5 Reasons Why We Love Listening To Sad Music

They say our sweetest melodies are those that remind us of the saddest thoughts but don’t we spend our lifetimes in pursuit of happiness? If so, why are we drawn to those notes of melancholy, those lyrics of dejection? Mysterious are the ways in which the human mind works and strange are the things our hearts crave for. Let’s try to understand our penchant for sad music a little better.

1. Amidst the constant thrive for joy

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If life teaches us something and if being alive means anything to us, it is the constant thrive for joy, happiness and gratification that is the reason to keep going. However, sometimes, as you look back, there will always be those lose ends that can’t be tied up. Grief has a special chamber in our hearts and in there, the sun doesn’t shine unless the rays travel through art.

The music that delves in sadness finds that special room and nurses our grief – like a friend who’s not a soothsayer in the dark times; who doesn’t pretend as if everything’s fine but gently acknowledges what we’re going through when no one else comprehends.

 

2. Someone else is out there

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We aren’t always supposed to talk of what’s bringing us down to others lest we bring the spirits down. Therefore, we often put on our sunny side up and disappear seamlessly into the merry crowd. However, sometimes, when it all starts looking like a big pretense, it gets too tiresome and we feel alienated, lonely – among friends yet lonely.

Then, when the day is done, the music brings you the thought of everything lost and won as the sun sinks into oblivion. The carefully chosen notes, the slight plucking on the silver strings, the minor falls and the major lifts that caress your throbbing heart like a potter touches the wet mud, tell you that someone, near or far has felt what you have been feeling now.

 

3. You’re taken on a journey to the depths

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The kind of music we’re talking of aren’t usually written aiming to be the year’s best club hit. If it meant something precious to you, it must have been precious for the artist too. It was the imagination of the artist and your interpretation that intersected to form a world where you can almost imagine the depths of dejection one had to dive in to bring out the essence of the art.

It is in that moment the music for you becomes so much more than entertainment, chart busters or a topic of discussion among your friends – you’re flashed with visions of the artist’s solitude, the breakdowns, the pondering, the cleaning of his instrument with cloth and spirit, the scribble on his notebook, many of them scratched out – the journey of a song.

 

4. Everybody needs to tear up

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Our tears are precious but like the river, they have their own course – they shouldn’t be held back. What else can embroider our pent up emotions with such earnestness like the way music does. All those sentiments that you have kept shoved under the rug because they seem like delirious rants in real life conversations become the most ethereal articulations weaved in melodies.

It helps you make sense of things, let go and you finally let it rain. These tears are your own and so are the associations with such songs and no matter how much these listicles write “20 songs that are guaranteed to make you cry”, it doesn’t work like that.

 

5. The music becomes too connected to us

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No matter how much the music industry tries to throw “happy” music at your face, it is the sad and melancholic tunes that reach the deepest crevices of your soul. We connect to it so much that they feel personal. The music finds us in ways that no one else can and if the music is not as appreciated by others as we do, we get attached to it even more like a mother loves his aberrant child the most.

Science often tries to simplify the fact by differentiating the emotions between “felt” and “perceived” and further explaining that the emotion that we identify with during listening to sad music is actually “perceived” emotion and that is why feel pleasure instead of sadness because we know it doesn’t affect us. However, anyone who swears by the music will know how music transcends between the sentiments of the artists to the listeners those emotions are real.

How deep do you let the music flow into you?

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