Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler
Sad music, ironically, seems to make us happier when we listen to it. The explanation for that could be either scientific or philosophical.
Sad songs make me happy like drinking makes me thirsty. It’s a strange paradox most of us share; nobody enjoys being sad in real life, but boy do we love to listen to a song that makes us miserable. It’s magic, or maybe a better word is “alchemy”: If you take a few inert ingredients (one C major scale, one D#, a 3/8 time signature), then arrange the ingredients in the right order, like Beethoven had in mind, and play dynamically with a flowing tempo that breathes a bit, the final product can tear your heart out.
Für Elise starts with this motif in A minor, full of longing and melancholy, then lifts with the contrast of the C major—creating a sense of whimsy, unpredictability, and playfulness. Then it goes back to the legato A minor, which now sounds even sadder by comparison to the happy, whimsical relative major.
“Although writing music was his livelihood, he wrote this as therapy, or a private declaration of love and loss.”
I recently worked up a guitar arrangement of Für Elise and played a version while filming a PG video of the Godin Multiac Mundial. It’s an embarrassingly rough, semi-improvised performance, but what I wanted was to take this epically sad melody and play with it, adding some fun jazzy/bluesy American improvisation to put a wry, crooked smile on the tragedy. That’s part of the magic of this piece; it’s a simple melody that can be musically reinterpreted as blues, ragtime, anything. Even Nas used a sample of it in his song “I Can.”
After filming the Godin video, I said to my colleague Chris Kies: “I don’t know who Elise was, but boy did she do a number on Beethoven.” The always well-informed Kies told me that Für Elise was discovered 40 years after Beethoven’s death. Beethoven had never published it, and the only clue to the song’s inspiration were the words “Für Elise” messily scribbled on the top of the forgotten page. There were apparently three Elises in Beethoven’s life, so no one alive knows for sure, but what it comes down to is Beethoven fell in love, it did not go his way, and he dealt with it by writing this music. Although writing music was his livelihood, he wrote this as therapy, or a private declaration of love and loss. Perhaps it was so soul-crushing that he did not go public with the music. We turn to music when words fail, right?
Hearing the rest of the story made the whole thing even sadder to me, which led to my spontaneously breaking into tears, thereby turning a normal product video into an awkward workday for me and the very tolerant Chris Kies.
Weird, right? I never want to cry, particularly in front of people. It’s horribly embarrassing to be that vulnerable in public. I’d rather be seen going to the bathroom in public than crying, and yet I’m drawn to sad songs like a moth to a flame. I’ve broken into tears while performing and turned my back on the audience or buried my head in my pedal steel until I could take some deep breaths and pull it together. So why do we voluntarily submit ourselves to this kind of torture?
There may be some science that helps us understand it. One study suggests that music, particularly sad music, stimulates the release of comforting hormones like prolactin. There was a study where scientists played sad music for people and then measured their prolactin levels and, as you guessed, listeners who felt some positive effects from the sad music had just released a heavy hit of prolactin. Other listeners who report feeling sad without the accompanying positive effect, as it turns out, already had a higher level of prolactin to begin with, “suggestive of a homeostatic function.” It seems our bodies are using music to self-regulate our chemical balance. If you need a boost of prolactin, music will give it to you. If you don’t need it, it saves it for later. Another study suggests that sad music can also stimulate that feel-good bringer of pleasure and rewards, dopamine. In short, listening to sad music can flood your body with happy chemicals.
Maybe another reason we willingly subject ourselves to the beautiful sadness of melancholy music is to engage in a fictional sadness to help deal with that vague malaise that we all carry around but never unpack. A lifetime of quiet heartbreak that we don’t even understand and try not to think about. Music releases the steam valve before the boiler blows.
But the more I looked into the appeal of sad music, it seemed to ask more questions than answers. Like, why do we connect to the songs we connect with? Does it remind us of someone? Is it empathy? Is it self-pity? Do we connect with the artist? And perhaps the most puzzling bit of it all: Why does flattening a 3rd, 6th, and 7th in a scale make a melody universally sadder? That’s the magic, the mystery, the therapy.
