Sweet Sixteen Action: (1) JOY DIVISION vs (5) PJ HARVEY & NICK CAVE

FINAL SCORE: (1) JOY DIVISION 75, (5) PJ Harvey & Nick Cave 24

*

(1) Joy Division, "Atmosphere"

Analysis by Kate Bernheimer

Sometime in the early 1980s, my little sister bought a New Order record, most likely at our Uncle Alvin’s “Music and Camera Store” in Newton Center, Massachusetts. She danced to it a lot in her bedroom:

This was surprising. For quite a few years up to her New Order obsession, she had precisely two records she would play over and over again: the single of Kenny Rogers’ "The Gambler” and the soundtrack from the Broadway show Annie.

It wasn’t only her sudden style of dancing—her new way of being—that surprised me. The music surprised me. The music startled me. I couldn’t believe there were actually kids my age making music who felt the way I felt: SAD and BAD in the 1980s. There were other weirdos out there?

Around this time I miraculously became friends with Penelope and Sarah, two of the coolest girls I ever have met. I hung out with them as often as they would let me. Sometimes after school, we’d have tons of coffee and cigarettes at Pewter Pot:

Coffee and cigarettes deranged our already deranged minds. We didn’t know how to harness whatever feelings we were feeling. In tenth grade English class our sensitive, liberal teachers had us keep journals and hand them in weekly and we were told to write down everything that we thought and we felt and were allowed to fold over pages we didn’t want our teachers to read. Penelope and Sarah and I were suspicious. In a frenzy of inspiration (and possibly rage) we invented and described, in those spiral-bound notebooks, a wild Sapphic triangle among us, set in the suburban woods of Waban, our town. Carefully, we folded over the pages.

The next week we were called in by the teachers. They were very troubled by our affair, we were told. They wanted to help us. Of course they became quite angry when we told them we had just wanted to see if they were liars. And though we laughed about it for days afterwards, bitterness lingered. Who could we trust?

And it was in the 1980s that my wild older sister—in a bizarre stroke of kindness, or maybe my parents had made her—invited me to visit her at college for a weekend. The first night I was there, she dressed up in clothes I never had seen her wear in the suburbs:

That night she let me go with her and two of her friends to the college gymnasium to see an REM show. It was the first time I tried a particular drug that kept me awake all night, which was too bad as she had brought me back to her dorm room pretty early and gone out again with her friends, so I was awake and jittery and became rather frightened by how different (and how good) that night felt from the thousands of nights I had lived up to then in the beautiful but strangling suburbs. On the rotary telephone I called a friend who tells me now that I jabbered on for hours about how my life had been irreversibly changed by a band. The next day my sister took me to a hair salon and I got a perm and a mullet. (I don’t have a photo of that.)

Thankfully, or thanklessly, nothing is forever.

Which is the bold cliché that brings me to Joy Division’s damning and damn sad anthem of dread, “Atmosphere.” I first heard this song in the 1980s, during an incomprehensibly fogged and hurtful awakening.

It was around that time I sat in silence every day at The Faggot Table in the school cafeteria. The Faggot Table was well below The Loser Table. It was the bottom. We faggots didn’t even dare speak to each other. Who knew what would happen if one of us spoke. Some days a select few of us—and I was always among the select few—had our textbooks grabbed out of our hands as we left the cafeteria, by The Tough Kids (these were the kids who smoked in the breezeway with the teachers between classes, the boys whose laps the French teacher sat in during French class). The books were taken outside and thrown down a stairwell. The Spit Pit, it was called. We’d have to descend the concrete steps to retrieve them. And you can imagine what happened when we were down there; spit was involved, but sometimes “spit” was putting it nicely, if you want to consider the implications of that. My locker was sometimes decorated with lipstick graffiti in the morning: faggot, weirdo, lesbo, etc.

Joy Division made music for outcasts. (The band’s name derives from what the Nazis called brothels in concentration camps, a chilling detail.) Ian Curtis apparently thought he was a freak in part because of his epilepsy. He danced like an angelic matchstick on fire. He was sad. And like many outcasts he suffered sadness—a most important human emotion—in silence. His bandmate, Peter Hook, writes, “[H]e never wanted to upset you, so he'd tell you what you wanted to hear.”

Listening to “Atmosphere” one hears a sepulchral song of mourning and shame. And those tribal-sounding drums in "Atmosphere" have such urgency, especially in contrast with the mournful music—they’re so loud in the mix. Joy Division always made the underpinnings of the music important. The drums, the bass. The deep structure is very important. Who is down there? What happened to them?

A friend told me recently that Ian Curtis hanged himself while leaving Iggy Pop's "The Idiot" on repeat, for the people who discovered his body to find, another chilling detail. ”Don't walk away in silence....”—well, that's exactly what Ian Curtis did, with his suicide. He walked away in silence. By the time most people heard the music he made, he was dead. Those silences echoed in the music—and they pervaded the atmosphere of my late teens and early 20s. My friend Sarah walked away in silence. Also, on air. She leapt off of a building in Boston when she was 40.

But when we were seventeen, Sarah and I went to college together. It was 1984. We had gone to our college interviews together in matching pink mini skirts, pink sneakers, white shirts (the same outfits we’d worn to see The Go-Gos concert that year). In college, or so it seemed, Sarah flourished—wrote award-winning poetry, joined a band called Da Grotty and sang Nancy Sinatra cover songs in knee-high white boots, bleached her hair. Me? After desperately wanting to escape Waban, where we’d grown up (a town I still somehow ardently love), I found myself terribly homesick, anxiously taking the Peter Pan Bus Line home every weekend. That first year of college, Ronald Reagan was re-elected. I remember watching Walter Mondale’s concession speech with a bunch of stoned, snobby strangers in a smelly dorm living room (waiting for my turn at the pay phone to call my parents). Mondale gravely said on the screen, “Tonight especially I think of the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, the handicapped, the helpless and the sad, and they need us tonight.”

In some ways, of course, the 1980s were a time of joy for me, when I think of the music—the crazy all-night dancing to The Cure, Bronski Beat, Joy Division, New Order, Tears for Fears, The Replacements, REM. Music for outcasts. A place to belong. Yet still...there is danger, always danger, endless talking, confusion, illusion. Division. Danger, always danger. Don't walk away. Joy Division, I will always love you.

