10. The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby.” This is the classic ode that revealed loneliness to be a sociological rather than merely personal problem. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? In the 1950s and 60s, mass society theory stated that individuals had become atomized as we trudged along in our suburbs, offices, and highways, crowded together yet desperately alone. In mass society you have neither individuality nor community, but instead a throng of isolated people who frantically conform to authoritarian institutions and consumer fads because they’re terrified of being left behind. The Beatles probably didn’t need to look any further than to their own fans, to all those middle-class teenagers hysterically screaming, crying, and fainting in their presence, to spot the problem. All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
9. Wilco, “How to Fight Loneliness.” I didn’t give this song much thought until it was used in a key moment of the movie Girl, Interrupted. The song is just oozing with sarcasm as Jeff Tweedy answers the question of how to fight loneliness by repeatedly singing “just smile all the time.” Lots of people will sincerely advise you to do just that—you know, “fake it ‘til you make it.” They’re the same sort of people who will tell you that happiness is a “choice,” that you can simply “choose” to be happy no matter what the external circumstances are. Many well-intentioned people have said things like this to me, and I nod my head and thank for them for their help but what I’m really thinking is that they don’t know shit about loneliness or depression. I’m guessing that Jeff Tweedy agrees with me because he says things like “shine your teeth ‘til meaningless/sharpen them with lies,” and so the chorus “just smile all the time” sounds like the taunting affirmations of a psychologist armed with a thousand bullshit ideas about the power of positive thinking.
8. Bruce Springsteen, “Stolen Car.” Most of the songs on The River, a double-album that charts the demise of a relationship, could have made this list. So many of Springsteen’s songs are about cars, and one of the things I love is the multiple meanings he assigns to the automobile culture in America: the desire for escape and the freedom of the open road; the ultimate male commodity fetish; the possibility of fatal accident; the Fordist path to the American dream; the decimating consequences of deindustrialization in factory towns. In the beginning of “Stolen Car” he’s recapping the events of his failed marriage: boy meets girl, they fall in love, get married, and settle down, they swear they’ll never part, they move to a house on the edge of town, and then slowly but surely they drift apart. She looks back at the old love letters he wrote to her, and it seems like they were written a hundred years ago. Next thing you know he’s totally fucked up and aimlessly racing down the highway in a stolen car, trying to comfort himself with the thought that it’s all gonna be alright. He’s just waiting to get caught but somehow he never does, so he just keeps driving. The guy’s so alone he can’t even get busted.
7. The Beach Boys, “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” There are also a lot of songs on Pet Sounds that could have made this list. There’s something doubly depressing about hearing this sort of stuff from the Beach Boys, whose surf music harmonizing makes everything sound so upbeat and carefree until you actually listen to what they’re singing and remember that Brian Wilson had a breakdown and didn’t leave his bedroom for like three years after this album was recorded. This song begins, “I keep looking for a place to fit/where I can speak my mind.” Oh how often I’ve shamelessly taken pity on myself because I think I’m not made for these times, that my talents for writing and teaching are being wasted in this illiterate culture of video games and instant messaging (“they say I got brains/but they ain’t doing me no good/I wish they could”), that I should have grown up in the 1960s or the 1930s, that I am so unlucky to have been born into the most non-revolutionary time in modern history. Brian Wilson felt my pain, even in 1966: “Every time I get the inspiration/ to go change things around/ no one wants to help me look for places/ where new things might be found.”
6. Don Gibson with Chet Atkins, “Oh, Lonesome Me.” This song takes the melodrama of self-pity to absurdly low levels. It’s been covered by a number of musicians, but I mainly know it because of Neil Young’s version on After the Gold Rush, which is particularly great because Neil’s voice gives it that wounded animal sound he perfected in the early 1970s. This song captures the resentments that accrue when you’re alone at night and you imagine that everyone else is out having a blast: “everybody’s going out and having fun/I’m a fool for staying home and having none.” And it’s at least twice as bad when you’re missing a girl and you get these flashes of her out with other guys: “I bet she’s not like me/she’s out and fancy free/flirting with all the boys with all her charms.” Misery loves company, so I wish you people would just stay home and cry yourself to sleep at night.
