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The Miserabilist Guide to Music
by Adam Brent Houghtaling
Sad music moves us like nothing else, and despite its gloomy nature it also has the curious power to make us happy. In This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music, author Adam Brent Houghtaling explains why, while offering up a compendium of history's masters of melancholy and the greatest sad songs of all time, featuring artists across genres and through time - from torch songs to country weepers to emo classics. Loaded with recommended playlists and insights into our favorite sob songs, This Will End in Tears is a fascinating immersion into the "miserabilist" genre, a musical marker with increasing resonance.
"Starred Review. A comprehensive, sharply written journey through the music of sadness, of every stripe and from every genre... this is a most helpful musical sourcebook through every kind of blue." - Kirkus Reviews
"...[Houghtaling] attempts to show connections between melancholy artists from all ages in a few longer essays on Miserabilist themes such as heartbreak, cheating, depression, and disease. However, any guide to melancholy musicians that includes an essay on Morrissey but not one on Joni Mitchell has to be seen as highly idiosyncratic - although overall, Houghtaling is highly entertaining." - Publishers Weekly
"For the meticulously melancholy music fan in all of us, a celebration of songs with a dark side. This Will End in Tears gathers the downest, doomiest sounds in rock, soul, jazz, the blues, and any music that can put a serious chill in your evening." - Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is A Mix Tape and Talking To Girls About Duran Duran
"Sad sacks of the world: Rejoice! Adam Brent Houghtaling has ingeniously compiled the ultimate guide to this cruel world's maestros of miserabilism. The feel bad book of the year!" - Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, co-authors of I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
"Breaking up is hard to do, but not when you've got a book like this to help you make the saddest playlist of all time. Now, someone pass me a Kleenex... and that Elliott Smith album." - Leslie Simon, co-author of Everybody Hurts and author of Wish You Were Here
"Sad songs say so much, but Adam Brent Houghtaling has a lot to add to the conversation. This Will End in Tears is a book well worth wallowing in." - Mark Yarm, author of Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
This information about This Will End in Tears was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
From the author:
In my early teens, the capes and tights of my comics-bred youth fell away, replaced with an explosion of sound from Guns 'n' Roses, Black Sabbath, S.O.D; INXS, The Descendents, and The Misfits. In short order I began playing bass and started a staple-bound fanzine (Chinchilla Smile) to celebrate my favorite indie-pop bands. Music has been a passionate part of my life and depressing music makes me particularly happy, and I routinely sweep hours away in record stores and online looking for new artists to feed this miserable addiction. I'm a singer and a songwriter and have written for Prefix Magazine and was responsible for music coverage across 8 cities while an editor at AOL CityGuide. I have been an editor for over ten years and was most recently the online editorial director at Gourmet.com, the online extension of Gourmet Magazine.
At times, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
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