Why do sad songs, like Etta James' "I'd Rather Go Blind," have the ability to break our hearts yet soothe the soul at the same time?
Why do we like sad music so much?
Sad songs make me happy, like drinking makes me thirsty.
It's an odd paradox, but sitting in my car, staring dead-eyed into space and sobbing like my dog just died, while listening to heart-crushing music remains one of my favorite activities. Strange, perhaps, but not uncommon.
In real life, I go to great lengths to avoid hardship. When I greet someone, I rarely ask, "How are you doing?" for fear that the person will actually tell me, and it's going to be bad news. There's an unwritten law that we keep our depressing bits to ourselves or risk becoming a pariah, seen as an emotional vampire, greeting all with two armfuls of gloom and despair. Try talking to me about your horrible relationship and I will extricate myself from that pity party ASAP.Por ejemplo, if Etta James walked up to me and said:
"Something told me it was over
When I saw you and her talking
Something deep down in my soul said, 'Cry, girl'
When I saw you and that girl walking around."
I would say, "Sorry to hear that Etta, but excuse me, I have to leave now to do anything but listen to this." But when she wraps those sad words in a melody, I can't get enough of that devastation. I hang on every heart-wrenching word. Why? Well, science has a few ideas about what's going on here.
Generally speaking, minor-key music feels sad while music in a major key feels happy. We've all heard exceptions to the rule. Henry Mancini's "Moon River" is in a major key, but feels wistful, whereas Van Morrison's "Moon Dance" is minor but feels like a happy, playful romp. But, for the most part, when you flat that 3rd, 6th and 7th, it's going to feel melancholy. Scientific studies back that up, according to Popular Science, and studies also suggest that even though minor-key music sounds sadder than major-key music, most people, somewhat surprisingly, find minor key music more likable.
There's an unwritten law that we keep our depressing bits to ourselves or risk becoming a pariah, seen as an emotional vampire, greeting all with two armfuls of gloom and despair.
Some scientists hypothesize that people enjoy the vicarious sadness of a sad song almost the way they enjoy a scary movie. Since it's not happening to us in that moment, we can just sit back and observe someone else's heartbreak. But that sounds a bit sadistic to me. I can't believe that non-sociopaths take pleasure in the suffering of others. There's got to be more to it.
I'm more swayed by studies that suggest that sad music hits us differently on a chemical level. Ultimately, everything we feel comes down to our body's chemistry. An article I found from Science Alert explains it this way: "Some scientists think melancholy music is linked to the hormone prolactin, a chemical which helps to curb grief. The body is essentially preparing itself to adapt to a traumatic event, and when that event doesn't happen, the body is left with a pleasurable mix of opiates with nowhere else to go. Thanks to brain scans, we know that listening to music releases dopamine—a neurotransmitter associated with food, sex, and drugs—at certain emotional peaks, and it's also possible that this is where we get the pleasure from listening to sad tunes."
In summary, whereas all good music gives us a hit of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, sad songs also give us an opiate kicker for a super-double chemical buzz. That could explain why just listening for a few minutes feels like a gut punch followed by a loving, warm hug.
A few years ago, I was playing a songwriting festival in Crested Butte, Colorado. I stumbled into a bar, as is my custom, and found some songwriter friends in a circle by the fire passing a guitar around. My friends, recognizing me as one who is easily duped, asked me to join the circle, then had me sit to the left of Hall of Fame writer Dean Dillon. Nobody there wanted to follow Dean. I had to play one of my songs right after the guy who wrote "Tennessee Whiskey" and dozens of other iconic No. 1 songs. Dean prefaced his songs with a story of heartache that led him to write "Easy Come, Easy Go." I said, "Yeah, but Dean, it's hard to feel too bad for you, because you turn all that pain into songs, and those songs have made you fabulously wealthy." Dean paused for a beat, then replied, "Yeah, but it still hurts…. That's why I try to co-write with people going through a divorce. They've got all the good pain.