Something I'm asking as a person, not as a moderator: I know many people have found it comforting to curse the year, say it's fired, etc. I, personally, find it the opposite of comforting, for complex reasons.

I'm not going to get mad at anyone for going down that road; I'm not going to get my gnome hat on and do things to them or their comments. But I personally, just as a member of this community, will find it easier to be in the thread if we don't focus on that strand.

Again, this is a personal preference, not a moderatorial injunction. I don't really want to squash how anyone mourns. I'm just...sensitive to this particular thing.

It may sound weird, but the song that always works for me in this sort of mood is MacArthur Park.

[from memory]
MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,
All the sweet green icing flowing down.
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it,
'Cause it took so long to bake it,
And I'll never have that recipe again.

Daniel Kahn's Yiddish "Hallelujah", in honor and memory of Leonard Cohen, and a source of personal comfort. Cohen's death was the only celebrity death that felt like a gut-punch for me this year, although others certainly made me sad.

All of my personal losses this year were lettings-go, breakups. There were no deaths, thank goodness. But I and my partner each let go of our previous partners, I'm leaving my job as soon as I can manage to find a new one, and my partner's winter car burned down over Thanksgiving (no human injuries). And we await with anxious breath Things Going Wrong with my father's parents, and my parents' dog. They are all three of them fairly old for their species.

I'm finding my feet on new ground, but I'm not there yet. Daniel Kahn's piece helps draw out and smooth over some of the sense of helplessness, of overwhelm.

Another song that's been doing this for me is "The Idiot", by Stan Rogers. It's written to be a Morris dance, and Morris has been life-saving and heart-saving since I picked it up a little over a year and a quarter ago.

They're both songs of loss, but both, to me, contain the seeds of the future and the finding of a stable place to put one's feet. Which perhaps some of us could use.

I lost a friend to breast cancer this fall. She was 36. She wasn't a close friend - I enjoyed her company and the activity we had in common, but everybody's busy and there will always be more time another time, right?

The priest at her funeral said that we had two responsibilities: to grieve, and to celebrate. We grieved her loss, too soon, and it was okay to be angry with God for that (he quoted St. Teresa of Avila: "If this is the way you treat your friends, it's no wonder you have so few of them.") But we also celebrated her life and the gifts she brought to others.

I recommend that double-barrelled approach to anyone who finds it helpful.

One of my very oldest and dearest friends, a guy I'd known since '78, died this summer. One of the very last records he listened to (by choice--it wasn't a sudden death) was A Wizard, A True Star, by Todd Rundgren. Nothing from that quite fits, but two from Todd really do:

This is pretty much what Bryan was like, other than the terrible pun-ishment. ("A Dream Goes On Forever")

And this is pretty much how I feel about him being gone. ("Everybody's Going To Heaven")

I often find Chumbawamba's By and By, about Joe Hill, a comfort and a push to move forward. They're a band worth savoring in troubled times, and have many other helpful songs.

And, oddly, The Oyster Band's When I'm Up I Can't Get Down, which may be a trigger for folks with issues around S/M relationships, substance abuse and more -- and is about choice, and how it helps, to me. A difficult song, but ultimately upbeat.

They're for very different moods.

Poetry, not music: Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Dirge without Music"

#7 was me. I don't know what happened to my name; I did type my full one. (That's never happened before!!)

Two friends from my college days died this year. Cancer, and complications from diabetes and kidney failure.

The former Came Out late in life. To judge from his Twitter feed, he spent nearly every darn weekend at Furry conventions. That fandom provided immense support in his long spiral down, leading to some surreal sick-room photos. Great bunch of folks (along with his co-workers and volunteer fire company, I should mention).

The latter was the guy whom the crowd coalesced on holidays, partially because he was centrally located, partially because he was the grand storyteller every liked to be around.

At attempt at a reunion today, at the Chinatown greasy spoon we used to meet at back in the day, fizzled out. We'll try again this summer.

Can't think of songs appropriate to Lincoln and Robbo.

This year was a mixed bag for me, with both incredibly low lows that I probably don't need to enumerate, as most of them are public record and affect very many people -- but several quite high highs as well.

Very stochastic.

It's a little like those tools for being fond of a problematic thing. To me each day of this year has been a thing unto itself, with a few grouped as kin. I cannot even personally feel the year as a gestalt, because it's all choppy pieces of mirror on the floor, each reflecting a unique reality.

Also, the Oscar and Hugo in-memoriam crawls are going to completely destroy me.

One of my favorite interpretations:

Princess Leia's Theme

Ben's theme, not Leia's- but it feels tonally appropriate.

Oh, sheesh. Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher's mom, has died.

