Five songs that will make you feel like the only person in the world
When Ozzy Osbourne spoke about The Beatles, he said that they were a band that allowed the world to have fun again.
Coming off the back of World War II, as the country climbed deeper into economic peril and the job market seemed stagnant, the atmosphere in the UK was one of despair. Suddenly, along came The Beatles, with great music that listeners were able to dance to and get lost within. It was a time for community and togetherness when they first made it big.
While this is a very wholesome point of music, it’s also slightly one-sided, as there are other songs that can have the opposite effect. Instead of making you long for community, they have you feel as though you’re the only person on the planet, and this can be because of a song’s theme, its tone, or an overarching sound that’s difficult to shake.
These tracks might sound daunting in theory, but sometimes, when things feel like a lot, turning to these isolating songs can be an effective way to decompress, so with that in mind, let’s have a listen.
Five songs that make you feel like you’re the last person on Earth
Leonard Cohen – ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’
Leonard Cohen was a writer before he was a musician, and it really shows in songs that are as scathing as this one. ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ is arguably one of the most heartbreaking pieces of music ever laid on wax, as Cohen writhes in despair while losing touch with a woman he loves. Despite the song having multiple characters, the use of dominant voice and guitar, with little to no other input, alongside what is a pretty sad narrative, makes the listener feel completely alone.
Perhaps what’s even more isolating is learning that Cohen looks back on the song and thinks his paranoia was of his own creation. “The problem with that song is that I’ve forgotten the actual triangle,” he said.
Adding, “Whether it was my own, of course, I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether this one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember, I’ve always had the sense that either I’ve been that figure in relation to another couple or there’d been a figure like that in relation to my marriage.”
Pink Floyd – ‘The Great Gig in The Sky’
A lot of the time, bands can layer songs with coats of music in a bid to make it atmospheric, but instead just create a mass of noise that feels overdone. Sure, you can pile a solo over chords over bass over vocals over crashing cymbals and rinse and repeat to create something monumental, but listeners can hear through such a mass. If you’re layering music, you need to do it in a way that makes sense to the listeners and that they can latch onto.
One of the best examples of this in music is Pink Floyd’s ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. It may well be the greatest psychedelic offering in the history of sound, as different instrumental sections are layered on top of one another, but also a screeching sense of emotion manages to pierce through it all; it’s truly magical. This is a song which is isolating in its magnitude, and when you hear the beauty of this track through the right speakers of earphones, the rest of the world falls by the wayside; all that exists is the moment you find yourself in.
Merzbow – ‘Ananga-Ranga’
People criticise noise music for saying it lacks substance, but those people haven’t been listening properly. What is essentially an inaccessible sound can represent so much more than just a wall of distortion, and that’s best reflected on Merzbow’s album Venereology.
An overreliance on certain substances plagued the musician’s life when he was putting this record together, and it makes for a much more aggressive and unrelenting depiction of noise. It’s hard to hear this song and imagine that a world outside of it exists. The walls close in with every passing second, and all that’s left is the maddening persistence of Merzbow’s crumbling psyche.
Slowdive – ‘Dagger’
Cast your mind back to what I said about Pink Floyd and ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. Some of the best bands that can layer music but still make it sound as though listeners are getting something a lot more than just those layers are shoegaze bands. You can hear that incredibly well on Slowdive’s 1994 album Souvlaki, which is considered a particular high point of the genre.
While this layering is done incredibly effectively, the album isn’t necessarily isolating; instead, it makes you think of packed out venues and gentle swaying. That is, until the final track ‘Dagger’ comes along. In complete contrast to the cinematic appeal of the rest of the album, ‘Dagger’ is stripped back and solemn. After what has been a pretty explosive record, having the whole thing end with something so calm is strangely isolating, and in the right environment, it can make you feel like we’re on this spinning rock alone.
Roxy Music – ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’
On this list, we have seen songs that are stripped back and songs that go all in, but this is the only one that has a mixture of the two. Roxy Music’s ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache‘ begins with a simple synth and longing lyrics. Steadily, things build, and the track culminates with one of the biggest and most powerful instrumentals of the 1970’s. The whole thing comes together incredibly well, which makes it even more interesting that the song was written separate from the lyrics.
“That was one of the songs where we didn’t know what was going on in the sense that we didn’t know what the lyric was going to be,” said producer Chris Thomas, “So we did the backing track as the sort of soundtrack, and then the idea was for this sort of psychedelic bit to happen at the end, but Bryan didn’t tell us why. I mean, he just said this is what he wanted. So we were just, y’know, flying blind.”
