What is the most miserable form of loneliness?
The one that comes right after a terrible break-up, or one that is a result of the absolute lack of any company in your life, romantic or otherwise?
Well, the only way for you to escape that is to just go out there and smell the roses, but if you really want to dwell into the emotion and want to listen to songs that perfectly resonate your feelings and sum-up your situation, then we’ve got you.
In today’s Soundpasta countdown, we’re listing down 13 of the best songs ever created which exemplify this excruciating feeling of loneliness.
From Celine Dion’s All By Myself to Akon’s Lonely, here are the top 13 best songs about the feeling of ‘being lonely’…
13) Rainy Days and Mondays – The Carpenters
Nothing screams ‘Monday morning blues – coming from a place of absolute insignificance’ like this gloomy tune from The Carpenters, sung in the ever-so-gloomy tone of the great Karen Carpenter. The absolutely sense of detachment from an inexplicable place of despair, with words like ‘What I feel has come and gone before’, sums-up how we all are faced with nonsensical sadness, every now and then.
12) People – Barbra Streisand
The iconic Barbra Streisand builds a hopeful, dreamy world – from the lens of someone longing for love and companionship. Written by Bob Merrill and recorded by Streisand for the film ‘Funny Girl’, the song about expressing your needs without shame, resonates – even after all these years.
11) A House Is Not a Home – Dionne Warwick
Coming back home to vacant furniture and empty bed, and basically no one who is waiting or counting on your return. The legendary Dionne Warwick’s signature tune was written by the team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David and its stunning message of how it all is meaningless unless you have someone to share it with, is still relevant.
10) Anyone – Demi Lovato
Demi Lovato words it as it is in their heartbreaking ode to feeling absolutely purposeless. Another unabashed cry for someone to hold on to, coming from a state of absolute – nothingness. How much more lonely can a song get, when it already has lines like –
‘I tried to talk to my piano
I tried to talk to my guitar
Talked to my imagination
Confided into alcohol’
9) Waiting For Love – AVICII
Like many other AVICII songs, this tune too carries a deep sense of melancholia – that makes your heart feel heavy. A song about carrying on with your life, and hopelessly dreaming of somewhere finding someone for you. Despite it being an up-tempo, this song has an overall gloomy theme about age-old longing that you can’t escape.
8) Lonely – Akon
That post break-up feeling of total emptiness, that cannot be cured by anything other than time. Akon words out the heartbreak of a presence that is no longer there, but it’s memory still lingers somewhere.
7) Soulmate – Natasha Bedingfield
That feeling of looking at other people falling in love all around you, and wondering how long will you have to stand-up in line till it’s your turn. That ‘forever lonely’ feeling is summed-up in Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘say it like it is’ fashion in this soul-stirring tune.
6) Maybe This Time – Liza Minelli
Driven nearly-crazy by the absolutely lack of success in her love life, the song’s protagonist contemplates her many failures in the past – desperately relying on her current relationship to work and last, somehow. With its theatrics and eccentrics, this will give you all the drama that you need to feed your mind, in your depressive lonely days.
5) Somewhere Only We Know – Keane
‘I’m getting old and I need something to rely on’. Plenty of us have gone through these emotions in our heads, at various points in our lives. And Keane’s beautiful tune released in the year 2004, sums up this very feeling, beautifully.
4) Help Me Make It Through The Night – Gladys Knight
The desperation towards the end of the bridge as Gladys Knight belts out ‘lead me through the night, come on and take me through the night’, personifies the feeling of going through a night filled with twists and turns. Not just the moving words, but also Ms. Knight’s ability to bring life to them, is this song’s USP.
3) Learn To Be Lonely – Minnie Driver
Lyrically this song’s poignant yet crucial message about relying on yourself for your own happiness, in a world filled with no scope for the hopeless romantic – hits right at home. Coming from the genius of songwriter – Andrew Lloyd Webber, and his ability to do magic with words, this musical masterpiece composed for The Phantom Of The Opera – is an eye-opening reality-check for anyone dealing with similar emotions.
2) All By Myself – Celine Dion
There have been plenty of covers sung of this power-ballad about the absolute lack of any company, whatsoever, but Celine’s version definitely takes the cake as the most popular one. The song sums-up the state of complete detachment, especially when it sinks into that feeling with a line like – ‘Living alone, I think of all the friends I’ve known, but when I dial the telephone – nobody’s home.’
Thank you for the many nights filled with disturbia, Celine.
1) Angel – Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin’s heartbreaking interpretation of a song summing-up the longing for an everlasting love. It the manner in which she sings the epiphanic lines like ‘Too long, have I loved, so unattached within’ and ‘For I’ve lived to long without the love of someone’ – that resonate with you deeply. But it is towards the end of the song she packs-up all the right emotions to exemplify the chore and the seence of this whole theme, when she tears up singing ‘And there’s no misery, like the misery I feel in me’. Phew! This song is depressingly lonesome, and we absolutely adore it for telling it like it really is.
Apart from these 13 great ‘lonely songs’, here are a few other honorable mentions, that you can certainly give a try:
Cool Kids – Echosmith
Only The Lonely – The Motels
For Once In My Life – Judy Garland
Away From the Sun – 3 Doors
Simple Plan – Astronaut
Everybody’s Got Somebody but Me – Hunter Hayes
Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Green Day