Tackling the Void: Songs to Help You Face Your Feelings

Maddy Klein

Let’s say your heart was broken two weeks ago. You’re not yet well again, but you want to have a functional day—maybe even a good day, if that’ll be allowed. You don’t want to howl along to Adele’s “Someone Like You” and obliterate your tenuous sense of peace, but you’re also not in the mood to blast Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and force a greater joy than you can manage.

You want something that will allow you to feel your feelings without falling apart. You want music that will acknowledge your sorrows in a way that lightens rather than intensifies them. As indie pop singer Caroline Rose says, “sometimes a sad song just needs a cocktail.”

Originally delivered in an interview that was then cited in Genius annotations, this line has been on my mind for years. It perfectly describes the subgenre of pop music I so often turn to when I’m dealing with a situation like the one described above or when I simply crave emotional music that won’t bring me down.

When I finally decided to track down that interview with Rose, which discusses her 2019 album Loner, her elaboration of the work she was doing at the time hit me like a sucker punch: “I was 24, lonely, and realizing life might actually be as hard as people said it was.” Although my teens and early twenties brought plenty of emotional turmoil, I had long been under the impression that reaching certain milestones of maturity and stability would eventually offer me shelter. In reality, I’ve simply traded old storms for new ones and, now 24 myself, have begun to realize that nothing can permanently keep me safe.

I’m not about to drag you down to a place where the sun never shines and sadness never lets you go; I’m just saying that even an ordinary life requires extraordinary resilience that can be fortified by the art we choose to help us process difficult feelings.

More Of The Same—Caroline Rose

So, what does a sad song with a cocktail sound like? To start with the woman who brought us this phrase, we can turn to the first song from Loner, an alt-pop track called “More Of The Same” that epitomizes the cocktail concept and also happens to be one of my favorites on the album.

Opening with punchy keys and whirling synths, the first verse presents a version of reality where everything is so mundane and static as to make her feel dissociative, “floating around in a vacuum of space” rather than moving through the real world.

It’s with this filter of absurd sameness that Rose goes to a party and sits through a school day, always cut off from connection and meaning. She feels like an outlier among peers who all seem like clones of a perfect model, and she struggles to have faith in lessons taught by a woman who, like so many other aspiring artists, resorted to teaching because “she couldn’t make ends meet from her writing career.” And yet, despite describing social alienation and creative disillusionment, Rose delivers her vocals without any strain and in a key of G major that offsets the song’s existentially troubling lyrics.

It’s because of this emotional counterweight—the cocktail served alongside the sad song—that even when the plain text of the chorus might suggest defeat, the energy of the song encourages listeners to sing along as an invigorating act of catharsis instead of a grim acceptance of misery. When Rose says she’s “never gonna try again if all of this is just more of the same thing,” the strength of her voice suggests someone who refuses to comply with the expectation to accept reality rather than someone whom reality has beaten down.

Rose’s cocktail here is perhaps the one you pour at the end of a frustrating day as you complain to a friend or roommate about feeling unfulfilled or burnt out. There is space here to be dramatic and speak in the absolutes that anger or disappointment can bring out—to say you’ll never do something again—without surrendering to despair.

Slide Tackle—Japanese Breakfast

Because the phrase originated from a female pop artist, I’d like to continue exploring it through other pop songs written by women, and I bring us now to “Slide Tackle” by Japanese Breakfast. As we might expect, this song gives the tangible language of physical conflict to the intangible struggle of fighting for agency over one’s thoughts and feelings. Zauner sings about “tackling this void” in her mind and “wrestling with [her] head” in an effort “to be good” and “to desire living,” and all the while, a steady thread of percussion kicks along at an upbeat tempo that frankly does feel suited to physical exercise. I could easily imagine placing this song at the start of a running playlist in the hopes of keeping a brisk pace.

There’s a motivating sense of movement and energy in the rhythm and melody of “Slide Tackle” that makes the listener feel like they have what it takes to contend with the darker parts of their minds. When I reflect on my own about the self-critical and catastrophizing trends of my anxious thoughts, my mind often feels weighed down with the conclusions those thoughts drag me toward. The lyrics of “Slide Tackle” remind me that a fight is possible, and the insistent pulse of the song makes me feel like a capable fighter. The musical cocktail bringing vibrance to a song that I take to be confronting mental illness could then be characterized as an energy drink supplying us with the sugars and electrolytes we need to keep moving.

While it may be that the closing line, “obsessing in the dark,” does not exactly proclaim us the winners in the fight against our minds, I find a brightness in the horn solo that claims the final thirty seconds of the song. We come to the 3:39 mark with a triumphant ambition to keep going—to be good and desire living—and that in itself counts as a victory.

