Song Sung Blue

Keeper came home from work and asked me how my day went.  I burst into tears.  I couldn’t get any work done at all, I moaned.  I spent four hours on the couch watching a marathon of Project Runway re-runs, I told him, and kicking myself that I was not as clever or creative or hip as the fashion designers on the show.  Then, I downloaded some songs from iTunes and listened to them while I tried to write and failed because I have no talent. Furthermore, I hadn’t made anything for dinner, I told him before he asked, because from where I sat in my pit of despair I couldn’t image living until dinnertime.

Keeper was at a loss.  After making a number of suggestions and not being greeted by gratitude for them, he retreated to his den and stayed out of sight.

Over the weekend I felt ambitious.  I read a book about nuns in the 15^th Century and listened to my new tunes. Then I took a 4-hour nap. 

Monday morning, my friend Tom called me.  “Hi,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” he said. Over our 20-year friendship, he has learned to read my moods based on how I say “hi.”  It’s amazing, really.

I answered his questionnaire.  No, I was not sick.  No, nobody died.  No, I had not been robbed.  No one had even been cross with me.  Why do men have this compulsion to pin down every problem so they can solve it?

Poor me.  I had the nothing-is-wrong-but-still-feel-bad blues.

I was listening again to my ‘recently added list” on iTunes when I realized what was wrong.  Every song I had downloaded was a downer.  They were about death, heartbreak, or broken dreams.  Some weren’t sad per se, but were so exquisitely beautiful that they made me cry.

I had put together a soundtrack for my life as if it were an unrelenting tragedy.  No wonder I was bummed. Here’s the list of mournful songs and their singers that put me in Pity City:

1. My Life – Iris DeMent (“My life, it don’t count for nothing”)
2. For a Dancer – Jackson Browne (“cryin’ while they ease you down”)
3. Gulf Coast Highway – Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson (enough said)
4. Calling My Children Home – Emmylou Harris (“I’m lonesome for my precious children”)
5. I Know You By Heart – Eva Cassidy (“I still hear your voice on warm summer nights”)
6. Calling All Angels – Jane Silberry (“then you’d miss the beauty of the light upon this earth”)
7. Take It With Me – Notes From the Edge (“Ain’t no good thing ever dies; I’m gonna take it with me when I go”)
8. What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong (“The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night”)
9. Over the Rainbow – Eva Cassidy (it’s not so much the song, but the fact that she died tragically young)
10. Naked As We Came – Iron & Wine (“one of us will die inside these arms”)

There you have it.  If you want to feel like a truck ran over you, put this playlist on your iPod and set it on “repeat.”  Just make sure you have the number of the suicide hotline handy.  As for me, I’m switching to Motown.