Words by Domini Forster // photograph by Jeff Andersen Jnr
‘It’s best to listen to music made by happy people’, the linen-clad yoga teacher said to me and the rest of the bright-eyed 20-something tourists sitting cross-legged in the Thailand retreat hall.
Ok, so those may not be the exact words he said. It’s been over a decade. But his meaning was clear – if we wanted to grow as humans, we should listen to music made by people who had overcome their demons. People who were (ideally) enlightened, or at the very least contented. He warned that if we listened to music made by ‘sad people’ we risked catching their condition by osmosis.
The moment confirmed my growing realisation that this particular school of spirituality wasn’t for me. It also made me realise that I had some strong opinions about the value of ‘sad’ music.
I was pretty young when I realised that sad songs could make me feel almost elated. I remember sitting on the night bus to Brisbane as a pre-teen, looking out into the rain and listening to Dido on my iPod as she belted out a ’90s power-ballad of impassioned heartbreak. To me, she seemed like a wolf howling at the moon. Letting loose her pain in an uninhibited, cathartic pop wail. It reflected my own heady, newly discovered romantic yearnings and heart-aches (ahh, the sting of unrequited love). It stirred up so much emotion in me that I remember feeling like my chest couldn’t contain it; like I needed to howl at the moon too.
What struck me even at the time was that I couldn’t quite tell whether the feeling was sadness or joy. It was something that seemed to encompass both, and it made me feel totally alive, and very very human. From that place I felt more connected to basically everyone, even the grumpy old bus driver who never got any friendlier despite my brother and me being repeat passengers every fortnight.
In the years since, I’ve leaned in. Sufjan Stevens, Laura Marling, The Mountain Goats, Julia Jacklin, Adrianne Lenker. Spotify suggests ‘Sad Girl’ playlists to me now. And I didn’t just listen to sad songs, I wrote them too. Not all of them made it past my bedroom, but a heap did – on my EP and album, played live in tiny regional halls and on big festival stages, sung around the fire in a friend’s backyard.
It wasn’t long before I started to get messages here and there. From people saying they’d listened to my music and felt seen, because the pain I had shared felt like their pain. A teenager in the US contacted me to say thank you because my song about depression made her feel understood in a way she rarely did. A woman interstate got in touch to let me know that she’d played my EP as she sat by her mother’s deathbed, and now listening to it was a special way she could connect to both her grief and her love for her mum.
I was trying to figure out what to call my new album recently, and I settled on ‘The Lonely’. I chose the name because so many of the songs touch on different forms of loneliness: the isolation of anxiety, the grief of losing someone you love, the strange simulacrum of connection we get from social media that often leaves us feeling somehow more alone.
And I chose the name because the older I get, the more I see loneliness as the biggest obstacle to leading a happy, meaningful life. We’re good at talking about the importance of connection and community, but what I see is a world that makes it very hard to prioritise meaningful togetherness. I count myself very lucky to have strong relationships with friends and family, but when my anxiety is flaring up, I still really struggle to maintain those connections and I can wind up feeling alone and stuck. It’s hard to swim upstream – to build and maintain a village in a huge and highly atomised world.
So I keep writing sad songs and playing them for people, and hopefully my sadness can make them feel a little more seen and understood. Less uniquely broken, and less alone.
Screw what that yoga teacher said. Listen to sad songs, and maybe howl at the moon too.
Unravelling – a sad song by Domini Forster – is out now
The Lonely is slated for release in 2025
