Speaker 1: So could you show me like a chord that's major
Speaker 1: and then a chord that's minor, just so we can
Speaker 1: hear the difference. Yep, So here's a C major chord
Speaker 1: C minor to meet. Anyone who prefers C major is
Speaker 1: out of their mind, Like I wish them well, but
Speaker 1: we can't ever fully understand one another or be close
Speaker 1: friends because C minor is true and C major that's
Speaker 1: for selling soap. Wow, I never knew. I mean, I
Speaker 1: know you felt strong. I didn't know you felt this strongly.
Speaker 1: That's me and Andy Thompson talking shop. He's a composer
Speaker 1: and a producer who works out of a basement studio
Speaker 1: called Instrument Landing. And I'm Dessa, host of the show
Speaker 1: Deeply Human. I'm wearing my podcast had today. But I
Speaker 1: make my living as a hip hop artist, and Andy
Speaker 1: and I are frequent collaborators. Most of the music that
Speaker 1: I write is pretty dark, so much so that my
Speaker 1: bandmates tease me about it. Even my fans tease me
Speaker 1: about it. Years ago, when I sent an early mix
Speaker 1: of an album to my mom, she said she liked it,
Speaker 1: but then asked, why do you always make music to
Speaker 1: bleed out? To I've loved sad songs since I was
Speaker 1: a teenager. My favorite genre was arguably total devastation. Tracy
Speaker 1: Chapman's Fast Car That was a big one, some of
Speaker 1: my mom's Bonnie ray Its slow Jams messed me up
Speaker 1: pretty good, and of course Jeff Buckley's rendition of Hallelujah.
Speaker 1: I played them over and over again because they reliably
Speaker 1: made me feel exquisitely awful. Listening to sad songs is
Speaker 1: a weird, counterintuitive thing to do. Why would anyone willfully
Speaker 1: gravitate towards something that hurts to hear? To find out,
Speaker 1: I'm asking a music critic, a philosopher, an experimental researcher,
Speaker 1: and a songwriter, why do we listen to sad music? First,
Speaker 1: let's holler at our critic, someone who listens to music professionally.
Speaker 1: Stephen Thompson is a writer, an editor, and a broadcast
Speaker 1: guy with National public radio in the US, and he's
Speaker 1: a serious sad song enthusiast. I know that you made
Speaker 1: a playlist called Weeping at the Wheels right, right right,
Speaker 1: and the cover image was just a box of tissues
Speaker 1: on a dashboard, and man, the car is definitely one
Speaker 1: of the best spots to be totally disemboweled by a song.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of songs that that I'm not allowed
Speaker 1: to drive to because because I become an irresponsible pilot
Speaker 1: of a motor vehicle in the throes of that much emotion,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, when you cry, it can sometimes
Speaker 1: like help you, like irrigate your emotions a little bit.
Speaker 1: And I think, I think sad songs kind of have
Speaker 1: that same that same function. I have a depressive streak,
Speaker 1: and I have an anxious streak. And when I was
Speaker 1: in high school, I remember my anxiety had gotten to
Speaker 1: the point where I wasn't able to sleep at night,
Speaker 1: and I started making lists of all the things that
Speaker 1: I had to do. And then when I was done
Speaker 1: writing down everything I had to do, and I was
Speaker 1: able to process and handle it. And I think in
Speaker 1: a way, sad songs for me are like those lists,
Speaker 1: those anxiety lists, you know, so I can my brain
Speaker 1: can just be this haunted circus of terrible emotions, and
Speaker 1: a song that has a way of processing those emotions
Speaker 1: can sometimes like serve as like almost like a sorting
Speaker 1: mechanism for that web of feelings in my head. And
Speaker 1: so I think sad music is really therapeutic for me
Speaker 1: in that way, clarifying a painful feeling, pinning it to
Speaker 1: a board, the clean, neat description provides some degree of relief,
Speaker 1: even if the feeling itself persists. I know that in
Speaker 1: my life being able to call demons by their proper
Speaker 1: names just helps somehow. It's a relief to know exactly
Speaker 1: what I'm up against, you know how, like your kid
Speaker 1: and you come crying to your parents you've had a nightmare,
Speaker 1: and your parents explain, like, nightmares are your brain's way
