sad songs: “stolen children”

For those out of love. For those pining and pawing at shadows and not-promised futures. For those lonely. Forlorn. Bereft. For those recently broken up. For those about to. For those who look inside themselves and find only gaps, abscesses and absences. For all of you — and there are more than we could ever know — there is “Stolen Children,” a song by the Parenthetical Girls from their album Safe As Houses. (Second verse, same as the first: they were previously covered here.)

It’s a stunner and a grower, a track that puts you in a trance as you behold the song over and over, aching for those warbling, angelic aaaaahs that hark the chorus, sympathizing more than you would like to singer Zach Pennington’s mourning cry of “the last six years of my life,” the little twinkling keys, triangles and bells taunts of What Might Have Been. And even for those madly in love (and I gratefully put myself in that camp), the wistfulness is impossible to resist. “Stolen Children” brings gravity to the mundane, a weight to the meaningless. (I spent about ten minutes listening to this song while nostalgically looking at pictures of my friends playing ping-pong and it felt momentous and profound.) It may be more than you can carry, but if you feel like diving blindly into the melancholy, I can think of few better places.