Window In Your Heart: Songs of Sadness

Like the songs says, losing in love is like a window in your heart. More than a decade ago I suffered a mild breakdown when my marriage ended, but just when I had willed myself into that grey twilight where nothing could touch me, along came one song that cut through everything. That song is Mna Na H'eireann as sung by Kate Bush. Even today, long after that old wound has well and truly healed, I dare not play it in the car for fear of weeping.

I'm guessing that I'm not the only one to have such a "window in the heart", and I'd very much like to hear some of yours. If you like the idea, then please take it as a meme and post the button below into a blog entry of your own with the link to this page intact, and encourage five interesting people to do the same. Even if you don't have a space of your own, add your song in the comments box below, with no more than 100 words explaining why it's important to you. Of course, some things are too personal - in which case just give the song. I'll post the best ones as updates, and we can all have a good weep, what do you say?

The html code for the button is this;

<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://hedgewizardsdiary.blogspot.com/2007/12/window-in-your-heart-songs-of-sadness.html" target="_blank"><img style="width: 152px; height: 70px;" src="http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f131/heletari/WindowHeart.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a></div>

The Songs

Ally: "For me, The Bangles 1989 song Eternal Flame sums up a particular period of my life that was particularly full of shattered glass. I was nineteen and in my first year at University. I ended up in halls of residence with someone I had been to school with and was very fond of. During our first term, I fell in love with him and one thing led to another. He ended up date-raping me after I'd had one too many glasses of wine... I know it's a good song. But I still can't listen to it without getting that same pain in my chest as I did then." (Hedgewizard's note: this is a heavily abridged version of a very powerful post on Ally's own blog - please do visit and see what she has to say.)

Linda: "Unfortunately for me, I experienced my first love and heartbreak, not in the heather scented heaths of Scotland, but in the 70's in Southern California, where the hills were alive with the sound of Bee Gees and Jim Croce and the Eagles. The best I can come up with is Don't Ask Me To Be Your Friend by Lobo that sums up the candy-pop era of my mostly imagined and tragically brief love affair with a James Dean-esque motorcycle jock."

Aoj: "A few years after Himself and I got together, I was in a mess. I loved this man more than anything. I knew he was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. But he was in his late 30s, had had plenty of relationships but nothing ever serious and he never settled down with anyone. He was fly by night, take it as it comes and move on just as easily. He was independent and the thought of "two becoming one" was an anathema to him. Yet he had asked me to move in with him so maybe I was the one. But I was insanely jealous of any woman from his past, imagined present and imagined future. Like most men, he wasn't averse to the flattery of female attention. He wasn't a flirt but if anyone started to flirt with him, he'd lap it up. He'd told me several times that he didn't love me. Can you imagine what I went through? I was tearing myself apart at the seams. Friends who knew him well just said that was ridiculous and of course he did, it was blindingly obvious to them, he just wouldn't, or couldn't, admit it to himself. Eventually I had to sort myself out because if I didn't I would end up having a nervous breakdown and destroying everything and I was not prepared to let that happen. Then I heard this song and I used to wish he'd just listen to the lyrics and understand that he just had to open up a chink. It really would be OK. That song is Honest by Kendall Payne."

Seawitch: "Every River by Runrig always does it for me - evokes deeply buried emotions and brings back memories of those who have moved on ....... both within this world and to the next one"

Steve Mudge: "Brokedown Palace by The Grateful Dead, and most definitely Lisa Gerrard--who I play when I'm happy and sad!"

Older Songs

Nez: "Last Goodbye from Jeff Buckley's album Grace. It's the late 1990s. My mum had died in 1992 (cancer) and this had just decided to catch up with me in a big way. I also broke up with a lovely guy somewhere around this time (he WAS lovely, but I wanted him to be my big brother more than anything else) and that I am an only child whose dad had already died when I was 5 - car accident. I was not a happy chappy. Weight loss, doctors, counselling, happy pills were all involved. It was not a good time."

Rob: "The Spirit of the Great Heart by Johnny Clegg and Savuka... Reminds me of my home country, lost family, lost friends, a past childhood with all its innocence and happiness that can never be brought back."

Rentman: "I'm more a poetry type. I found Do not stand at my grave and weep in The Nation's Favourite 100 Poems compiled by Griff Rhys-Jones. It allowed me to come to terms with the death of a daughter some 10 years earlier. I still can't read it aloud."

Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

Hedgewizard: "Mna Na H'eireann as sung by Kate Bush. I had literally fled from the Vampire Wife in Shropshire back to Ireland with my two-year-old son and a raw and broken heart. I wrapped my mind in grey cotton wool, but even when I couldn't connect with anything else, this song cut right through my defences. It hurt, but at least I was feeling something."

Antionette: "Sanvean by Lisa Gerrard. I had lost a beautiful cat companion, and both the song and the experience unlocked a huge wave of grief from an earlier (human) loss."

SpiralSkies: "If You're Not the One by Daniel Bedingfield. Acoustic version. I can barely type the words without welling up."

Hardup Hester: "Family Portrait by Pink. When it comes to myself I'm callous & hard hearted, but this song always reminds me of the effect my divorce had on one of my four children. They were all over 18, and the others seemed unaffected."

Sian: "The Promise by Tracy Chapman because of broken promises."

Laney: "Everybody Hurts by the Corrs. This one reminds me of a low period of my life that ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me. When my sons father left me without even a goodbye, I was devastated and completely and utterly alone. I was quite into The Corrs at the time (he got me into them), and I spent my whole pregnancy listening to their albums."