Speaker 1: of taking out the garbage. And I always thought that
Speaker 1: was a great way of thinking about nightmares. It's your
Speaker 1: your brain's way of processing difficult and dark things and
Speaker 1: so that you can handle them going forward. I think
Speaker 1: in a way, sad songs ping a little bit of
Speaker 1: that same thing. I wonder though, if there's like an
Speaker 1: undercurrent of intimacy that runs through sad music that isn't
Speaker 1: necessarily there and like dance music and that it's okay
Speaker 1: to tell anyone, hey, I want to dance, but the
Speaker 1: idea that like, hey, I think I'm getting a divorce,
Speaker 1: that's a secret, that's an intimacy, and that like there
Speaker 1: are fewer people in places that you can share that information,
Speaker 1: and so maybe, like we understand ourselves to be in
Speaker 1: a more intimate and trusting relationship with a musician who's
Speaker 1: telling us a sad story than one who's telling us
Speaker 1: is celebrating the song, can feel like you're communing with
Speaker 1: an artist who understands and has been through what you've
Speaker 1: gone through. And so it's not necessarily hopeless because here's
Speaker 1: somebody who clearly went through some of the same things
Speaker 1: that I did and came out on the other side
Speaker 1: and wrote a song about it. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: empathy is just one of the most powerful and important
Speaker 1: experiences we can have as human beings. This is the
Speaker 1: whole misery loves Company thing, but the way that Steven
Speaker 1: tells it, maybe it's also like proof of life, evidence
Speaker 1: that a fellow sufferer with a misery much like yours
Speaker 1: was able to get back on our feet and get
Speaker 1: stable enough to hire a band and a publicist and
Speaker 1: release some music into the world. All right, for Steven's
Speaker 1: walk off music, let's tee up a cut from his
Speaker 1: Weeping at the Wheel playlist, and now back to Andy's
Speaker 1: basement studio for a second to talk fundamentals. What is
Speaker 1: sad music exactly? My lad jewel vary and there are
Speaker 1: exceptions to every rule, but Andy ticked off a few
Speaker 1: of the features that makes sad songs sound sad. A
Speaker 1: lot of times when you feel sad, you kind of
Speaker 1: pull inward and you're quiet, and you don't necessarily want
Speaker 1: to speak to other people. And so I think one
Speaker 1: thing a composer can do is to bring the dynamic down.
Speaker 1: Another thing a composer can do is use just sparseness
Speaker 1: and not have a lot going on, have the notes
Speaker 1: to be very alone with themselves. But there are other things,
Speaker 1: like major and minor keys that are a little bit
Speaker 1: more of a mystery. Keep in mind, this conversation is
Speaker 1: being had by two Western musicians, and the world is
Speaker 1: a very wide musical place, but in very broad strokes.
Speaker 1: Major chords are usually considered happy and minor chords sad.
Speaker 1: So let's break down the chords to see what they're
Speaker 1: made of. C major chord has a C in the
Speaker 1: major third and five. To make it a minor chord,
Speaker 1: you take that second note and you move it down
Speaker 1: a half step, which is the shortest distance you can
Speaker 1: move an interval in music. Usually they're C minor. Dissecting
Speaker 1: a chord doesn't explain the feeling it foakes much better
Speaker 1: than cutting open a candle explains romance. You're basically talking
Speaker 1: about two frequencies interacting, and when they interact one way,
Speaker 1: it generally makes people feel happy, and when they interact
Speaker 1: a different way, it makes him feel sad. And that
Speaker 1: to me is it's kind of like a black hole.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It goes like this, the F five,
Speaker 1: the minor fall and the major lived, the baffle king composing.
Speaker 1: Have we just learned that some chords are associated with sadness?
Speaker 1: Or is there a mathematical relationship between the notes that
Speaker 1: makes us feel that way? People who have spent a
Speaker 1: lifetime trying to master the how of music still don't
Speaker 1: know the why. Myself very much included segue to our philosopher.
Speaker 1: Andrew Huddleston, teaches at Birkbeck College in London. Is an undergrad.
