Gloomy Sunday: Lesson #2

i've never been a sunday fan. probably goes back to my school days and my dread of returning to that dark, bleak place. and really not much has changed. i'm off today and i wish i weren't. so i'll console myself (and bring you down) with another 5 songs you should download.

i don't care how catchy they may be, these songs are bleak, through and through. and that makes me feel so much better!

1. "Jackson Cage"-Bruce Springsteen from The River. The older i get the scarier this album becomes. Financial devastation, lost love, the death of dreams, this album has it all. and it rocks! "and it don't matter just what you say/are you tough enough to play the game they play/or will you just do your time and fade away/down into the jackson cage". The idea of fading away hangs heavy over the album. and lately i feel like i can see through my hands.

2. "End of Miles"- off of Frank Blacks' Black Letter Days. another album of loss and flight. there's alot of songs about heading west on this album. i've always had a bit of wanderlust (with just enough fear to keep me in place) so the idea appeals to me. "i'm lost and i am lonesome to the core". always strange and disturbing when someone who usually writes more abstract lyrics says something right on the mark like that.

3."Suicide is Painless"-by Royal Trux from some soundcheck or something. a real dark reading of the song. i mean, even more so. a girl at work made me aa mixed cd with this song on it. what was she trying to tell me?

4. "Game of Pricks"- by GBV from Alien Lanes. i'll be humming this song to my grave! "I've entered the game of pricks with knives in the back of me/can't call you, or on you, no more when they're attacking me/i'll climb up on the house/weep to water the trees/and when you come calling me down i'll put on my disease". that's gorgeous.

5. "Nothin'"- by Townes Van Zandt from Delta Momma Blues. there's a scene in the townes documentary "be there to love me" when a reporter asks him why so many of his songs are sad. townes looks at him with the most despairing look i've ever seen on a human and asks, rhetorically really, "you don't think life's sad?" the last line of this song, and of the album, is: "sorrow and solitude/these are the precious things/and the only words worth remembering".

so, uh, those are my picks. have fun with them! and remember, as ray davies said : "it's only jukebox music"!