Kate Bernheimer is the author of a novel trilogy and two story collections, including How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales. Her recent novella, Office at Night, co-authored with Laird Hunt, was a finalist for the 2015 Shirley Jackson Awards.

vs.

(5) PJ Harvey & Nick Cave, “Henry Lee”

Analysis by Nicole Walker

Every year, Ander and Megan send Erik and me a CD/mixtape/playlist for Christmas. Between Erik and the two of them, they are compendia of musical knowledge, especially of the 90s. My lonely, sad (saddest!) brain cannot compete. But I do know a couple bands they don’t. I couldn’t find my Bongwater CD when we all lived in Michigan and spent a lot of time indoors listening to music because winter is real in Michigan. Instead of Bongwater, I forced them to listen to Gordon Lightfoot, whom they knew but whom they did not fully appreciate until I sang to them the many verses of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which takes place outdoors on Lake Superior near where Ander grew up, giving us a sense of the difficulty of being outdoors in Michigan (e.g. "The winds of November come early").

After we all moved to Arizona, they to Tucson, Erik and me to Flagstaff, they came to visit. I found my Bongwater CD and I made them listen to the whole of it indoors because it was winter and Flagstaff is not Tucson and winter is winter although not Michigan winter. 

When we got to the song "Nick Cave Dolls" I told them to listen closely as Ann Magnuson speak-sings, "Is it politically correct to even be here? / I mean, look what happened to Dorothy Stratton. / Then I decide... / 'Oh, the hell with it, I'm horny!'"

When, at the end of the song, Magnuson sings “They make Nick Cave Dolls now. I want one,” I say to Megan, “Now I know what to get you for Christmas.” Bongwater is a very indoor band. The epic song is about AIDS and Avenue A which where all the bars are definitely indoors.

Megan knows Nick Cave way better than I. I only know about Nick Cave’s haunting voice. To me, he is of the David Lynch, Blue Velvet world. I picture him inside Jazz Clubs. I don’t think he’s seen the light of day. In "Henry Lee," Harvey comments on his lily-white skin. They’re both pale as vampires—no outdoor danger here. He looks cute and he sounds good but he probably wants to break my fingers. I do not know what PJ Harvey sees in him. Why is she hanging all over him? Who is he to her? Where the hell is her daughter: big fish, little fish? Isn’t she supposed to be a role model? Harvey, descended from the Ann Magnusons and Laurie Andersons of the punk rock world, should not be so into him, although, admittedly, she looks like she’s about to eat his face. Possibly she is predatory. I can imagine PJ and Laurie Anderson together, singing as Nick Cave cautiously steps outside the club, “Sharkey says: I turn around, it's fear. I turn around again, and it's love. Nobody knows me. Nobody knows my name. You know? They're growing mechanical trees. They grow to their full height. And then they chop themselves down.” It’s better to get inside where there are no trees, mechanical or otherwise and where people know your name.

Sharkey and Nick Cave and the mechanical trees are going down. Harvey tries to get him indoors but, like Henry Lee, he finds he likes it out there, outside like lovers and heroin survivors and Elliott Smith, who is from Portland, which is a place as wet on the inside as the outside and who is also a contender here (although not against this song. Henry Lee is the saddest song. Please do not walk away from this one). According to Megan’s write-up, Henry Lee is short for heroin, or, rather, the bird is the heroin, sticking poor Henry Lee in the arm over and over again but that’s what nature will do to you in either bird or syringe form.

But I think, in this song, the outdoors are as dangerous as heroin-birds.

"Henry Lee"'s opening riff pays homage to Velvet Underground’s "Perfect Day" which seemed like it was going to be such a happy song: Sangria in the park, feeding animals as the zoo and then suddenly, “It’s such a perfect day. You just keep me hanging on.” You, lovely zoo-going partner, have gone from fun times to on-the-rope times. You, sunshine, are desperation. You, heroin, you double-crossing backstabber, are “going to reap just what you sow.” Things started so well but I believe the cautionary tale here is, don’t go outside with Lou Reed. Don’t go outside with either Harvey or Cave. Look what they encourage the bird to do to Henry Lee: "A little bird lit down on Henry Lee / Come take him by his lily-white hands / Come take him by his feet / And throw him in this deep deep well / Which is more than one hundred feet / And the wind did howl and the wind did blow.”

Throwing kids in the well. That’s what we do outside, the singers sing. Look what happens with the Violent Femmes, an indoor band if there ever was one, goes outside: "'Come, little daughter,' I said to the youngest one / 'Put your coat on, we'll have some fun / We'll go out to mountains, the one to explore.'"

But if your family's starving and this little one is just one more mouth to feed, well, then, "I led her to a hole, a deep black well: / I said, 'Make a wish, make sure and not tell / And close your eyes, dear, and count to seven / You know your papa loves you; good children go to heaven / You know your papa loves you; good children go to heaven.'"

Or even the sad, song from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I where the lovers are to meet at the Hanging Tree. Meeting outdoors is the fast-track toward a dying place: "Are you, are you / Coming to the tree? / Where dead man called out / For his love to flee. / Strange things did happen here /No stranger would it be / If we met at midnight / In the hanging tree."

Listen. It might be sad to die indoors but stabbing yourself in the stomach or succumbing to an overdose, your body wrapped around the toilet, is not nearly as sad as dying outdoors. Indoors, the hope of someone coming by, ringing you up, even the sound of voices on the television mean that you don’t die entirely alone. Or even better, maybe someone comes by in time to stop you.

But, as William Blake’s "The Little Boy Lost" knows, there’s no hope in the outdoors.

The night was dark no father was there
       The child was wet with dew.
The mire was deep, & the child did weep
       And away the vapour flew.

The outdoors are the saddest dying place even if, in Henry Lee’s case, heroin is the bringing of the outdoors inside.

