Blue Songs for When You're Feeling Down

Some might think "blue" songs are depressing, but it's not necessary for a sad song to bring you down.  We're not talking Blues Clues songs or blue jean songs here, these are the songs you listen to during those times when you yourself are feeling a little or very blue.  Such songs of melancholy can actually be just the thing to make you feel better, lifting you out of your sorrow.  That's one of the secrets of the blues- some think it's just depressing music, but the blues is actually usually healing music both for the player and the listener.  Somehow, this kind of music is able to help us process difficult emotions and get through them, emerging with our sanity and spirit intact and perhaps stronger than when we started.  Almost all cultures have their blue music, from blue hindi songs to the Fado of Portugal and beyone.  The use of melody and songs to express the dark emotions we all experience at times in the effort to move on from those emotions is universal to humanity.  Let us explore some of the classic and lesser known "blue tunes" from around the world that have offered comfort to many a soul who was feeling down.  The next time you're in a funk and feel like the world is a cruel, cruel place to live in, try one of these blue songs to help you get your mojo back.

One of my all time favorite blue songs comes from Brazil, a land full of infectious music, much of it bittersweet songs of yearning.  The thing I love about Brazilian music is that even when the subject is dismal, the music is features great rhythms and beautiful harmonies with complex chord voicings.  For that reason, even though I can't say the lyrics are happy at all, the song "A Felicidade" (Happiness) is one of my favorite songs of all time.  It features the lyrics "Sadness has no end.  Happiness Does".  Talk about a downer!  But it is one of the most beautiful songs that I know of, and I can't help but feel good after hearing it. 

For more down-in-the-dumps blue music songs that leave you feeling more up when you're sad, check out some of Billie Holiday's classics.  Her rendition of "You've Changed" is heart breaking in a way that allows you to view the emotion in a more detached manner.  When I hear this song, thoughts of past heartbreaks flash through my mind and I reflect on how life goes on, how we can express our deepest emotions on the bad things that happen to us while creating something beautiful.  Incidentally, Dexter Gordon's soulful, wordless rendition of this song on tenor sax is my favorite ballad of all time.  That one's pure emotion without the words to get in the way, it's mellow and powerful and stunningly beautiful.  Check out the song off his album "Doin' Allright".  Freddie Hubbard also plays exquisite trumpet on this track as well as on the whole CD.

Of course, we can't leave out blues music songs.  They are the reason we have the term "the blues", after all.  Here, we have the perfect outlet for the controlled release of the things that are too painful to keep inside.  The blues is a vehicle for self-expression in twelve bars, which repeats again at the end of the twelfth bar.  In this way, it kind of represents the cycles we go through in life, especially the way that our troubles seem to stick around sometimes, changing forms and becoming more or less intense but coming back again for another chorus.  The blues, like a lot of melancholy Brazilian songs, laments the problems we often find ourselves facing in life while moving on from them, coping and dealing with gnarly situations creatively.  It's hard, very hard, to pick even just a handful of blues songs for inclusion in this list, since there's so many truly great songs.  I choose Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign" because it expresses in a controlled, and even rather humorous and upbeat way the feeling of having bad luck.  Who hasn't found themselves thinking that perhaps there's some kind of curse on them when the going gets tough?  While that's not exactly a productive way to deal with life's problems, it sure can feel good to hear someone singing what you feel.  Mississippi John Hurt, a now departed country blues great, had an utterly unique playing style and lyrics of quiet resignation at the things that went wrong in life.  Much of Hurt's music, as well as that of older bluesmen, is in the public domain available as a blue songs download. 

For sheer intensity of feeling and lyrics that could move you to tears, you have to check out the music of Tom Waits.  With his "Louie Armstrong from hell" voice and passionate delivery on songs old and new, he has a power in his voice and a poignant quality of redemption seeking.  In the song Tom Traubert's Blues, the chorus of which is "Waltzing Matilda", you hear the desperation of a man at the end of his rope.  Although most people would be hard-pressed to tell you what, exactly, the song is about, the use of imagery in his songs paints a soundscape that is bleak but somehow warm and full of life at the same time.
I leave you with a song that is a gift to us when we're really feeling down- REM's "Everybody Hurts".  Because everybody does hurt… sometimes.