The track Patti Smith called her favourite “sad song”
Beyond being the godmother of punk, Patti Smith is a major music fan. Before becoming a musician herself, by putting her poetry to a guitar backing, she was a music journalist for Rock Magazine.
For the magazine, she wrote up reviews and did some infamous interviews, including one where she asked Eric Clapton simply, “What are your six favourite colours?” Smith has always been engaged with the music being made around her. She has talked at length about her deep love for artists like Bob Dylan, dedicated songs to Jimi Hendrix’s impact on her and written poems for Janis Joplin.
Regularly dedicating time at her own concerts to sing songs by other people, Smith’s love for music stretches way beyond just making it. She’s just as passionate about the music of others as any other music fan.
When it comes to sad songs, however, one artist has always stood out to her. Connecting to one of the purest, worst pains that all women will know well, Smith’s favourite sad song sounds like that first teenage heartbreak.
“To me, it expresses all young girls’ heartbreak, that we’ve all experienced,” Smith told Shortlist about her choice of Skeeter Davis’ ‘End Of The World’. Released in 1962, just as Smith was graduating high school, the song was perfectly timed to soundtrack her own first tastes of heartache.
“I used to listen to it when I was a young girl, probably crying over a boy that I liked in 11th grade,” she continues. But the heartbreak expressed in the song doesn’t time out with youth; Davis’ emotive delivery has endured long into Smith’s adulthood as she adds, “even when I hear it now it produces a pain.”
The classic heartbreak track has spawned hundreds of covers, including beautiful versions from Julie London, Nancy Sinatra and the Carpenters. In recent years, Sharon Van Etten shared a stunning version of the timeless track.
Perfectly articulating the feelings of despair after a breakup and the way a person’s world seems to crumble after their love leaves, the melodrama of the song seems to get those emotions in all their over-exaggerated glory.
To Smith, the song’s enduring appeal is all down to its relatability. She adds, “I’m just speaking as a female, but there’s something so plaintive and so sincere about her delivery.”