Blaming 2016 bugs me too, and I think it's because it's distracting from the real grief. I get that people need to make sense of overwhelming things in order to process them, but still. Listen to a song, name your emotions and share memories. Feel your grief. It can't be held by a single year, and as we get older, more and more things and people we love will pass away.
Here's my contribution:

Singing in the Rain, a la Debbie Reynolds

The Coventry Carol has a firm place in our family, and we've been singing it a lot together.

The song that I keep playing on repeat is Gilberto Gil's "Expresso 2222". It's really up-tempo and optimistic, in a somewhat mystical/trippy way, with the image of a express train departing from Rio de Janeiro for the future (all the way to the year 2000 or so, since the song is from 1972). And it was written during Brazil's military dictatorship by a recently-returned exile. And there are recordings of Gil performing the song at all different ages. Right now it really, really clicks for me, and makes it easier to hear the bad things and hope for better things.

(Portuguese lyrics, someone's English translation, and a 1972 TV solo performance of the song—with worse audio, but an amazingly retro intro fanfare—can be found here.)

I'm not good at doing links, and not going to hunt for any this late, but I've got a couple of titles in mind.

Michael Longcor's "Drunken Angel"

The late Dave Carter's "When I Go"

For some reason, this song is providing comfort right now ... maybe because it's about potential, and we need to know that good things might still come: Jane Siberry's "At The Beginning Of Time".

And the silence was only broken by
The absence of the clinking of the masts
And every now and then a bird would not fly by
And someone would look up and say - what wasn't that?
...
We were waiting for the world to begin

I have been taking a great deal of comfort in Sacred Harp. In recent weeks I've been listening to/earwormed by #162 Plenary, which is a shapenote setting of the tune more frequently found as Auld Lang Syne. Here it is as recorded at the Western Massachusetts convention in 2009.

The lyrics are very much a warning, in the same strain as quite a few Sacred Harp tunes, that death is ever-present and it's time to get your earthly affairs in order. But combined with that uplifting tune (which for me at least - a Brit - still carries very strong associations of celebration and looking-forward, regardless of lyrics) it seems to me more hopeful than despairing.

I'm not sure if it's hopeful or fearful, but I was thinking that the intro to Bablylon 5's fourth season fit my attitude toward the next year or two pretty well. There's plenty of darkness, but also hope for something better at the end of the road.

Youtube link

The song that comes to mind for me is Hijo de la Luna (YouTube link), performed by Mecano.

A pretty good translation of the lyrics is here.

A few years back, as I was driving to my cousin's funeral -- he died young, of metastatic colon cancer, after battling it for more than four years -- I appreciated hearing Enya's Long Long Journey. In other years, I've listened to Clannad's A Gentle Place. Otherwise, I rely on the B-52s, just to name one group, to cheer me up. Love Shack comes to mind.

Across the Sea by the Wailin' Jennys has helped me get through this year.

Across the Sea by the Wailin' Jennys has helped me get through this year.

Songs that help get me through. The first two are seasonal. The others are not.

Alexander James Adams - Wintertide (a song very specifically about gathering together in love.)

Heather Dale - The Holly and the Ivy I enjoy her jazzier recorder-heavy live renditions as well, but this initial studio version with the piano line is one seasonal song I play year round.

Vienna Teng - Level Up Most of the time I feel this song is an uplifting thing. Sometimes I think it grates against the kind of depression that makes it hard to actually get up and do things.

Ruthie Foster - Death Came a knockin' take the title as self-evident; this will either be great consolation or the absolute opposite.

Beethoven - Symphony #5 in C Minor I will note that this and Level Up are straight off one of my playlists for my 5 year old -- part of the reason I hear them so much, but only part.

We Know the Way Obviously a new addition. but it's been on frequent repeat, enough for Joseph to have asked once for "boats!"

While "Fairytale of New York" often comes up this season, Kirsty MacColl's cover of Days by The Kinks is the one I listen to when grief and gratitude collide. I recently discovered the choral version by Kinks frontman Ray Davies and the Crouch End Festival Chorus.

Leonard Cohen's Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye contains one of my favorite lyrics: "Walk me to the corner/our steps will always rhyme."

Pendrift @ 26: I hear you. There are times when I think "Days" and not "Waterloo Sunset" is Ray's most simply beautiful song.

Somehow, I've been getting loads of comfort from Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song", especially "I ache in the places where I used to play". It works on me like Zevon's "I think of my friends and the troubles they have to keep me from thinking of mine" does.

"You'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone" though, too.

This year, especially the last couple of months, has been a time of both public and private bad news for me. The piece of poetry I keep coming back to is Mike Ford's De Vermis.

As for music, it's not so much listening to something cheerful, or at least not sad, that helps me, as being lifted out of myself, exalted. Bach does that, and Beethoven (especially the Ninth Symphony), but also Balinese gamelan music (I prefer it to the Javanese style). But there are 2 songs from Annie Lennox' Medusa album that always bring me out of the slough of despond: Don't Let It Bring You Down and No More I Love Yous.

