Tom Reynolds

I had written a book before about the outlaw motorcycle culture in the United States from the 40’s to the present with the Hell’s Angels and everything. The year I ended that book, I moved to England. Four or five years later a publishing company called me and asked “Hey we have this idea for this book.” I think they were hitting the Guinness a little heavy that night. It was almost like a challenge so I took it on and ran with it.

Yeah he’s pretty funny.

I’d say watching every Dan Aykroyd movie would make me really annoyed. This is scarier to me because it’s not like these songs suck but they’re just so oppressive. There’s a difference between a sad song and a depressing song and that’s what I was trying to concentrate on more. A depressing song doesn’t necessarily make you cry, it just lays you out like you just don’t want to do anything. For people who are so depressed that they don’t get out of bed for three days, that’s what a depressing song would do to you. Songs like that bring a big negative fog over you.

I used to be a disc jockey years ago and I used to play in bands so I know an awful lot about music. So there were always songs that stuck in my subconscious no matter how much I try to get rid of them. But there are some songs in the book that I wasn’t familiar with until someone told me about them and I was like “wow, this is amazing”.

One that stuck out for me was this song Artificial Flowers by Bobby Darin who is probably not remembered much nowadays. He was like a poor man’s Frank Sinatra from the early 60’s. This guy told me about Artificial Flowers and I listened to it and it’s got this really happy up-tempo big-band music to it but the song’s about an orphan girl who dies of hypothermia and freezes to death in squalor. It’s the weirdest song ever. I have ten different categories in the book and that song is the category “I had no idea this song was so morbid.”

I think they won’t be bewildered by them because a lot of these songs have been around for a while and they’re still being played on the radio. If you’re going to do a book about depressing music, you’re really going to end up with 52,000 songs. But what I notice is that depressing music is released as singles more and more. You don’t hear depressing music as much on the radio nowadays because they employ different kinds of programming now. They wouldn’t dare put on some of these songs anymore. If you listen to hip-hop or top 40 stations, it’s all this up-tempo, really happy hip-hop rap stuff American Idol type things. They may do some lovelorn ballad or something like that but it doesn’t hold a candle to some complete train wreck like Seasons in the Sun or something like that. But the book reached number three in Ireland and kids 17 and 18 years olds are loving the book.

I think it’s mostly music fans and I’ve been noticing there’s been two polarized reaction to the book. Either people really love it and they think it’s really hilarious or they think I am scum and they really hate it.

No it’s not because I’m making fun of their songs, it’s because I’m making fun of depressing music in general. I found out that there’s a huge fan base for really morbid depressing songs that talk about the really nihilistic things. They’re talking about death and suicide and necrophilia and there are people who are really into it who are completely humorless. I don’t address any of those kind of death metal for nihilistic punk songs in the book for that much because to me, those songs are trying too hard. Those songs don’t make me depressed. I find them kind of laughable or maybe a little bit jarring but I don’t find them depressing. They seem almost comical because they’re so over the top. To me the songs that are really depressing are the ones that are trying to be uplifting or cathartic and they just completely blew it.

Oh yes, you’ve got to have fun with this. Some of the songs I write about in a positive way but there’s a Carpenter’s song in there and I know the Carpenter songs are known for being pretty cheesy and stuff like this but I actually like the song. I like The Freshman by the Verve Pipe even though it’s a really depressing song about a girl’s suicide. I’m sure most of the people I put in the book are not going to be that happy about it but whatever. I only attack one particular song, Bruce Springsteen's The River because it is a really dreary tease of a depressing song.

I’ve had a few kinds of reactions. Before we actually went to press, Morrissey’s management saw what I had written and demanded he be pulled out of the book. I wrote an analysis of an old Smith song, Miserable Lie. The lyrics are really oppressive and it wiped me out. I didn’t write a snarky review. I actually wrote it in a positive way because I think Johnny Marr is a fantastic guitar player. At the time Morrissey was on Sanctuary’s record label and Sanctuary was also the publishing company that was doing the book in England, so as a courtesy they sent him the chapter. He never even saw it but his management read it and they were pissed so we took him out. Now to this day I’m getting slammed by people who like the book because they say, “I can’t believe you didn’t put any Smiths songs in there. “ Apparently not including a Smith song in a depressing music book is like leaving the resurrection out of the New Testament. So that was one. The second reaction was from Adam Duritz of Counting Crows. He was perplexed that I picked his song Round Here from their first album to be on the list. He said “I wrote more depressing songs than that one. That song’s about hope.” I was like “well I don’t even want to know what your other depressing songs are.”

I know it’s being pitched around for that. The only thing with VH1 is that they had done a 40 Worst Songs of All Time special and the only songs they pick are the ones they actually have the videos of. Something like this would involve an awful lot of licensing. I think it would make a great VH1 special.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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