Patti Smith’s favourite sad song
There’s really nothing like the power of a sad song. While music can and is used to articulate every emotion, from unabashed joy to pure rage, nowhere does it feel more poignant and more useful than when creating a language to express the difficult emotions of heartache, loss and devastation. Patti Smith has written plenty of her own, but when it comes to her own favourite sad songs, her choice proves just how enduring the power of music is.
Smith is known as the ‘Godmother of Punk’. When she first emerged on the New York scene in the 1970s, she was a phenomenon of her own making, unlike anything anyone had seen before. She was a wild force on stage, learning from the likes of Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and a whole host of other frontmen she’d studied her entire life. But at the same time, she was an academic that commanded a unique type of respect. During her years at the Chelsea Hotel, Smith lived like a student, brushing shoulders with Beat poets who had been her teachers.
She’s just as much a writer as she is a musician. Her career has always balanced literature with music, melding the two together in her poetic take on punk and her punk take on poetry.
While Patti Smith has lived a miraculous life, she has also experienced profound tragedy. The greatest sorrow of her existence may be the way she has continued to live through the history of the Chelsea Hotel and the early punk scene after her peers had left her. Much of Smith’s work now revolves around the act of remembrance, as she has penned poignant odes to the many loves she has lost. Whether reflecting on her husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, her brother, or her creative soulmate Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith’s most haunting songs articulate grief in a way that is both palpable and devastating.
Especially in the immediate wake of the loss of her husband and brother in quick succession, Smith was encouraged by her support network to turn the pain into music. Having grown up as a music fan and always being called to write or create in some way, she keenly knows the power that art has in not only articulating pain but also being a cathartic channel to process it. It’s not just for the writer or the musician either. The beautiful role of a sad song is that it can touch the hearts of so many and stay with them throughout their lives, even as situations and circumstances change and evolve.
That’s exactly Smith’s relationship with her own favourite sad song. When asked to pick a track, she said, “Well there’s so many beautiful sad songs, but I think Skeeter Davis’ ‘End of the World’”. To her, that track speaks to the universal experiences of sadness that everyone knows. “To me it expresses all young girls’ heartbreak, that we’ve all experienced,” she explained, adding, “I’m just speaking as a female, but there’s something so plaintive and so sincere about her delivery.”
The 1962 track, first recorded by Skeeter Davis, has been covered by countless artists, proving the relatability of its sad lyrics. Even today, decades after its release, modern acts like Sharon Van Etten have shared their version, while the original has appeared in modern TV shows like The Queen’s Gambit or Mad Men. Even Patti Smith herself has covered the track, delivering a haunting, stripped-back version that appeared at the end of the film Mother!
It’s a track that has touched so many, and for Smith, that’s exactly what’s so moving about it. “I used to listen to it when I was a young girl, probably crying over a boy that I liked in 11th grade, but even when I hear it now it produces a pain,” she explained, perfectly articulating the way a great sad song can grow and change with you.