This is the saddest song. Henry Lee is a little kid outside in the world with no parents. PJ Harvey, Little Fish Big Fish swimming in the water, come back man and give me my daughter, has already lost one of her children. Nick Cave, barren and trapped in a too-big suit at the jazz club, can’t find his son. Out there, where there are real mountain lions and real bears and real heroin and real birds with plungers for claws, there is no one. There is no sadder thing than being lost in the howling and moaning wind with no parents and no way home.

Nicole Walker’s books include or will include: Canning Peaches for the Apocalypse, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She edited, with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. As some have noted, she pretends to write about food a lot but then manages to mostly avoid the topic. [twitter] [facebook]

*

Sweet Sixteen Action: (14) LOW vs (2) CONCRETE BLONDE

FINAL SCORE: (14) LOW 73, (2) Concrete Blonde (64)

*

(14) Low, "Words"

Analysis by Kenneth Caldwell

I'm prone on the living room floor, listening to Low's “Words” for the umpteenth time, debating whether to call the paramedics again. Do I want to stay overnight in ER and wait ten hours for results, hearing the screams in trauma? Someone saying, “Come back, child?” No—I've been through this. Every time, “It's not life-threatening. Nothing structural.” So, why am I getting leveled? Damn it. It's bad this time.

Keep calm and focus on the idiot box. Adam Levine’s slick new haircut. I’ll bet he’s saying something profound. Mute is television's best feature. How many words is too many words for closed captioning to keep up? Who gets paid to type this colloquial catastrophe? My chest is pounding. “Man in the box wants to burn my soul.”

I'm prone on the floor hearing Low harmonize all the way from Duluth, the song somehow oscillating between a drunken swirl and stone-faced sobriety. It must be frigid there. Like in Michigan when it's too cold to snow, or the way nostrils freeze first. But this bass line lends some warmth. It's Carhartt wool & North Face fleece.

Here’s a fun anecdote: Chest pressure can signify fatal, time-sensitive horror, or nothing at all. Something trivial. “The pain is easy.”

My hands are soaked. From an evolutionary standpoint, perspiration is an advantage. In fight or flight mode—say, running from a snarling grizzly—moist hands mean better grip on the tree used to escape. But there is no bear. There is only snare and cymbal. I'm prone on the living room floor, counting sizzles on the ride: “4-7-8,” like they told me. Breathe. “But I know they're gonna make it just one more night.”

*

The emergency responder barrels in. I say, my hands are tingling. “Is that the truth?” he says. Tiny lightning is combing my veins. He looks confused. Gives me an EKG. I’m breathing fast, he says, standing over me. I’m clutching his pant leg like he’s the father I lost in October. “We’re gonna take him in, just in case.” I ask my wife to get my joggers and that gives him a little chuckle. He mutters something like, “Yoggers.” Who is this guy?

Lucky me: He rides along in the back of the ambulance. One thing they don’t tell you about ambulances—the halogen is resplendent. Can’t fake anything under that light. He’s talking to me as he measures my vitals, says his brother had to stop drinking Monster. Made him feel the same way. Shit, I think. I’m not your bro—not some juiced up meat-monger whose truck says “Super Duty” on the tailgate. He talks the whole way, about his last job or something. “Too many words, too many words.” All the while I’m collapsing into the gurney, letting the clean white linen smother me into some new galaxy sans Adam Levine. Also, I’m wondering how I left my shoes at home. They let me aboard in just Carhartt socks. Anything goes in this clown car.

Later, after the rigmarole of all-night clinical tests and vague explanations, I get a sick note at 4 a.m. that is impressively concise. Doctors don’t play around: “Please excuse Kenneth from work today, as he was seen in the ED overnight.” Talk about understatement. Bitch, I was dying.

*

But that was last time. I’m not doing it again. Maybe my heartrate is back to normal now. “And I'm tired.” Beyond tired. And again the lights are all fading back into view, an array of golden beacons smeared across an empty shoreline. The light is resplendent and I’m holding my head. I'm thinking of too many words. How many mantras is too many mantras?

I’m prone listening to “Words,” and it is a song about language. It is plaintive. It is contemplative. This always happens—some rouge nerve whispering in my ear: “Time to faint, fat boy.” I'm not going to listen anymore. “And I can hear 'em.”

“9-1-1. What's your emergency?”

“Hey, I’m not sure. Never mind.” Click.

Beat, busted heart. Stammer in my chest. Just one more night.

Kenneth Caldwell is eyes wide into the night, illuminated in electric blue.

(You may also download a prettier, designed version of the essay here.)

vs.

(2) Concrete Blonde, “Joey”

Analysis by Megan Campbell

Concrete Blonde’s Bloodletting came out in 1990, but it didn’t make its way to me until 1991, when I was 16 years old. It was the first “alternative” album I ever owned, except maybe for Red, Hot, and Blue, which I bought because I happened to see a still of Sinead O’Connor in her video for “You Do Something to Me”—she was dolled up with make-up and a wig, and looked unrecognizable (I remember showing the picture to my friend April, who sneered, “That’s not her.” My teenage self was fascinated by this dichotomy. Why look like that (bald and weird) when you could look like this (lacquered and gorgeous)? Which is actually a good thing for a 16 year-old girl to ponder, but I digress). I’m compelled to remind my youngers that, at the time, it was hard to find good music—there was no internet, no satellite radio, no Spotify, no cable music stations, and only one MTV. Even CDs were new-ish. Music meant Top 40 radio and Musicland at the mall; figuring out there was a world of sound outside of those suburban walls was, in retrospect, a rite of passage that not everyone managed to find their way through (eight years later I knew someone who had only ever owned one CD: Roxette). I wish I could remember how I found “Joey,” but find it I did, and it now represents that particular time for me.

I was not alone in my discovery—everyone seemed to love “Joey.” The video broke out of the 120 Minutes ghetto on MTV and achieved regular rotation, and the song even cracked the Top 40, topping out at #19 (it was #1 for four weeks on something called the “Modern Rock” chart). Considering all of the mild, poppy alt bands floating around in the late 80s and early 90s, “Joey” was an unlikely crossover hit. Lots of people love sad songs (and March Sadness thanks God for that) but “Joey” wasn’t, shall we say, attractively sad—it wasn’t winsome or sexy or sweet. The video featured no cleavage and no pretty girl tears—just lead singer Johnette Napolitano looking fierce and unapproachable (she’s still there in my head with bald Sinead), backed by a band that was not good-looking or hip or even youthful. “Joey” was guttural and depressing and pleading. It was without ego or posturing, which I’ve come to feel is necessary for a truly sad song. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was also autobiographical—about Napolitano’s relationship with Marc Moreland of Wall of Voodoo, who died of liver failure about 10 years later (whatever your criteria, this is a bona fide Sad Song).