Just hit me: This is the other just beautiful Kinks song that's like those two. A lot of people don't know it because it's from their latest (and I expect last--one more tour, maybe) record. I find it very beautiful. It's a song from a much older Ray:

Scattered

albatross @20: If 2016 was written by Straczynski, all sorts of things suddenly begin to make more sense....

Dittos #12 Lori Coulson, for sure.

I think I may have composed the tune to which I often sing, on sad occasions, Robert Frost's poem--was "Remembrance" what he called it?

"When to the heart of man
Was it ever less than treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love, or a season?"

It works whether a person or merely a relationship needs to be laid to rest.

estelender at 21: Almost anything by Stan Rogers is helpful, I've found; "The Idiot" is a good one. But the song I've had on repeat lately is The Mary Ellen Carter.

For me, there is one poem that I turned over in my mind repeatedly this year. It is by a man whom I knew fairly well, and who, in the days of my youth used to pick me up at the bus stop on Marescaux Road across from Mico College and drop me off in front of my office at the Gleaner on his way to the Supreme Court, where he was President of the Court of Appeals. It is as true today, as when he wrote it in the 1940s, Epitaph by H.D. Carberry:

I think they will remember this as the age of lamentations,
The age of broken minds and broken souls,
The age of hurt creatures sobbing out their sorrows to the rhythm of the blues -
The music of lost Africa's desolation become the music of the town.

-
The age of failure of splendid things,
The age of deformity of splendid things,
The age of old young men and bitter children,
The age of treachery and of a great new faith,
The age of madness and machines,
Of broken bodies and fear twisted hearts.

-
The age of frenzied fumbling and possesive lusts -
And yet, deep down, an age unsatisfied by dirt and guns,
An age which though choked by the selfishness of a few who owned their bodies and their souls,
Still struggled blindly to the end,
And in their time reached out magnificently
Even for the very stars themselves.

---

For those of us who grew up at a particular place and time, there is only one song that can truly express the sentiment of resistance.

(Song linked is Let the Power Fall, by Max Romeo — Idumea Arbacoochee)

Please give artist and title of links, as requested in the original post.

I, at least, am not fond of blind links. You never know where they might lead.

Fragano @ 33: Thank you. I'm not familiar with Carberry's work--I'm ashamed to admit I'm weak on Caribbean poets in general--but that one is going to stay with me for a while.

Pendrift @ #26

ObKinks: and Ray Davies is justly rewarded.

Third one down.

Mary Frances @32, thank you for that. I had heard it before, but not recently, and The Mary Ellen Carter is resonating deeply with me.

Idumea Arbacoochee #35: My apologies. No evil was intended, nor, I hope, wrought.

Mary Frances #36: You're more than welcome. Dossie Carberry was a good man as well as a great poet, and Epitaph encapsulates a lot of what was true of the world of the immediate post-war years as well as today.

It's sort of cliche, but Auld Lang Syne works for me, on both the level of reminiscence, and comfort in those friends I still have to cherish:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?

And days of auld lang syne, my dear,
And days of auld lang syne.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?

We twa hae run aboot the braes
And pu'd the gowans fine.
We've wandered mony a weary foot,
Sin' auld lang syne.

Sin' auld lang syne, my dear,
Sin' auld lang syne,
We've wandered mony a weary foot,
Sin' auld ang syne.

We twa hae paidled i' the burn,
Frae mornin' sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roared
Sin' auld lang syne.

Sin' auld lang syne, my dear,
Sin' auld lang syne.
But seas between us braid hae roared
Sin' auld lang syne.

So here's a hand, my trusty fiere,
And gie's a hand o' thine;
We'll tak' a right guid willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

So, let us each tak a right guid willie waught of the tipple of our heart's desire; raise it up, in the memory of those we've lost, and for the love of those we still have.

And Bless Us, every one.

I remember the second time I met Angela. My parents had just moved "up on the mountain", and started attending a Mennonite church; I was four. And there she was with her little sister, with Glen and Priscilla, and I knew her already. A couple years later, they adopted her--and for all my childhood, she was two grades behind me in school. And I knew her biological mother Bernice, too; we went to visit her now and again. We'd moved, you see, from the valley where we lived in the first house I remember, with a tap in the yard and a hickory tree with hickory nuts, to the mountain where the Mennonites were--and so had she.

I remember her ability to read; she could read stories so they came alive. Even when I was in my early teens, I'd sit where I could listen to her reading to the little children when we visited her family. And for more than a decade years, I kept her and her mother's secrets, separately. Once she was grown, and her birth mother had stopped drinking, they met--but Glen and Priscilla were always her parents.