Speaker 1: He wrote a thesis on why we're drawn to sad music,
Speaker 1: and I asked him how sad music evolks emotion. One
Speaker 1: theory is that the musical expressions resemble the expressions of
Speaker 1: sad people think of the face of a Saint Bernard dog,
Speaker 1: we say that the face is sad, even though we
Speaker 1: think the dog is not sad. Now why do we
Speaker 1: think that, Well, it resembles in a certain way the
Speaker 1: expression of sad people, maybe in a kind of caricatured way,
Speaker 1: the kind of drooping quality of the Saint Bernard dog's face.
Speaker 1: And you think something similar might be the case in
Speaker 1: the contours of music, that they might have these kinds
Speaker 1: of qualities that put us in mind of sadness. Some
Speaker 1: sad music might actually resemble the sounds that come out
Speaker 1: of sad humans, that sound like wailing or like laments.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's a very common thing in
Speaker 1: vocal music and in some purely instrumental music too, where
Speaker 1: that quality is mirrored. And I think that that really
Speaker 1: puts us in mind of expressions of sadness, that kind
Speaker 1: of rising and falling suddenly falling vocal line, or the
Speaker 1: sense of a sigh in the music. My mom used
Speaker 1: to sing a lullaby to me and my kid brother
Speaker 1: Maxie called No Nando, and I think it has the
Speaker 1: kind of melody lines that Andrew's talking about. It has
Speaker 1: these like super epic swells and cascades My mom is
Speaker 1: Puerto Rican and most of the words are in Spanish,
Speaker 1: but I've always suspected that maybe, like the trills in
Speaker 1: the vocal line were forged by Sephardic Jewish singers with
Speaker 1: roots in Spain. It's one of those songs where a
Speaker 1: mom like puts her kid's name into it, and I
Speaker 1: do not have kids, so I'm gonna use Max's name.
Speaker 1: But it goes like this an no na do no
Speaker 1: no go me baby Maxie it done, and no na
Speaker 1: gole no na go ani no na and the nina no.
Speaker 1: It is an insanely dramatic way to put a kid
Speaker 1: to bed. I used to hate it when you go high,
Speaker 1: because I knew and he was almost done and I
Speaker 1: had to go to sleep. I still sing on nonando
Speaker 1: sometimes around my apartment, and my voice right now sounds
Speaker 1: a lot like my mom's did then. But why I
Speaker 1: am a grown adult who could listen to dance music
Speaker 1: or just eat Peanut M and M's or right a
Speaker 1: Shetland pony through a field of daisies. I asked Andrew
Speaker 1: for the philosopher's take on why we listen to sad
Speaker 1: music at all. We're interested in knowing about what the
Speaker 1: world is like, even about extreme kinds of suffering and horror,
Speaker 1: even if that's not particularly pleasant. You know, why are
Speaker 1: people drawn to tragedy? Why are people drawn to films
Speaker 1: that are about really horrible things? Why do they read
Speaker 1: novels that are about really horrible things? And I think
Speaker 1: one of the explanations is we care about knowledge. We
Speaker 1: care about knowing what the world is, even if what
Speaker 1: we find out is something that's depressing. There might also
Speaker 1: be something important about packaging sadness in music. So I
Speaker 1: think the beauty plays a really considerable role here. One
Speaker 1: thing that it can provide is in itself a certain
Speaker 1: kind of consolation. Perhaps the presence of the beauty in
Speaker 1: this expression of something that's sad or depressing, it might
Speaker 1: also intimate a certain kind of hope as well. Maybe
Speaker 1: the music here becomes the mixer and a stiff drink,
Speaker 1: or the sticker the doctor gives to a little kid
Speaker 1: after her shot. It's still going to burn, but the
Speaker 1: beauty of the music gives you something for the pain.
Speaker 1: Andrew himself is a Wagner guy, So DJ drop something
Speaker 1: from the ring cycle. Yeah, my name is Boskowski. I
Speaker 1: work at the University of Oslo as an Associate professor
Speaker 1: in music cognition. Yana was part of a team that
Speaker 1: conducted an experiment to study fans of sad music. They
Speaker 1: wanted to find out what kinds of personality traits are
Speaker 1: related to people's enjoyment of sad music. Jana's team recruits
Speaker 1: a bunch of research participants, put some in fancy headphones
Speaker 1: and presses play on eight minutes of sad instrumental music. Next,
Speaker 1: you wanna hit some with a questionnaire to record their feelings.
