These are the saddest songs ever recorded, according to researchers and listeners

Let’s get the obvious out of the way—there’s no way to truly determine the saddest song ever written, just like there’s no way to calculate which one is the best. Music is too subjective for such a task—and, for that matter, so is the word "sad." After all, you may find it comforting to hear a folk artist sing about the apocalypse, or you may take away some kind of dark humor in a punk song about death. This is nuanced stuff that lives in a quirky zone beyond hard science. But it’s still fun to ponder, and by highlighting the trends from researcher data and consistent human feedback, we can make some reasonable conclusions.

In 2013, Rolling Stone took the cultural pulse on this subject, and their resulting piece, "Readers’ Poll: The 10 Saddest Songs of All Time," spanned everything from classic country (Hank Williams’ "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry," George Jones’ "He Stopped Loving Her Today") to '90s alt-grunge (Alice in Chains' "Nutshell," Pearl Jam’s "Black," Nirvana’s "Something in the Way"). But the top pick belonged to rock-guitar legend Eric Clapton, whose 1991 soft-rock ballad "Tears in Heaven" was inspired by the tragic death of his four-year-old son, Conor. With its heartbreaking backstory, wistful melody, and brutally bare lyrics ("Would you know my name / If I saw you in Heaven? / Would it be the same / If I saw you in Heaven?"), it’s understandable why this track would top anyone’s list.

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What makes a song musically sad?

In 2022, Annaliese Micallef Grimaud, then a PhD candidate in the music department of Durham University, teamed up with the customer-feedback platform HappyOrNot to dig deeper into Rolling Stone's poll—selecting the five songs with the most Spotify listens and factoring in "tempo, overall dynamics level, vocal pitch range levels, average onset frequency values, and mode (e.g. the order of the notes)" to create a sort of sadness-evaluation system. Clapton’s track came in third, with Nirvana’s "Something in the Way" hitting the peak.

"Results from my research indicate that a slow tempo, minor mode, legato articulation, soft dynamics level, low pitch level, and a dark timbre help convey sadness in music," Grimaud wrote. "From the list of sad songs, ‘Something in the Way’ by Nirvana ranked as the saddest song. The song is written in minor mode, and has a slow tempo, the softest dynamics level, the smallest average onset frequency value, and low pitch levels in the vocal range, making it the saddest compared to the other songs.” (Of course, this is before even considering the lyrics, which are also quite bleak: "Underneath the bridge, tarp has sprung a leak / And all animals I’ve trapped have all become my pets," Kurt Cobain sings in the verse. "And I’m living off of grass and the drippings from my ceiling / It’s okay to eat fish 'cause they don’t have any feelings.")

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"Tune trigger quotient"

Other researchers have gone equally deep into the science of sonic sadness—including Dr. Harry Witchel, who partnered with phone company Nokia in 2006 to measure people’s physical responses to music. According to The Independent, he evaluated the heart rate, respiration, and skin temperature of 15 volunteers who listened to 30 songs picked by the Official UK Charts Company. According to Uncut, Witchel used these findings to assess each song’s "tune trigger quotient." The saddest of the bunch: The Verve’s 1997 Britpop cut "The Drugs Don’t Work." (The lyrics, again, are pretty dark, as songwriter Richard Ashcroft sings lines like, "All this talk of getting old / It’s getting me down, my love / Like a cat in a bag, waiting to drown / This time I’m coming down.")

In a Reddit thread devoted to our subject, one user pointed to that specific Verve lyric, writing, "I think about this line a lot." That tune did receive a fair amount of fan votes, but the responses were all over the map, from Sufjan Stevens’ mournful 2015 ambient-folk anthem "Fourth of July" to Jimmy Eat World’s mournful 2001 emo-alt classic "Hear You Me." There’s an endless ocean of sad songs to swim around in.

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