Even though George Jones (“He stopped loving her today”, “These days I barely get by” among others), Hank Williams (“First Fall of Snow and many others) and other country artists give her a run for her money, I have long felt Sugarland’s–Jennifer Nettles’–song Stay is the saddest song I’ve heard. Every time I hear it, it makes me want to cry. I can feel her pain. She is a very open person, and I can feel what she feels. This is why they are as successful as they are. She puts what she has out there.
I don’t know the story behind this–I did some basic research, but nothing exhaustive–but I cannot help but feel that that amount of emotion has to be autobiographical. That kind of pain is shattering. It leaves a mark; but having survived it, one becomes better able to be confident in feeling deeply. To have suffered deeply is to have learned, if you do not reject that pain, if you choose to move beyond it, to get back up off your knees, and decide to live–to move–again: to reject helplessness, and the watery emotions that flow over you like a suffocating river.
Stay was not their first hit, but I cannot help but wonder if it was not the emotional basis for what has become a very first-rate career; if it was not latent and simply unwritten early on. So much that is good flows from conquered despair.
I have said often and will say again that one cannot assume that people that are “lucky” have good “karma”, and those who suffer bad. We are here to learn, in my view, and there are many ways to do that, but the principle one is to learn to transcend the many attachments to ways of feeling and being that cause us such misery.
Here, she has located her entire emotional life in a relationship which is cruel and random. She has lost herself in need and desire and lust. Her pain flows from a chosen “medication”, a chosen behavioral gestalt, that hurts her.
Could we not view ourselves–many of us, at any rate–in many respects as incompetent pharmacists, dispensing lifestyles which cure none of our diseases of mind and emotion?
To see is to make good; to be blind is to be hurt repeatedly, the blows inflicted from a darkness beyond.