5. Jimi Hendrix, “Burning of the Midnight Lamp.” You just don’t expect this kind of shit from Hendrix. You expect to hear the badass acid-drenched guitar monster talking about standing up next to a mountain and chopping it down with the edge of his hand. But I guess the dude got as lonely as the rest of us. Although “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” features Jimi’s typically intricate and assertive wah-wah guitar work, it begins with the thought that “The morning is dead and the day is too.” Hmmm…sounds like one of those rough nights where you wake up choking on your own vomit (or maybe someone else’s vomit, like one of the drummers for Spinal Tap). “All the loneliness I have felt today/It’s a little more than enough to make a man throw himself away.” You know, I never thought Hendrix wrote very good lyrics, but I like this one: “Now the smiling portrait of you/Is still hanging on my frowning wall.” “Loneliness,” Jimi begins to say, momentarily slowing down the music in anticipation of some profound thoughts, “is such a … drag.” ‘Nuff said.
4. The White Stripes “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet).” This one’s kind of funny. It’s the last song on what I think is the White Stripes’ best and certainly most underrated album, Get Behind Me Satan. I love Jack White’s guitar playing, but on this album I also began to take notice of what a great songwriter he is because many of the songs, including “I’m Lonely,” are primarily played on the piano. It’s an absolutely beautiful song in which Jack first sings about missing his mother and his sister before getting to the part that makes me chuckle, where thinks about this girl he knows he can always have but decides he just hasn’t gotten that desperate yet: “I roll over in bed/Looking for someone to touch/There’s a girl that I know of/But don’t ask for much/She’s homely, and she’s cranky/And her hair’s in a net/And I’m lonely, but I ain’t that lonely yet.” In short, sometimes loneliness isn’t the worst thing in the world. At the end of the song he goes to commit suicide by drowning in a river but then stops himself at the last minute, “before my lungs could get wet.” He reiterates that he misses his sister, and that sometimes he gets jealous of all her little pets.
3. Woody Guthrie, “At My Window Sad and Lonely.” The archetypical ode to a lost lover who’s moved away, gorgeously sung by Wilco on the first Mermaid Avenue album. Leave it Woody Guthrie to capture the universal feelings of heartbreak with such poetic simplicity: “At my window sad and lonely/Oft times do I think of thee/Sad and lonely and I wonder/Do you still think of me?” So complete and self-explanatory, in fact, that I’m not going to say anything more about it.
2. Led Zeppelin, “Tea for One.” The best song on the worst Zeppelin album, “Tea for One” doesn’t offer much lyrically, but it does feature nine and a half minutes of Jimmy Page’s most intense blues guitar riffs. Page’s guitar sounds like someone in a prolonged fit of crying, first slow and moaning, then hysterical, manic, and uncontrollable, then slow and moaning once again. While the song stretches on and on and on, Robert Plant keeps repeating the same question, “How come twenty four hours sometimes seem to slip into days? One minute seems like a lifetime, baby, when I feel this way.”
1. Wilco, “The Lonely 1.” Well I guess Jeff Tweedy must know something about loneliness, because Wilco is the only band to make this list twice, and that doesn’t count the Woody Guthrie song they’ve also covered. In fact, as a song about the loneliness of a rock star as seen by one of his devoted fans, this one could be about Tweedy himself. A lovely song with a haunting steel guitar and violin, “The Lonely 1” paints the picture of a musician in the spotlight he’s always dreamed of inhabiting, arms outstretched for his autograph as he heads backstage after the show. In an image that I think it says it all, he stands “alone in the halo’s haze.” Oh the great numbers of people who have spent their lives chasing fame to heal the hole in their hearts, and the much smaller numbers who have achieved that fame only to find standing alone in the spotlight and the haze of a smoke machine. The fan is alone too—he or she comes home, finds no messages on the phone (ah the good old days when you had to go home to check your phone messages), and then plays the ones from yesterday just to hear something from someone, I suppose. The fan turns on the stereo and there’s the rock star whining about the fact that they’re lonely, even though every one wants an autograph or a picture with them. Kind of makes rock stars seem like assholes, doesn’t it? I mean the fan would do anything for the rock star and defends everything he does: “when the critics pan, I write in your defense.” But then maybe the fan has the luxury of being able to live vicariously through someone else, while the rock star who’s made it to the top realizes there’s no one except him standing up there, alone and now totally distant from us ordinary folk.
Honorable mention: Three Dog Night, “One.” Come on, you know you know it, so sing along with me now: “One is loneliest number that you’ll ever do. One is the loneliest…”
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