In 1991 “Joey” felt like it was aimed right at my wounded teen soul. Yet when I listen to it now, it feels like a song for adults who have seen some shit, not kids playing at broken hearts. I wasn’t even a lovelorn sort of teen, more of a morbid one (I remember removing the piece of heat-reflective cardboard from the crawl space entrance in my parents’ basement after I read The Bell Jar. I peered inside and wondered: would they find me? Hmm). A cynical part of me thinks, this song is about giving and giving, and teens are about taking and taking. So of course they (and I) loved it. But when I think a little more about teens, their personalities buoyed up by their favorite store at the mall, their favorite pizza topping, and so many other irrelevancies, I get it—giving someone everything feels possible at 16, because there’s not that much to give. But for an adult, it’s an impossible, desperate, last-ditch promise, which is why “Joey” stings so much.

Wikipedia tells me that “Joey” was the last song recorded for Bloodletting—Napolitano wrote it but didn’t want to sing it. But, eventually, she had to. And it became the single. And it was a hit, an unheard-of thing for a band like Concrete Blonde in 1990. So, she must have heard it everywhere, and also had to sing it everywhere, maybe thousands of times, for fans who were sodden with whatever sadness the song represented for them. And I would love to know what her sadness was like. Was it a punch to the gut every time she sang, or did it fade away over time? Neither feels like a happy ending.

Megan Campbell is a member of the March Sadness Selection Committee and a vintage clothing dealer in Tucson, AZ.

*

Scores & Analysis

(1) NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL 54 edges (13) The Church 49 

(2) JEFF BUCKLEY 73 knocks out (3) Sinead O’Connor 35

The close game between a possibly-overseeded (1) Neutral Milk Hotel and a surging (13) The Church came down to the final moments, but NMH squeaked a victory, 54-49, and advances to the Elite 8 where they'll meet (2) Jeff Buckley, who stomped (3) Sinead O'Connor 73-35 in a lopsided contest.

Close call for surprising tournament contender The Church, and had a couple calls gone their way at the end NMH could be packing their bags. But Jeff Mangum & co go on to play another day, ice their legs, rest up, and celebrate how far they've come.

Sinead's tournament is over, probably unsurprisingly, where she ran into the voice of Jeff Buckley. Man, that was a contest of spectacular voices, but you chose Buckley. One voter contacted us to inform us that her first kiss took place against a background of Buckley's "Hallelujah": damn, quite a song for that, we think! Well-played, and that's a great reason for a vote. We've been reading Ben Ratliff's Every Song Ever, and he's got a bit that describes nicely what happens sometimes in a great song when “some singers…go transparent in their voice. They seem to become the property of other forces.” That's what we think happens in both those songs, and so we're sorry to big goodbye to Ms O'Connor. Next year, next year...

So the Elite 8 teams is all the one and two seeds so far: (1) The Cure vs (2) Radiohead and (1) Neutral Milk Hotel vs (2) Jeff Buckley. Today's matchups are going to be sweet too, and will ensure that at least one lower seed advances. We have (7) Tracy Chapman vs (6) Kate Bush and (1) Elliott Smith vs (4) Gary Jules.

Added bonus: In the first game, Chapman is introduced by Manuel Muñoz and Kate Bush is ushered in via Danielle Cadena Deulen. And in the second game we have Katie Jean Shinkle repping Elliott Smith and Ryan Carter repping Gary Jules. Come for the games, but enjoy the lovely essaying while you're here.

Tomorrow we'll see Kate Bernheimer repping (1) Joy Division against (5) PJ Harvey & Nick Cave, repped by Nicole Walker. And (14) Low, underdogs from Minnesota, introduced by Kenneth Caldwell come up against (2) Concrete Blonde, repped by Megan Campbell.

Also, guest analysts for the Final Four will include Rick Moody and Pam Houston. Rock on. More to come on that.

Vote & comment & spread the word about the March Sadness action: we're getting closer to knowing who the real contenders are. & here's your updated bracket:

Sweet Sixteen Action: (7) TRACY CHAPMAN vs (6) KATE BUSH

FINAL SCORE: (7) TRACY CHAPMAN 74, (6) Kate Bush 53

*

(7) Tracy Chapman, "Fast Car"

Analysis by Manuel Muñoz

It’s never a good idea to study a bracket too closely, either before or after the playing starts, but Tracy Chapman’s appearance in the Sweet Sixteen suggests unheralded strength rather than an easy draw. I was sure she was going to fall to The Smiths in the first round, but her earnest delivery carried “Fast Car” through. That might suggest (might!) that the voting pool considers the combo of plaintive but warm voice plus easily graspable lyrics more potent than the committee anticipated. Only the voting bloc that witnessed the Chapman/Eels showdown knows for sure.

“Fast Car” might be the most straightforward and story-like of the songs we’ve got left, leaving little room for second-guessing its considerable narrative of burden and responsibility. The previous write-up on Chapman already made mention of the song’s “speed” chorus, its rush of longing and vulnerability. But before that, we hear the speaker lay out how parental failure has forced a guilty hand. “Somebody’s got to take care of him,” says the speaker of an alcoholic, broken-down father, “so I quit school and that’s what I did.” For all its merits as a song of broken hopes and disillusionment, it’s also one that surprisingly insists that bigger family circumstances can matter just as much as a lack of individual options for a person at a crossroads.

For pushing thirty years of age, “Fast Car” has held up well as a song representing the early half of the bracket era. I admire how its folk sensibility managed to crash a couple of boundaries in 1988. Is it college radio or straight-up adult contemporary? Is it 120 Minutes or VH1 during the daytime? However we might answer those questions, the impact of the song and what it meant to a lot of people might best be demonstrated by the “roll call” moment in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing from 1989. Just a year after her big hit and Chapman (thrillingly to my young movie-going ears at the time) got to take a well-earned place on a very deep bench.

Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and two short-story collections. He’s midway through a third, with recent work in the current issue of American Short Fiction.

vs.

(6) Kate Bush, “This Woman's Work”

Analysis by Danielle Cadena Deulen

It’s those first sung notes—somehow both sweet and distraught, sharp and tender—an exhale that draws the breath out of a room. It’s a hurt-pleasure like pressing the cut at the tip of your finger, or the anxiety that arises in the moment someone you love touches your shoulder, turns you around because they need to tell you something. Something big. Something that will probably make you cry.
And I do whenever I hear this song.

Admittedly, I’m sentimental. But I don’t think that’s all that’s at work here. Most sad songs are sad to me because I connect them with my own memories of loss, but this song has been floating through my life a long time now, landing my attention in various moments that have no aligning personal narrative. It’s not unlike the aesthetically disjunctive context of the song’s original life, having been written for the 1988 John Hughes film, She’s Having a Baby. 

I watched it on TV as a kid, largely unimpressed by Kevin Bacon’s supposedly comedic performance, his character’s hysterical response to the expectations of fatherhood striking me, even then, as immature—Oh, grow up, thought my eleven-year-old self. Then his wife goes into labor and something is wrong. A drop of blood falls slowly to the hospital’s white floor and Kate Bush’s voice rings out over a montage of scenes that haven’t earned it. For a moment, I forget that I don’t like what I’m watching, that I am bored, only a child, and am merely suspended in her voice, in perpetual present tense.

The song has always arrived to me this way, at moments in my life that should make me resist its emotional call: Drunk at a party, or driving on a bright day through the mountains, or sitting with my high school ex-boyfriend in his Volkswagen Rabbit, still saturated with the stink of cigarettes and Eternity for Men, stifling a laugh because he’s shown up at my childhood house years after we split with an engagement ring for the girl he left me for—to get my opinion, he tells me—but the ring’s so godawful (white-gold dolphins diving around a diamond chip) and his obviousness so ripe (he wants me to be jealous) that I have to clasp my hand over my mouth, when the first notes of “This Woman’s Work” reaches out through the radio—

And I forget where I am, what I was thinking, who I’m with, and despite the context, my eyes well-up. He places his hand on my shoulder sympathetically. “No,” I try to say, “it’s just the song,” but I can tell he doesn’t believe me, that he thinks he’s got what he came for.

What I’m trying to say is this: the song creates its own space. Kate Bush starts singing and even though I know what must come next, I want to know what comes next. This is probably why it keeps resurfacing in the voices of different singers, gender notwithstanding. Its sadness is beautifully arresting, the call of a lone bird, the moan of a train at night. I suppose this is what I want from any song: to be transported so far away that I forget myself to ache into it.

Give me these moments back. Give them back to me.

Danielle Cadena Deulen is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Lovely Asunder and Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, and an essay collection, The Riots. She’s the poetry series editor at Acre Books and teaches for Willamette University. You can find out more about her here.

*

Sweet Sixteen Action: (4) GARY JULES vs (1) ELLIOTT SMITH

FINAL SCORE: (1) ELLIOTT SMITH 78, (4) Gary Jules 44

*

(4) Gary Jules, "Mad World"

Analysis by Ryan Carter

I had no idea Jules' song was a cover of a Tears for Fears hit until several years after I'd heard it in Donnie Darko. I looked up the original, and I don't think I've done so since. There's no need. It doesn't have the pull that Jules' version does. And by pull, I mean, well, the sadness. But also its clarity. This is a pretty spare tune. It's not hard to follow. There's a big wet whallop in here that's aimed right at your gut.

These days an artistic representation of suicidal ideation is a big turn-off. I get a little frustrated. This is ground that's been covered before. I know my thought is dismissive, and I'm kind of self-conscious about that dismissal. I kind of want to lecture the artist on reaching their full potential in other more constructive ways. "You've got a lot of talent, and you shouldn't squander it on moping." That sort of thing. But that's me today, as a grown-up. In 2002 or 2003, when I probably heard the song, memories of my own adolescent rage and despair weren't so distant. Let's say I was introduced to the song in 2003: that's 13 years ago. In the past thirteen years I've done a lot of stuff. In 2003, I'd been out of high school for only eight years. I'd been out of college for only three or four, depending on how you count. And that passel of years wasn't easy. There was plenty of sadness, and plenty of leaning on the edges of rooftops, looking at one city or another, feeling almost surgically removed from everything below and beyond.

I may even have spent some of those rooftop moments in a hat like Gary Jules wears in this video. The landscape he looks over is pretty bleak and wintery. There's a lot of separation there. Not a lot of "there" there. It's familiar.

Today I see a young parent with a young child and I smile. Same happens when I see a dog. If I were to gaze over the rooftops of my city, I'd think about the neat cars on the streets, maybe how the landscape was different before they put in the interstate. (In fact I'm certain I'd think about the changed landscape. I've become deeply enamored of historical plat maps.) I'd think about the weird politics that have led to the football stadium I can see being built downtown. In short, I often think of things other than me, because I feel connected to them. In all sorts of ways. Today I'm luckier and happier than I've ever been. I'm engaged to a singularly kind and beautiful woman. I've come out on the other end of a couple pretty serious illnesses. I've got friends and I'm well employed. I'm not alone.

But Gary Jules reminds me that sadness is a thick filter I know well. How he got Michel Gondry, whose film credits include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and that weird White Stripes video where they're made of Legos, to direct a video for his perfect song I don't know, but Gondry gets what he's talking about. When Gondry gets it, you know you're on to something.

Ryan Carter is a research librarian for a large global firm, and lives in Minneapolis.

vs.

(1) Elliott Smith, “Waltz #2”

Analysis by Katie Jean Shinkle

On tumblr the meme below is being shared furiously by teenagers experiencing heartbreak (100,000+ reblogs/likes as of December 2015), and most of them do not know who Elliot Smith is or where these lyrics come from or what they are associated with. They do not know he is dead. They do not know his music. These teenagers care about this image because, almost twenty years later, these lyrics embody ultimate sadness, loss, the impossibility of unrequited love, an infinity of closed off possibility—I’m never going to know you now—and even through the impossibility, a challenge of the heart—but I’m going to love you anyhow. 

