Sad Songs: Why Do They Affect Us the Way That They Do?

When a friend on social media posted a New York Times story about why many people like listening to sad songs, it was an immediate eye-opener. You know, as someone who loves to be moved to tears by a sad tune, something the writer clearly was feeling in the moment, be it heartbreak or loss or loneliness or something else entirely.

But why? I always just said it was because it’s about feeling something, anything. And at its core, that’s what music does for so many people. It might make you feel like dancing, it might make you feel energized, it might make you feel sensations of love, it might make you laugh. Or, in this case, a sad song can make you feel something that, perhaps in the past, made you feel sad.

But why? Well, New York Times writer Oliver Whang wrote about a new study in the Journal of Aesthetic Education that tries to answer the question.

This Matthew Sweet song, “Thought I Knew You,” is haunting and sad at the same time.

Previous research, Whang wrote, has shown that a song can provide multiple feelings at once. He cited a 2016 study that “found that emotional responses to sad songs fell roughly into three categories: grief, including powerful negative feelings like anger, terror and despair; melancholia, a gentle sadness, longing or self-pity; and sweet sorrow, a pleasant pang of consolation or appreciation.”

The new study, titled “Fifty Shades,” surmises that because we look for emotional expression in speech, we’re also trained to look for the same in song.

Additionally, there’s a belief by many that the sounds themselves, from tempos to types of instruments used, along with the melody and other factors, can trigger predispositions toward certain emotions in people. Which, I guess, would maybe also explain why a sad song is open to interpretation or why some people are unmoved by any type of sad music.

But this sentence from Whang’s story is what hit me as the most personally familiar: “Maybe, because sadness is such an intense emotion, its presence can prompt a positive empathic reaction: Feeling someone’s sadness can move you in some prosocial way.”

And I think that’s it. It’s like the Adam Sandler line from “The Wedding Singer,” when he’s telling Drew Barrymore’s character why he wanted to be a songwriter: "Ohh, I know what that guy was feeling when he wrote that."

And maybe that’s why that silly song he performs on the plane during the movie’s climax, “Grow Old With You,” reduces me to tears – because I know exactly what “that guy” is feeling (happy message in that song, but a melancholy melody). To be fair, however, I can’t even get through Mouse Rat’s “5,000 Candles in the Wind,” which is about a fictional miniature horse, without getting choked up. It doesn’t take much to get me in the feels. (As an example, the relatively unknown “A New Lease on Life, Parts 1 & 2” by Charlie Chesterman absolutely slays me. And yet it may have no effect on you or anyone else who reads this post.)

And the empathy theory also reminds me of the old saying, “Music is what feelings sound like.” Trite, but you get the point. And I think it’s pretty accurate in a lot of cases. At any given time, a song might take me a back to a time when I lost a family member, friend or a beloved pet. Or, a song may remind me of a lost love. Or simply a difficult time in my life, or difficult times I’m living in the present. And those songs make me feel in different ways, based on what they evoke. (I’m still talking about sad songs here. Hearing “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard does not make me feel like I want to go to a strip club anymore than hearing a gospel song makes me feel like I want to become an evangelist.)

There’s more to the study, and I encourage a read if you want a deeper dive. Meanwhile, if you sit quietly, listening to a sad tune by one of your favorite artists, and find yourself feeling a tear coming, you aren’t alone. Elton John may have been onto something when he told us that sad songs say so much.