Friday mornings on WYEP, Chef Bill Fuller (Corporate Chef for big Burrito) joins Cindy Howes at 7:30am for Pairings! Bill & Cindy challenge each other to pair up your favorite music with matching menus. Let’s see what they came up with this week. Listen to the audio: 

Friday mornings on WYEP, Chef Bill Fuller (Corporate Chef for big Burrito) joins Cindy Howes at 7:30am for Pairings! Bill & Cindy challenge each other to pair up your favorite music with matching menus. Let’s see what they came up with this week. Listen to the audio: 

Friday mornings on WYEP, Chef Bill Fuller (Corporate Chef for big Burrito) joins Cindy Howes at 7:30am for Pairings! Bill & Cindy challenge each other to pair up your favorite music with matching menus. Let’s see what they came up with this week. Listen to the audio: 

On Friday, WYEP will be playing all of our music from the Morning Mix until the end of Grand Groove Radio at 8 PM from vinyl records. Although the song selection will be fairly close to what WYEP listeners expect to hear on a regular day, you'll once again hear the rich sound and the occasional crackle or pop that defines the vinyl sound.

 

Although WYEP's main on-air hosts play the occasional song from vinyl, they will still have to re-learn some old skills for the all-vinyl day. When was the last time that WYEP's hosts recall playing more than one songs back-to-back from vinyl? It's been a dozen years for Morning Mix host Cindy Howes. "Since 1997 for me," says Midday Mix host Kyle Smith. "It has to be the early '90s since I have," chimes in Rosemary Welsch of the Afternoon Mix. "Never!" declares the Morning Mix's Joey Spehar. So it might be a little bit of a high-wire act without a net at times.

 

Music lovers have an almost mystical attachment to vinyl. As digital music formats dominate the music landscape, vinyl has been making a significant resurgence. For several years now vinyl has been the only physical music format that has been growing in sales, and vinyl revenue to the music industry in 2015 (the last year that data is available) was at its highest level since 1988. The phenomenon is not necessarily rooted in nostalgia, however. While big-sellers in recent years include perennial favorites like The Beatles and Pink Floyd, newer artists like Adele and Alabama Shakes also make the list. And consumers from college-age to as young as nine-year-olds have been bitten by the vinyl bug.

 

Join us on Friday! It should be a fun day of great music, new and old.

 
Every Wednesday at 9:13 am, one of WYEP’s trusted music experts joins me (Cindy Howes) on The Morning Mix to play a couple favorite new songs and share some insight. Today we welcome Jess Phaneuf from WUMB in Boston!

In case you missed it, here's what Jess played:

Jesca Hoop, "The Lost Sky" - I've always admired the weirdness of Jesca Hoop's music and then last year's collaboration with Sam Beam (Iron &Wine) made me into an uber fan. Now I'm loving this new song from her forthcoming album... it's so bold and has so much raw emotion. If you really want to dig in, check out the music video, which is REALLY trippy.

Laura Marling, "Soothing" - I'm always impressed by everything Laura Marling puts out there. I'm especially excited to hear her produced by Blake Mills on the forthcoming release Semper Femina. He seems to be the hot new producer to work with these days, having just wrapped projects with Dawes and Jim James. Oh and he happened to produce the new Jesca Hoop album too! 

 

"They reach into your room," Elton said, "Just feel their gentle touch." Every now and again, we all have to wallow in our misery. And we all know that "when all hope is gone, sad songs say so much." For a really good, nice wallow, the garden variety song with a tinge of depression just won't do. Overblown woe with a theatrical grandiosity is the ticket for today's on-the-go Sad Sack. We've collected a number of sad songs below and rated them from one to four boxes of tissues you'll need to soak up those tears from a trickle to a river.

And be sure to catch some of these, plus more music for Sad Sacks throughout the day, from 6 AM to 6 PM Friday January 13th on WYEP.

 

• The Cure, "Boys Don't Cry"

Robert Smith and company have provided their share of good tear-jerkers over the years. In fact, when "Friday I'm in Love" was released in 1992, some fans wondered if Smith had been kidnapped and replaced by a bizarre double-agent from Happyland. "Boys Don't Cry" is one of the standard bearers for the goth-rock mainstays. (Even dubbing the band "goth" makes Smith sad.)

sample lyric: "I try and laugh about it, hiding the tears in my eyes/Because boys don't cry"

weepiness rating: 2 boxes of tissues

 

• Marvin Gaye, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine"

No one wants to be the last one to know any important info, let alone the tragic detail that your significant other is now another's other. That's rough. Gladys Knight recorded this song first, but while her version is soulful with some powerful singing, Marvin really makes you feel it. That slight raspiness in his voice comes across as a catch in the throat, kicking up the song into an extra tissue zone.

sample lyric: "Losing you would end my life you see 'cause you mean that much to me/You could have told me yourself that you loved someone else/Instead I heard it through the grapevine"

weepiness rating: 3 boxes of tissues

 

• Prince, "When Doves Cry"

On paper, it's got all the theatrical sadness one would need, but how can you be very sad when you're listening to such a joyful arrangement?

sample lyric: "How can you just leave me standing, alone in a world that's so cold?"

weepiness rating: 1 boxes of tissues

 

• The Replacements, "Unsatisfied"

