The saddest song...

There are plenty of sad, sad songs out there. "Eleanor Rigby" has its title character who "keeps a smile in a jar by the door" and Father McKenzie who writes the "words to a sermon that no one will hear." "Jane Says" has Jane who doesn't know what love is, but only knows "if someone wants her." "Wish You Were Here" has its "two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year." "I Am a Rock" has the cold solitude of a "freshly-fallen, silent shroud of snow." I could go on and on with the genuinely sad songs out there without even touching on the ones that want to be sad, but can't pull it off. But over the weekend, I listened to one I'd heard so many times before and just now realized it had them all beat.

The Violent Femmes' "Country Death Song" might be the saddest song ever recorded. It might be so based just on the story it tells, a story of a man so crazy with poverty and desperation that he murders his family, not in a fit of rage, but in a patient and in a sense almost gentle way. What really gets me though is the delivery. Most songs have their haunting minors or strained vocals or maddening dissonance to convey grief, but the Femmes take things a step further. In their peculiar hybrid of punk rock and hillbilly gospel, they manage to conjure up something on par with snake-handling fundamentalists, stirred into a mad frenzy that is both righteous and terrifying. And in doing so, they show this poor, poor man as both the fragile father and husband and as the vicious monster that he was. Other songs have loneliness and loss and confusion, but I can't think of another that has good and evil doing doing battle inside someone like this. No other song has a man destroying his family with their own trust in him as he leads them to that dark well into which he will push them, a well whose darkness is only exceeded by the darkness eclipsing his soul.