“Come in!”
It’s a cheerful response to the knock on my bedroom door—after all, I’m feeling cheerful. Regardless, my friend opens the door, pauses a step into the room, and asks: “Oh—Annmarie, are you feeling okay?”
Which, I suppose, makes sense in hindsight. Most of the lights in my room were turned completely off save a few strings of lights and a single lamp in the corner. I was on the floor with a piece of chocolate in one hand and a mug of tea in the other, and I hadn’t played a song that wasn’t in a minor key all night. To most, I’m sure it would have looked like all I wanted to do was curl up and cry for a while.
But my favorite kind of beach days are the ones when the fog is so thick that you can’t even tell where waves start to rise in the sea. I think that the world can look its prettiest through raindrop-speckled windows, or reflected in puddles. (Umbrellas are the cutest!!!) The darker the clouds, the more likely I am to bound into a room singing about what a beautiful day it is. Grey days are a little sleepier, but also have always felt calmer, more peaceful, more reflective. My head clears up a little bit when clouds are out, and maybe that has to do with just the fact that there’s a bit less pressure for everything to be cheerful. There’s a bit more room to own up to imperfections when the even weather seems imperfect, too. It can surprise people sometimes that I prefer listening to really sad music, given the knowledge that I’m not exactly a really sad person. I think it might have to do with the sense of empathy that comes from getting to see into someone else’s sadness.
It’s easy to write a happy song. It’s easy to tell the whole world when you’re happy. There’s no vulnerability involved there. Everyone celebrates with you, and it feels amazing. It’s a lot scarier to write about something that might still hurt. It’s a lot harder to say your heart is broken than it is to say it’s full. So for me, I think, I know that being able to write and perform sad songs is a really big step.
Music is also so fantastic because it’s the biggest microscopic thing out there. It can go absolutely everywhere with you. And though that’s amazing for any kind of song, I find that I value it the most when I need to listen to a sad one. Happy music is nice and always super fun to listen to, but I never feel like I connect with it as much. It’s not even like I understand sad music better; it’s really more that sad music makes me feel more understood. Everything’s always a little bit more bearable when you feel like your hard experiences aren’t unique. It’s comforting to hear exactly what I might be feeling put into song, said by someone else before I even was able to find the words for it myself.
Overall, for me I think there’s something that’s just a lot more beautiful and human, and something really brave, about music that can express how it feels when things might not be going as well as you’d hoped. It’s something I can identify with no matter what mood I’m in—it’s consolation when I feel like I’m going through sadder times, but can also help me when life is going great to remember to count my blessings and appreciate my happiness even more.
((Also, because I feel like after writing a whole article about how much I like sad things, it made sense to throw a playlist together on the Her Campus Kenyon Spotify account of some of my favorite sad songs. So here’s that!))
Image Credit: Annmarie Morrison