+

What are the ways in which we know and love each other, even for brief moments of time? How do we ever relieve ourselves of the grief and burden of relationships, especially our earliest ones, the ones that shape who we are and what we carry with us? If thinking of "Waltz #2 (XO)" in this way, this is the saddest song of 1998* (especially as this song was in the world with songs like this and this and this that year). "Waltz #2 (XO)" is a song about childhood trauma, but it is also a song about suffering and love, longing and turmoil, as all Smith’s songs are, and the relentless mantra of being a failure and receiving such a message as early as the earliest years of life: you’re no good you’re no good you’re no good / can’t you tell that its well understood? This is a love song to his family, his harsh stepfather and the undying love of his mother. This song offers an articulation to these complicated feelings and a chance to ruminate on the suffering that shapes us all in these ways and that shaped the haunted and exhausted Smith as an adult: I’m here and expected to stay on and on and on / I’m tired, I’m tired. 

+

It’s OK / It’s alright / Nothing’s wrong.

+

On October 21st, 2003 the news of Smith’s death trickled in slowly to the Michigan woods where my friends and I were binge drinking PBR and chain-smoking Newport 100s. Elliott Smith was one particular friend’s favorite artist and when we heard the news he told us a story about meeting Smith earlier in 2002. Supposedly Smith was clean then, but there are conflicting reports. My friend told us about giving Smith a handmade acoustic guitar created by my friend and his father, and how Smith was so humble upon receiving it, as if no one had ever given him a gift before. He mused with my friend about how the world was a strange place without heroin. He played the guitar in the show. My friend wept while telling us this story, and we all stayed up all night with him while he played Elliott Smith covers and recorded them, playing his guitar and bawling through songs. He must have played "Waltz #2 (XO)" for us 20 times by morning, and by morning my friend had deleted all the recordings in a rage as grief is apt to do. Here are the ways in which we love each other, even for brief moments. Here is how we relieve our grief. 

+

I’m never going to know you now / but I’m going to love you anyhow. 

+

*Or, arguably, the saddest song of all time, and possibly Smith’s best song. In Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith by William Todd Schultz, he argues that "Waltz #2 (XO)" is Smith’s best, most tortured song (see here in Slate in 2013).

Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of two books, most recently The Arson People (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015). You can learn more about her work here. 

The Sweet Sixteen: (3) SINEAD O'CONNOR vs (2) JEFF BUCKLEY

FINAL SCORE: (2) JEFF BUCKLEY 73, (3) Sinead O’Connor 35

*

(3) Sinead O'Connor, "Three Babies"

Analysis by Laura C. J. Owen

The question that’s already dogged this song in this tournament is why it’s not “Nothing Compares 2 U” (the songs are from the same I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got album).

I am a certainly a big Sad Fan of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the video for which (Sinead: staring straight at the camera, singing and crying) represented one of my most shameful, secret, teenage Sad Music acts: staring into the mirror, whilst reciting sad music/poetry/love letters, whilst crying.

Similar to Sinead, I’m a Northern European style pale. While other Arizona teens ran around in the sun, the only time I ever really liked the way I looked was when I stared into the mirror, facing my sharply-angled, pale face, and thick, black eyebrows, while I recited sad music and admired the artful fall of my tears. The “Nothing Compares 2 U,” video and song, showed me that I wasn’t the only one who benefited from this aesthetic.

But here’s the other thing: “Nothing Compares 2 U” is written by Prince. Which isn’t bad—Prince is the best. But he’s just so...cool. Wonderful, but not mortal. So it was disappointing for Teenage Me to discover that he wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U.” I wanted bald, odd, pale, sad Sinead O’Connor to have written it. It hurt me that the song wasn’t autobiographical.

And as has already been discussed, “Three Babies” is closely, painfully autobiographical / confessional: it’s a song that’s close to un-coverable. It’s all Sinead.

Arguably, autobiographical connection shouldn’t matter, not when the cover is glorious, but Sinead’s epically messy life—in all its Pope-protesting, musician-feuding, public suicidal breakdown glory and squalor—is an important part of her legacy, and difficult to disentangle from her music. It’s not hard to imagine Sinead staring into the mirror and crying, not because of her famous video but because her entire career is based on that kind of embarrassing, beautiful sincerity, a willingness to blab secrets, commit to extreme positions and then retract them, to be always, uncomfortably, inconveniently, annoyingly, tragically honest, even when being honest requires that you be histrionic and contradictory.

In a way, “Three Babies” is about celebrating those inconvenient, tragic bits of ourselves. “Each of these, my three babies, I will carry with me, for myself,” Sinead sings, “There’s no other way I could be.” The song is sad, but peaceful. Loss is with us always, Sinead says, part our blood and bones, but that is something to be celebrated as well as mourned. Instead of reveling defiantly in the dysfunction of loss, it admits the necessity of loss to informing who we become: "No longer mad like a horse / I'm still wild but not lost / From the thing that I've chosen to be / And it's ‘cause you've thrilled me / Silenced me / Stilled me / Proved things I never believed"

Loss lives on within us; we carry Russian-nesting-doll versions of ourselves inside us at all times: the sad teenager, the defiant daughter, the grieving mother. Within us, the dead still live. No one else can carry them.

Laura C. J. Owen is a writer and teacher in Tucson, Arizona. You can see more of her writing here.

vs.

(2) Jeff Buckley, “Hallelujah”

Analysis by Elena Passarello

Jeff Buckley covered Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—one of those covers that’s so powerful, it endangers the original— in 1994. I was an un-blossomed sixteen, and such an easy target for Buckley’s special trick of rewashing songs in beautiful sadness. The love that he promised me in his perfect vox was full of bodies and moonlight and urban melancholy. His was the first version of the song I ever heard, and sweet Lord, it stuck on me.