One can think of this song as the flipside to John Lennon's "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with The Beatles. Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine in 1970, "When you're drowning, you don't say, 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me.' You just SCREAM." With this Replacements classic, Paul Westerberg repeatedly rages against the lie that his life appears to be and cries for the satisfaction that never comes, and he imbues his vocals with every ounce of those emotions. But we'll still deduct one tissue box for being more angst-y than weepy.

sample lyric: "I'm so, I'm so unsatisfied/I'm so dissatisfied/I'm so, I'm so unsatisfied/I'm so unsatisfied"

weepiness rating: 2 boxes of tissues

 

• Roy Orbison, "Only the Lonely"

Let's face it. Roy Orbison is one of the music world's Godfather of Sad Sacks. His most successful period of hit singles in 1960-'61 is littered with song titles like "Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel)," "Today's Teardrops," "Running Scared," "Love Hurts," and the majestic "Crying." Even his perhaps best-known song, the relatively straightforward "Oh, Pretty Woman" from 1964, backs up the line, "I couldn't help but see, pretty woman, that you look lovely as can be" with the Sad Sack follow-up, "Are you lonely just like me?"

sample lyric: "There goes my baby, there goes my heart/They're gone forever, so far apart"

weepiness rating: 3 boxes of tissues

 

• Chris Isaak, "Somebody's Crying"

Isaak has never shied away from dipping his music in the same Well of Tears as Roy Orbison, and this song is a prime example. He even uses a propulsive drumbeat on the chorus reminiscent of "Oh, Pretty Woman." And while he doesn't have the stunning vocal range of Orbison to kick the song into drama overdrive, Isaak is a master of singing with doleful vulnerability. This song is a Hallmark Movie of the Week in waiting.

sample lyric: "I know somebody and they called your name a million times, and still you never came"

weepiness rating: 3 boxes of tissues

 

• The Smiths, "How Soon Is Now?"

Morrissey is quite simply a towering figure in the annals of Sad Sack music. He's like a Sylvia Plath poem sprung to fretful life, spewing out woe-is-me tearjerkers like he's being paid under the table by Kleenex. He's churned out songs like "What Difference Does It Make?," "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," "I Want the One I Can't Have," "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me," "Never Had No One Ever," and "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want" like a one-man Brill Building of self-pity (and that's not even getting to his solo songs). This song is perhaps his "Stairway to Heaven" of misery, an epic and surprisingly radio-friendly anthem to ill-at-ease Sad Sacks everywhere.

sample lyric: "You go and you stand on your own and you leave on your own and you go home and you cry and you want to die"

weepiness rating: 4 boxes of tissues

 

• Adele, "Someone Like You"

It's like the 2011 Saturday Night Live sketch when everyone couldn't help but bust out crying listening to this song. Basically nailed it. "You both needed a good cry so you were listening to Adele's 'Someone Like You.' "  "Do you do it too?" "Everyone with a heart and an iTunes account does."

sample lyric: "I heard that you're settled down, that you found a girl and you're married now/I heard that your dreams came true, guess she gave you things I didn't give to you"

weepiness rating: 3 boxes of tissues

 

• Merle Haggard, "Misery & Gin"

About 40% of all country songs could have been included on this list, so consider this entry as also representing all the cry-in-your-beer country weepers that are not from the boot-scootin' and bro-country end of the Grand Ole Opry spectrum. Merle was certainly no stranger to tearful tunes, from his very first single "Sing a Sad Song" to his 47th and final album in 2011 which included three songs with "blues" in their titles.

sample lyric: "Looking at the world through the bottom of a glass/All I see is a man who's fading fast"

weepiness rating: 2 boxes of tissues

 

• The Beatles, "Eleanor Rigby"

While most of your typical Sad Sack tracks are about affairs of the heart, Paul McCartney wrote this pocket melodrama about the futility of life itself--making the Orbisons and Morrisseys of the Sad Sack world come off as Up With People by comparison.

sample lyric: "Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name/Nobody came"

weepiness rating: 4 boxes of tissues

 

• Best Coast, "Why I Cry"

It's a two-minute blast of upbeat music, but the lyrics paint a vignette of alienation and self-pity in which life is a Sisyphean "never-ending hill."

sample lyric: "Look to the future, nothing's there/Don't know why I even care"

weepiness rating: 2 boxes of tissues

 

• Eric Carmen, "All By Myself"

Even before the lyrics begin, the piano intro itself screams "here come the waterworks!" The verses are fairly compact but are packed with gorgeous touchstones of Sad Sackery: pining over lost youth, loneliness, insecurity. The choruses enter the scene like soaring eagles of melodrama, flying over awe-inspiring vistas of tear-drenched strings and ominous drum fills. And don't get me started with that Hugh McCracken guitar solo popping by like a comforting, shoulder-patting friend.

sample lyric: "Living alone, I think of all the friends I've known/But when I dial the telephone, nobody's home"

weepiness rating: 4 boxes of tissues

 

What are your favorite Sad Sack songs? Tweet us @WYEP and let us know, or post on our Facebook wall!

Listen for more sad songs on WYEP's Sad Sack Music Day on Friday January 13th, throughout the day from 6 AM to 6 PM.

Friday mornings on WYEP, Chef Bill Fuller (Corporate Chef for big Burrito) joins Cindy Howes at 7:30am for Pairings! Bill & Cindy challenge each other to pair up your favorite music with matching menus. Let’s see what they came up with this week. Listen to the audio: