ate marmalade sandwiches. 

I liked sad songs when I didn't truly understand why they were sad and I truly do still enjoy them from time to time. But now that I'm a little older and a little more worn down by life, I appreciate the joyful things that take me back in time to a world where everything was possible and happiness wasn't just a 'sometimes' but the end of one attainable quest and the promise of further adventures that went hand-in-hand with a joy without end.