Cry—Carly Rae Jepsen

Returning to my initial proposed scenario of heartbreak, Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cry” is an excellent choice for when you don’t want to actually shed tears but you do want to acknowledge that love has given you a hard time. If you’ve ever wished for the intensity of disco lights and the crush of bodies dancing around you as a distraction from missing someone who isn’t good for you or doesn’t love you like you wish they would, this song hits the spot.

The conflict at the heart of this song has to do with a man whose refusal of emotional intimacy is experienced by the woman he sleeps with as a painful rejection: one lover is crying because the other cannot, or perhaps will not. He visits at night but never stays the whole night; he wants to be physical with her but he never wants to just “kiss and close his eyes.” It’s sex without intimacy and only one person laments the lack.

For me, Jepsen makes this lack bearable in two ways. First, the reverberating one-two-clap of the beat is far closer to a dance track than a brokenhearted ballad and its simplicity makes it easy for your body to accept its invitation. Second, I find Jepsen to be singing to different audiences at different points in the song. In the verses, she addresses the man who makes himself “king of the castle” and refuses to give her what she needs, singing: “I want you to stay tonight.” But in the chorus, this you becomes a he, and with the combined swell in the music and in her voice, we get the feeling that her lament now addresses a friend who is sympathetic to the pain caused by this man who “never wants to strip down to his feelings.” This shift creates a space where, despite the loneliness of an emotionally unequal relationship, there is someone to witness your heartache and pay attention to the tears you’ve cried.

For the loving half of a one-sided romance, there is a loneliness that comes in part from being so focused on someone who doesn’t care as much. The cocktail in this song, then, is a fruity gin drink bought for you by a friend who knows you need a good night out and won’t ask you to make your feelings smaller—a friend who listens to the chorus where you complain about someone instead of asking them to stay.

Stayaway—MUNA

Let’s say Carly gets you through the challenge of a painful relationship and now it’s time to leave. You would need a song that both acknowledges how hard it is to move on and gives you the energy it takes to change. You would need “Stayaway” by MUNA.

The chain of speculations in this song’s verses captures the patterns that must be broken in order to commit to a breakup: to protect yourself from reminders that could trigger a backslide, you’ll probably have to hang out in different places and listen to different songs for a while. So much is lost in these verses, from old friends and dancing to just going for a drive and listening to music, and it would be easy for this loss to be crushing.

Fortunately, the surging synths, punching baseline, and insistent mantra of the chorus push back against this loss. The resolution of knowing you’ve “gotta stay away” for your own good points toward a future that will take you away from heartbreak rather than sending you back for more. Despite not yet knowing what will replace the things you leave behind, lead singer Katie Gavin’s conviction about the path forward is enough to make staying away seem possible.

The third verse is an especially powerful reminder of why the lure of familiarity is a predatory mirage. Gavin belts out a warning about the power of nostalgia to make it seem like “all the bad things never happened” and to make you doubt your instincts to value and protect yourself. You know for certain the habits you’ll lose if you leave an unhealthy relationship; you have no idea how much of yourself you might lose if you go back.

This time, the cocktail is a combination of truth serum and pain killer that puts you in just the right space to handle a hard truth. Honesty isn’t worth much if its blunt force debilitates you. “Stayaway” offers both the invigoration of a battle cry and the vulnerability of a confessional poem, enabling the listener to draw strength from what might otherwise be too painful to admit.

You’re Safe Here

That is the hallmark of sad songs with cocktails: they do not exacerbate; they soothe. They comfort you without erasing your pain. They expand the bleakly narrow tunnel vision of extreme sadness and remind you that joy is still there for you when you’re ready.

“More Of The Same” and “Slide Tackle” allow you to probe burnout and mental illness without making you want to give up and hide in a dark room. “Cry” and “Stayaway” make it seem possible to be good to yourself when others were cruel. While their lyrics may not be cheerful, these songs nevertheless sound upbeat enough that you can listen to them even when you don’t need their unique brand of healing. Like the good friend witnessing the chorus of “Cry,” these songs make good days better and bad days easier.

The bar at which these songs serve their cocktails is a sort of hybrid space in which one half offers a mahogany and velvet lounge with a fireplace and the other half sparkles with a disco ball and a light-up dancefloor. You can sit comfortably with emotions that usually cause pain, knowing that good times are across the room. This is a capacious place where you are neither rushed to feel better nor trapped in wallowing. That extraordinary resilience that an ordinary life requires? At this bar, it’s all around you.