Speaker 1: It's got different emotional adjectives like moved, melancholic, sad, peaceful,
Speaker 1: and intensity scales from one to seven. Also, they filled
Speaker 1: in a whole battery of different kinds of personality tests
Speaker 1: and questions about their current mood and also their experienced
Speaker 1: quality of life and kind of general health related questions.
Speaker 1: Some of the participants were hooked up with electrodes to
Speaker 1: measure bodily responses to evidence of intense emotional reactions. With
Speaker 1: all the data collected, Yonah and her team crunch the
Speaker 1: numbers looking for patterns, and they find one one thing
Speaker 1: that really consistently seemed to predict people's enjoyment of sad music.
Speaker 1: Was empathy. Those who score the highest in empathic concern
Speaker 1: or sympathy for others, they seem to be enjoying sad
Speaker 1: music the most. So perhaps they are connecting to something
Speaker 1: human in the music. They're reacting to sad music, gus
Speaker 1: they would to a sad person. Got admit as emo.
Speaker 1: Kids are coming off pretty good right now, kind compassionate.
Speaker 1: Sure you could date somebody from the varsity team will
Speaker 1: only listens to metal, but they might let your cat
Speaker 1: on fire something. And if they do, we will have
Speaker 1: a hot cup of tea ready if you want to
Speaker 1: talk about it all right. For Yonah's walk off music,
Speaker 1: I persuaded her to say the melancholic finish lullaby that
Speaker 1: her mother used to sing, You want me to sing? Okay,
Speaker 1: here goes bier Nicki, Sulin boy Gan and Holy yon
Speaker 1: None ohmak Covery, be a nil, Lucky Soli, loly Bion,
Speaker 1: Bion and Bienny. And we listened to sad music for clarity,
Speaker 1: for comfort. But what about the people who write the songs?
Speaker 1: Why do we wallow and suffering? I invited a fellow songwriter,
Speaker 1: Mayotta to talk it out. She's found herself in tears
Speaker 1: over her keyboard while crafting a particularly sad joint. Why
Speaker 1: do you do that? Why do we do that? That
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense that um my general thought that
Speaker 1: why we do that? I think it's for catharsis, and
Speaker 1: for me specifically, it's definitely for catharsis without sweating the
Speaker 1: dictionary different and like, what does that mean when you
Speaker 1: use that word says release? I think, like that's the
Speaker 1: main thing I'm thinking of, is release. I really see
Speaker 1: trauma as like stagnant energy that got stuck and wasn't
Speaker 1: allowed to like move through you. Like I literally just
Speaker 1: heard this from my therapist a couple of days ago,
Speaker 1: and she dragged me and was like, well, you have
Speaker 1: to feel to heal. If you don't let yourself feel
Speaker 1: your lows, you don't get to feel the highs either,
Speaker 1: Like everything numbs out. I know from personal experience that
Speaker 1: it can be a serious challenge to perform while your
Speaker 1: body isn't the throes of a big feeling. Your hands,
Speaker 1: shake your voice titans, your diaphragm might want to do
Speaker 1: that spasm thing. Sadness affects all the muscles that are
Speaker 1: supposed to be playing the damn song. But Mayada built
Speaker 1: room for these feelings into the architecture of her arrangements.
Speaker 1: Oh man, oh wow, Wolf, I'm just like I'm like
Speaker 1: viscerally coming back to a couple of times. I wrote
Speaker 1: a lot of like really belty swelling, like kind of
Speaker 1: squalling type of moments into these songs, and so it
Speaker 1: was like a yell just dropped jaw on an awe,
Speaker 1: but like really loud, and I think that was the
Speaker 1: release instead of like straight up crying like something needs
Speaker 1: to get out of me. But I'm gonna do it
Speaker 1: in a kind of pretty way because my choir teacher
Speaker 1: taught me, like in high school, when you have to scream,
Speaker 1: do it musically right, like breathe like you would be singing.
Speaker 1: And while my body was like on some very like
Speaker 1: shaky type of thing, I knew that if I just
Speaker 1: made it to the chorus, I could basically scream, And
Speaker 1: I think that was kind of what shorted up. Does
Speaker 1: it feel like you're sometimes writing sad songs for political,
Speaker 1: you know, reasons, like specifically absolutely? Actually, I would venture
Speaker 1: to say that those are the ones that are the hardest,
Speaker 1: like ones that came out of some very specifically rough
Speaker 1: stuff about just like my my black experience. For example,
Speaker 1: it's like, in the most technical of senses, I am
Speaker 1: literally performing my pain right now. But like, I'm doing
Speaker 1: this thing and I know that I'm incurring damage from it,
Speaker 1: and I know that it's like stress. It's like stressing
Speaker 1: my body to have to explain this over and over again.
Speaker 1: But also like, I still believe in the power of
Speaker 1: sharing my experience, but I need you to hear me.
Speaker 1: Some sad music might be used as a call to action,
Speaker 1: a request, or a challenge for listeners to come to
Speaker 1: one another's aid. I think that a lot of Western
Speaker 1: experience of music, particularly of art, is for entertainment, and
Speaker 1: I don't really see my job as one as as
Speaker 1: an entertainer. If you had a business card, like would
Speaker 1: it say, Wow, what was the first thing that came
Speaker 1: to my musical healer? Yeah? I think musical healer. That
Speaker 1: song with the belty yell instead of cry chorus that
Speaker 1: Mayatta was talking about is called Cracked Chest. She hasn't
Speaker 1: recorded a studio version yet, but we're lucky enough to
Speaker 1: premiere the Devil here. It's oh mind, oh my, oh mind,
Speaker 1: oh my, oh my, oh my. Was somebody my hen
Speaker 1: for a while? My dad made his living as a
Speaker 1: loot player. If you can't picture it, a loot is
Speaker 1: a precursor of the guitar, the kind of instrument you
Speaker 1: might see on a tapestry. It's not the line of
Speaker 1: work you pursue hoping to get rich. And by the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties my dad had missed the loot craze by
Speaker 1: like so years. Still he sat alone for many hours
Speaker 1: playing these delicate, melancholy songs written by other sensitive men.
Speaker 1: Now long did When I asked what drove his musical obsession,
Speaker 1: I met the hard limit of his sentimentalism. He said
Speaker 1: he was deeply moved by the music. He found great
Speaker 1: beauty in it, but he just didn't see any evidence
Speaker 1: that it had some higher meaning. He used the phrase
Speaker 1: mental masturbation, like that might be what all this loop
Speaker 1: playing amounted to. And some people have suggested that our
Speaker 1: affinity to music is just a byproduct of evolution, that
Speaker 1: our pattern sensitive brains built for language might just geek
Speaker 1: out our music like a house cat does on a
Speaker 1: laser pointer. Stephen Pinker, a famous cognitive psychologist, characterized music
Speaker 1: as auditory cheesecake. H I don't understand music in theory,
Speaker 1: but I understand it in practice, and I see how
Speaker 1: the faces in the crowd change when the big ballad
Speaker 1: begins and the strings lift like a tidal wave, and
Speaker 1: we are all briefly relieved of the obligation to be
Speaker 1: our professional, presentable selves, and instead the full truth of
Speaker 1: our lives is welcomed into the room, the fears and
Speaker 1: the fractures, and until the final notes ring, we are
Speaker 1: suspended in communion with one another, like rafts and rough water,
Speaker 1: somehow fortified by the storm. The music sensitizes us to
Speaker 1: the world and to the other people in it. There's
Speaker 1: this line often attributed to the Persian poet Roomy, that
Speaker 1: about sums it up for me. You have to keep
Speaker 1: breaking your heart until it opens as I let myself out.
Speaker 1: Here's a clip of a song I sometimes play on tour.
Speaker 1: It's called good Grief. How can it's head bad? Maybe
Speaker 1: good grieves one's good? How can it at our next meeting?
Speaker 1: Deeply Human is examining the teenage brain to find out
Speaker 1: why there's such an intensity of feeling during adolescents. Why
Speaker 1: does the world burn brighter in your teens? Deeply Human
Speaker 1: is a co production of the BBC World Service and
Speaker 1: American public media with I heart Media and as you
Speaker 1: know by now, I'm a musician and a songwriter too,
Speaker 1: so if you'd like to share your thoughts on songs,
Speaker 1: sad or happy ones, you can find me at Duessa
Speaker 1: Darling on Twitter. Thanks for listening.