I’d be in last period Bio, five miles away from my bedroom and my boom-box, and just aching for the chance to go home and play it. I’d tell myself I was one fetal pig dissection and one school bus ride away from its first note, which isn’t a sung note at all, but a feathery expulsion of breath: hhhhuhh. Breath on a neck, a lover’s last breath, or a dejected sigh—no matter what it signifies, that breath is like a reset button, blowing away all the sinister horniness of Cohen’s original take and replacing it with high, earnest emotion.

This bracket might not be the place for (probably poor) musical analysis, but doing so makes the best case for why this song is super sad, so bear with me. “Hallelujah” is technically sad, and that schematic sadness begins with the two-string intro of Buckley’s guitar. He plays Cohen’s C-major melody line, slowed to a crawl, on the high E-string, and then adds the wrong part of a C-minor chord—a D-sharp—on the string beneath it. A major tune with a minor underbelly. That wonky minor shift, paired with that opening sigh, tells us that the wry “Hallelujah” of Leonard Cohen is about to crumble. And then Jeff Buckley starts to sing.

One of my favorite things about “Hallelujah” is that first verse tells you how the song will manufacture its sadness: “well it goes like this, the fourth the fifth / the minor fall, the major lift...” That chord progression is the see-saw that builds an uneasy foundation under the melody. And the melody itself allows for sadness, too. Not so much in Cohen’s version, because he tunelessly drawls through his cheeky verses and chorus, but definitely in Buckley’s more articulate melody line (which Buckley lifted from John Cale’s 1991 cover; we really should give Cale the credit for finding the sadness in this song).

The back half of each verse climbs up the C-scale, note by note, over three measures. It rises all the way into the next octave, to which Buckley ascends in his oily and perfect head voice:

The fourth, the fifth/ the mi-nor fall the ma-jor lift/ the ba-ffled king com-po-sing…
  G     A        A    B     B   C  C    C   C   C   C   D    D   D   D      D    D     E    E

What progress! What a heavenly unburdening! Those rising tones are like a water bucket down a deep well that’s being slowly pulled toward the light.

But then, right at the title word, the melody drops. The four syllables in “Ha-le-lu-jah” tumble downward from E to D to C. Back into the dark. And how brilliant that the lyric on which the melody falls is the go-to word of Judeo-Christian worship, roughly translated as “lifting up praise” to God. “God” is the “jah” of “hallelujah,” and so God is the lowest note of the descent.

The chorus is a dirge-ier version of the same concept, up three notes and then back down, all on that ironic “hallelujah” until the chorus plummets to the low root tone. And that’s it for the song— it just repeats that structure; there are no bridges or codas. In a sense, all that lovely melody work gets Buckley nowhere, and it’s sad for a melody to try so hard— to make such beautiful progress—and ultimately fail.

Technics aside, I must admit there are sadder Jeff Buckley tunes. Look no further than the songs on either side of this track on Grace: the banshee-wail of “So Real” and the murderous breakdown that is “Lover, You Should Have Come Over.” I confess, too, that twenty years past Buckley (and two decades into my actual love life), I relate more to Cohen’s dark take on the song. He seems savvier to that long-distance marathon called love. And now that I actually know what sex is, I think Cohen’s version is sexier, too.

I’m still voting for Buckley in the match-up versus Sinead O’Connor’s song, which sports less technical sadness and really is more morose than anything. And I’d bet on the youthful, pristine sadness of “Hallelujah” over “Under the Milky Way” or  “Mad World” or “Fake Plastic Trees” any day. What might give “Hallelujah” a run for its money is “Joey,” which I was flat-out afraid to listen to at sixteen. Holy shit, that song is sad.

Anyway, Buckley’s “Hallelujah” is saddest to me because, on top of the great writing, it is so beautifully performed, and that beauty is now gone in more ways than one. And to put it more selfishly, it’s sad because it reminds me that I once believed in Buckley’s high-earnestness. In 1994, I thought life was this constant, pure, Byronic thing. I felt the same way about pop music. So when I hear Buckley sing, I’m sad to know I might never be as openly wooed by life than I was back then, when I’d experienced none of it.

Elena Passarello wrote a book about pop-culture voices, Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande, 2012). She personally thinks the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular” should’ve swept this whole dang tourney. Tweet your dissent @elenavox

*

The Sweet Sixteen: (13) THE CHURCH vs (1) NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL

FINAL SCORE: (1) NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL 54, (13) The Church 49

*

(13) The Church, "Under the Milky Way"

Analysis by Juan Diaz

“Fish is flesh, fish is flesh,” he kept yelling, “fish is flesh,” not at anyone in particular (though there were a few butler types scrambling around), but maybe at the occasional assumption that vegetarians are only averse to meat. Being a vegetarian myself, I thought the rest of the spread contained more than enough selections to please even a vegan palate. But Marty wouldn’t have it. The salmon did look pink and lively next to the dead grains and vegetables demanded by The Church’s rider. Everything smelled wonderful to me. Compared to the boiled cabbage we got in Germany, this buffet was luxury.

It was Lausanne, France, if memory serves me right. My band, Nuclear Valdez, opened The Church on a 3 month European tour. They were promoting their Starfish album, which contained the hit, “Under The Milky Way.” My other 3 bandmates usually scurried off after our show, but I stuck around to hear their set almost every night. I’d watch from backstage, from the audience: perspectives are important. But mostly because their music was growing on me. Before this tour, I’d only heard “Unguarded Moment” and a couple of other tunes. They’d add a song one night, remove one on another, maybe to avert boredom, but overall their nightly sets contained certain songs from their repertoire. You know how when you listen to an album, and it’s okay, but the more you listen the more it grows on you and eventually could become a lifetime favorite? I was experiencing this with the Church in a live setting with the added visual.

The Church consisted of three Aussies and one brit, Marty being the latter. Not sure why, but other than Marty, the other three guys kept to themselves, didn’t speak much and lived up to that introverted “college alternative” vibe that Hope Sandoval has perfected.

