Tom Dunne: You'd need a Wooden Heart not to be affected by some of those great sad songs
Elvis Presley's classic Wooden Heart has a tragic back story.
If you are a fan of a particular type of music – The Blue Nile, Jeff Buckley, The Go-Betweens, Joy Division – then every day is Valentine’s Day to you. February 14 is just a date in the calendar when the rest of the world catches up with you.
That’s the day they reach for the type of music, the “sad” stuff, that you spend part of every day with. “Boys don’t cry” you sing most days to the dog, the kettle, the back of someone’s head. What would these blow-ins know about heartbreak?
Sad music is cathartic and its as old as time. What was once the preserve of “blokes” – Grant McClennan, Paul Buchanan et al - has now largely gone female: Phoebe Bridgers, Billie Eilish, Alynda Segarra and Adrienne Lenker. These are the new keepers of the flame, and the flame has rarely been in such good hands.
As a young Billie Eilish fan who, when I asked her why she’d enjoyed the gig that she went to with her friends more than the one went to with me, said: “I was able to have a good old cry with my mates at the second one.” Yep, no argument there, sometimes a good old cry is just the job.
But sometimes I have found that the reason there is such emotion in the songs is due to the genuine emotional turmoil in the mind and heart of the writer.
They aren’t just writing to make songs. They are writing to make sense of or escape from, darker forces in their lives. And it’s their honesty that is so affecting.
A case in point is Joy Division’s Everything you hear in the song is true: the worry, the self-doubt, the turmoil. The song’s writer and singer, Ian Curtis, was gone from this world before its release as a single. That’s the kind of emotion and truth that AI song generators will never get close to.
That many other such songs carry equally true to life and often harrowing back stories was brought home to me quite dramatically recently. I had known about many such tales, but Elvis Presley’s beautiful little ?
Wooden Heart was one of the first ever songs I ever remember hearing. It had, and still has, a magic bewitching quality. Elvis’s voice, the old German melody it was based on and its simple childlike lyrics have always beguiled me. It’s the first thing I think of if every time someone mentions
In later years I discovered another Elvis song, that pulled on my heart strings in a very similar way. It featured in an ad on TV and had me from the off. Elvis’s voice and again the simple optimism of the lyric. It was once again a piece of pure enchanting magic in a type way.
Then one day I discovered that both songs were on the same album: Elvis’s 1961 soundtrack album Listening to it I thought they stood out and seemed quite similar, so I checked the writing credits. One man had been involved in the writing of both songs. Fred Wise, a writer I had never heard of before.
Sometimes you probably shouldn’t Google. The headline, from January 19, 1966, the first thing it brought me too, wasn’t pretty. “PSYCHOLOGIST, 50, PLUNGES TO DEATH: Fred Wise, Also Song Writer, Had Argued with Wife.” I couldn’t believe my eyes.
A life reduced to just 14 words, of which just three, “also song writer”, covered his entire career in music. The man who wrote was a Columbia graduate, the founder and director of a thriving psychiatric clinic. Before that he’d worked at MGM and served in Europe in WWII as a radio operator.
But in his heart he was a songwriter. He wrote over 30 songs for Elvis. Perhaps his day job, which must have been hard and his war service, are what inspired him to write such beautiful, escapist, whimsical songs. The details of his death are poignant, tragic and sad. He left a 12-year-old daughter.
So be careful this Valentine’s Day. Enjoy those sad songs, but maybe don’t Google the writing credits. Sometimes they are unbearably sad because so too were those writing them. Perhaps the best ones always are.
