I sing my sorrow and paint my joy.

I'm saddest when I sing.

Out of my own great woe
I make my little songs.

Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it — I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?

I've made a song for the poorly loved
And songs for everything I grieved –
For unaccompanied slave and shark,
For queens who've gone into the dark.

I'm possessed by love — but isn't everybody? Most of my songs are love ballads and things to do with sadness and torture and pain. In terms of love, you're not in control and I hate that feeling. I seem to write a lot of sad songs because I'm a very tragic person. But there's always an element of humour at the end.

When fill'd with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.

Songs are as sad as the listener.

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart

I think because I felt so sad I had to bring out my feelings, and try to create music that would make me and all my friends feel better.

Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!

I will indulge my sorrows, and give way To all the pangs and fury of despair.

Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.