It was in Spain not long after the French fish is flesh incident that Marty and I had a conversation about who knows what, that lead to Kate Bush and voila, he turned out to be as huge a fan of KT as I was. Not only that, he was a record collector too. We talked about each other’s collectible Kate items, had some drinks, promises of exchanges were made and kept. After the tour, for a while, we traded cassettes of each other’s Kate rarities. He had bootlegs, I had bootlegs, and mix tapes were made. That night in Spain, he told me that there are sparse copies of the Kate Bush, “Hounds of Love” 12” that are double grooved—not all of them—but some, and he owned one. Thing is, if you own one, and you can get the needle into the secondary groove, there is a whole other mix of the song on it. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this. But on one of the cassettes he mailed, you could hear him patiently laying the needle down on the groove over twenty times before he found the mystery groove, and sure enough, there was another mix of "Hounds of Love."

If anyone is interested, Marty Willson-Piper has a music blog titled In Deep Music Archive. Check it here if you will.

Juan Diaz started in music distribution and later managed a few record stores, both indie and corporate. Moonlighting after work with his band, Nuclear Valdez, they secured a major label deal in 1989, released two album and two videos: it was a fun 3 year run. He's since been selling collectible vinyl online for the past 15 years.

vs.

(1) Neutral Milk Hotel, “Two Headed Boy”

Analysis by Lawrence Lenhart

Before coming face-to-face-to-face with Jim and Joe at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum (a physician’s college dedicated to displaying medical oddities), I had never before considered that Neutral Milk Hotel’s eponymous “Two-Headed Boy” might be literal. I had thought the two-headed boy was a metaphorical Janus looking simultaneously to the past and future. Or, as a high school girlfriend suggested: just sexual innuendo, the second head being the character’s glans penis (or “head” of the penis), which at the time, seemed congruous with all the sexual imagery elsewhere on the record (most conspicuously: “semen stains the mountain tops”).

In 2005, John Strausbaugh of the New York Times described the Jim-and-Joe exhibit in the Gretchen Worden Room as a “green-tinged corpse of a two-headed baby, sleeping in a bath of formaldehyde.” When we saw it, I leaned in with a friend, our own skulls momentarily conjoining as she ghouled the lyric: “all floooating in glass.” Staring at Jim and Joe—oh, how Mütter courts the “post-mortem gaze”—I muttered through the lyrics again. In the album’s last moments (during “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2”), the grim leitmotif from the original returns for a few measures until Mangum slides out his chair and sets down his studio guitar indefinitely.

What’s most surprising about this song is the way the two-headed boy deflects the circus audience’s gaze (presumably, they “dance ‘round the room to accordion keys” for a Barnum-like sideshow). The two-headed boy pays the gaze forward to Anne Frank whose diary they mutually pore over in their adolescence. I had at some point projected this gaze onto the famous postcard album art, the defaced (perhaps moon-faced) woman, Anne, implicitly dividing two boys who tread the ocean backdrop with only their heads buoying above water.

I consider my friend Jeevan an aficionado of conjoined twins. An anti-Barnum, he writes poems about these fused bodies without resorting to vulgar fetishizing. When I recommended he listen to Neutral Milk Hotel’s song, he nodded as if he’d endured that suggestion one too many times. “I plan on it,” he said. If Jeevan was indifferent to NMH, then my father was flat-out averse.

He used to drive me to basketball practice in the winters, playing cassettes on the way to the Sewickley gymnasium (Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” Eagles’ “Hotel California,” etc.). He had a whole catalog of songs he was determined to convince me were the best ever written. On the way home, with a basketball between my sneakers, I tried my hand at the reciprocal task. I replaced his cassette with a cassette adapter, a deck with a short 3.5-mm audio cable, which plugged into my Sony Sports Walkman Portable CD Player whose spindle motor spun a CD pressed with the image of a flying Victrola phonograph. The radio-cum-cassette-cum-CD-cum-phonograph is reminiscent of the two-headed boy’s convoluted player: “with pulleys and weights / creating a radio played just for two.”

My dad claimed to hate Mangum’s voice, which disappointed me because I was trying to think of a manly way to tell him that Mangum’s gliding snarl, particularly the non-lexical vocables at the end of “Two-Headed Boy” (“deee da-dee da-dee-da dee-eee”) reminded me of his ancient lullabying to Bing Crosby’s “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral.” The syllables even sounded like “daddy.” Despite his antipathy, I persisted in playing the album all basketball season long, convinced that if he heard it enough times, he’d start to like it (like a jingle on a commercial).

Not long after that basketball season, I quit organized sports and became the lead singer of a punk band. Before one of our shows, the venue organizer offered to give me screaming lessons. I finished putting on my eyeliner, and he told me to scream as he muscled my diaphragm with his thumbs. “Like that,” he said. “Like that.” Minutes later, my band performed a screamo medley of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, including the lyrics: “when all is breaking / and everything that you could keep beside...” This is the moment, perhaps, of the two-headed boy’s lethal separation, paving the way for Pt. 2 in which the remaining twin chronicles his survivor’s guilt.  The song itself is surgically separated across the album.

The song ends melancholically on Christmas: “two-headed boy / there is no reason to grieve / the world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves / left beneath Christmas trees in the snow.” I think of how my uncle revives his antique trumpet on Christmas Eves and performs “Chestnuts Roasting On an Open Fire” with comic embouchure, discreet strain. Once, before reinterring the instrument in its velvet-lined case, I asked him to play me the interlude melody of “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” I hummed the notes, and he trumpeted them back. In the trumpet’s bell, I could see his head’s reflection. It was a feat of brassy craniopagus. As he played the melody, the image portended the album’s next song, “Two-Headed Boy.” He let me borrow the trumpet to see if I could learn to play it on my own. I failed to replicate the melody, instead sputtering as I depressed the finger buttons asynchronously. I called him twice on the phone for quick lessons on embouchure. I watched instructional YouTube videos. Eventually, I surrendered to the trumpet (“will wait until the point when you let go”). Sick of looking at my own failing reflection achieving nothing but spit in the mouthpiece, two heads not better than one, I gave my lips a rest and bought a kazoo.

Lawrence Lenhart holds an MFA from The University of Arizona. His essay collection, Isolating Transgression, will be published in Fall 2016 (Outpost19). His prose appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is a professor of fiction and nonfiction at Northern Arizona University and a reviews editor and assistant fiction editor of DIAGRAM.