Songs that can ruin your day

Tom REYNOLDS’ friends had to have been worried. After all, he spent the better part of the past year listening to the most depressing songs in the world.

He listened to 200 versions of “Send In the Clowns.” He listened to everything the Cure ever recorded. He listened to countless tales of shipwrecks, plane wrecks and emotional train wrecks. He listened to songs of Christmases so woeful that they’d make Santa Claus reach for the Zoloft.

But his suffering had a happy outcome. The Los Angeles writer and reality TV producer has written a book based on his research, “I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard,” which will be published by Sanctuary Books in the fall.

And he wants to make it clear that he wasn’t just looking for sad songs or maudlin songs, but something that went much deeper.

“First I had to decide whether a song was sad or depressing, and there is a difference,” Reynolds says, giving the example of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” as a song that did not make the cut. “That’s not a depressing song. That’s a sad song. When you’re feeling melancholy you’ll gravitate toward a sad song that will give you comfort. A depressing song is one that comes out of the blue and, no matter what mood you’re in, it ruins your day.”

In many cases, he says, the writer seems to have meant to provide comfort but missed the mark.

“A depressing song is often a sad song that failed, aiming for solace but doesn’t make it,” he says. “The songwriter is perfectly clueless of the damage they are inflicting on the listener.”

The list ranges from three teen tragedies (“Tell Laura I Love Her,” “Teen Angel” and “Last Kiss”) to overwrought ballads of loneliness (Celine Dion’s hyperbolic version of Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself”) to blue-collar drudgery (Bruce Springsteen’s “The River”) to a particularly gruesome account of regaining consciousness in the wreckage of a crashed airliner (‘70s sludge-rock band Bloodrock’s “D.O.A.”).

Most of the selections were hits, and some, including the Doors’ “The End” and Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” are enduring classics.

Reynolds stayed away from hard-core thrash bands such as Slayer (“They’re trying too hard,” he explains) and for the most part avoids country (where there’s an annoying habit of throwing in elements of redemption), but he did touch on goth and industrial with Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” and the Cure’s “Prayer for Rain” -- which raises the question: Just how do you pick one Cure song as the most depressing?

“It was hard,” he says. “I listened to every album all the way through, and I chose ‘Prayer for Rain,’ not a well-known song. I was going through the song’s lyrics and just listed all the depressing words -- suffocate, bled, wasted, dirt. It goes on and on. Add a few prepositions and you have the entire song.”

Depression, though, may be in the ear of the beholder. Counting Crows singer-songwriter Adam Duritz, for one, is a bit perplexed to learn that his song “Round Here,” from the band’s 1994 debut album “August and Everything After,” came in at No. 28 on this list.

“It’s a solitary song, but not a depressing one,” says Duritz of the selection, which portrays a young man trying to figure out his life in the company of a suicidal young woman. “It’s about someone trying to find his place in the world. There are songs of mine that are hopeless, but this is not.”

Oh, and the No. 1 most depressing song?

Reynolds went for one that’s meant to be uplifting but to his ears was anything but: the Christian-pop hit “The Christmas Shoes,” by the band Newsong, based on a most-likely apocryphal story involving a humbuggy man and two young urchins trying to buy a pair of shoes for their dying mother so she could “look nice for Jesus.”

“This was No. 1 on the adult contemporary charts, was a bestselling novella and a movie of the week starring Rob Lowe,” he says. “It’s about some guy who feels really good because he gives three bucks to a kid dressed like Oliver Twist. Some will say I’m being a heretic, but this song sends the wrong message. It’s just jaw-droppingly depressing.”

Present at the Addiction creation

Brendan MULLEN had an inside view of the creation and evolution of Jane’s Addiction. As the promoter at Club Lingerie and other concert venues, he booked shows by the band in its early days in the mid-’90s, as well as shows by Perry Farrell’s pre-Jane’s group, Psi Com.

He drew on that history in writing “Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction,” a book collecting anecdotal entries of band members and associates from the beginning through the reunions of recent years. It will be published May 1 by Da Capo Press.

But he had to do it without Farrell, who had said he would contribute new interviews to the project but ultimately declined. (Farrell was unavailable to comment for this story as well.)

“He wouldn’t respond to any communication,” says Mullen. “He kept saying, ‘Oh, I want to do my own book,’ which is fine.”

Mullen still had plenty of material from older interviews and other sources quoting Farrell and Jane’s members, with great detail about the origins, development, triumphs and scandals that made the band one of the essential rock acts of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Among the insights are explorations of how Farrell’s larger-than-life persona was influenced by the oversized character of his father, as well as looks at the key role of Jane’s Addiction in the emergence of a rock generation.

“I had interviews with Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, and he goes on and on that there would have been no Pearl Jam without Jane’s Addiction,” Mullen says. “His story was that his old band Green River came down to L.A. to open for Jane’s at the Scream and gets blown away, goes back to Seattle and says, ‘We have to rethink this whole thing as a band,’ and it essentially caused the band to break up. They wanted something with less limitations, so a couple of them formed Mother Love Bone, which led to Pearl Jam.”

Small faces

* Hot production team the Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo) has pulled the plug on its own band, N.E.R.D., which featured the two with singer Shay. The band’s two albums never achieved the level of success of the Neptunes’ production work with Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Snoop Dogg and many others....

* Feuds are not just for rap. The Killers’ singer Brandon Flowers took a swipe at fellow neo-post-punk band the Bravery, suggesting in a British interview that the latter is just an imitator and a trend-jumper....

* Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba has scrapped a new Dashboard album he had finished writing and instead is working on a new batch of songs for a planned summer album release. The initial songs, he says, did not carry the edge he was trying to communicate.