She married a friend of mine, and died of cancer this fall.

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

- Joni Mitchell

I was wrong on both the counts usually cited: I thought Britain would remain, I thought Trump would be annihilated. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

So I don't know life at all. I've spent some excessive portion of the last six months trying to work out why those things happened. I know more than I knew; but as to the rest, all I have gained is the first step to wisdom - to know that I don't know. I don't know anything.

I don't know that this is a signal step, a decisive turning. I don't know that it's not. Both were by very narrow majorities - Trump by no majority at all, on count. Does that mean something? I don't know. If I don't know that, how can I possibly say what it means?

Things don't feel any different. Here it is 1 January 2017, my arthritis is playing up, no difference, it's warm out and will be hot tomorrow, no difference. The State government wants to put a road through one of our rare wetlands, and is trying to face down trenchant and bitter opposition... see, it's in quite a nice middle-class suburb, and the people who are saying "Hell, no!" are mostly their own voters... no difference. The Commonwealth government wants to negotiate a free-trade treaty with Britain, which was a flat impossibility when it had to talk to the EU. Difference? Er... only if you think the last thirty-something years is eternity.

But I don't know. I honestly don't. Maybe Trump will appoint enough Supreme Court Justices to produce a court that will reverse or at least mostly destroy Roe vs Wade. Maybe he'll use the army to get the pipeline through. And to man the machine-gun posts on the Wall.

Maybe. I don't think so, but what would I know?

And if I don't know that, what nonsense to imagine what would happen if?

But, see, I read and sometimes write SF. "What would happen if..?" is somewhere between instinct and participation in a rite. Telling me not to do it is like telling me not to think in English.

And I still don't know.

SamChevre @42

I followed your link and read the poem. Hardened agnostic me, I wish and hope with all my heart that it is so.

I contribute King Jesus hath a garden, sung by Guildford Cathedral choir. Not specially a Christmas carol, though it does come in Christmas carol books. I don't know why I like it, except that the words (as translated by George Woodward) and tune (as arranged by Charles Wood) combine well, as words and tune often do, and the effect is gentle and peaceful.

The English words are on the Youtube page above. For those interested, the 17th-century Dutch text is here and in modern Dutch here.

Woodward renders the third line "There naught is heard but Paradise-bird" – "Paradise-bird" takes the rhythm, but not the meaning, from the original engelenzang, "angels singing". I guess Woodward had never heard a paradise bird – here, from the BBC's "Tweet of the Day", are the Raggiana bird of paradise and the Blue bird of paradise, neither very suitable for a peaceful garden.

I couldn't come up with a song, at first, to fit the emotional timbre suggested by abi. Then, walking away a few days, and coming back, it came to me: Jerusalem, sung by Anuna - when the founder/composer Michael McGlynn introduces this song in concert, he's often repeated a story concerning its origin - a priest who is awaiting his execution in the morning.

The chorus, apart from the first time, is sung in a technique called "heterophony"

Text included for sake of reading along (for folks who, like me, process better via text than sound).

Crazy(and an utter camp-follower of this group)Soph

Chorus:
Jerusalem, our happy home
When shall we come to thee?
When shall our sorrows have an end?
Thy joys when shall we see?

They see no one that sent her there
Their palms spring from the ground
No tongue can tell, no heart can think
What joys do there abound

Forever more the trees perfumed
And ever more they spring
And ever more the saints are glad
And ever more they sing

Fair Magdalene, she has less moan
Likewise there she does sing
The happy saints in harmony
Through every street doth ring

Fair Magdalene hath dried her tears
She'll sing no more to thee
Nor wet the ringlets of her hair
To wash her saviour's feet

For forty years, this song of Bunny Wailer's, The Old Dragon has been an anthem of struggle and resistance in my mind.

And as Bunny said, you've got to rise up and trample the dragon, get the dragon 'fore the dragon get you.

I like Joni Mitchell's Moon at the Window,
lyrics,
http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=156

TIL this is a reference to a poem by Buddhist monk Ryōkan,
nusutto ni / torinokosareshi / mado no tsuki

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISfEs32wLMw

At Obama's first election I proposed Caravan of Love by the Housemartins. It still seems relevant, though aspirational rather than hopeful now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehfiQd7lcPY

Okay, now this just makes me happy:

Prisencolinensinainciusol, (MinaCelentano con Roberto Bolle). For extra added silliness, con un accento Italiano.

Oh, you want lyrics! Well, okay, here you go:

Al al smai sesler,
Eni els so co uil piso al,
In de col men seivuan,
Prisencolinensinanciusol!
Ol rait!

Oh yes, now I remember where I first ran across this.

I just found this, and knew I had to post it here: The Piano Guys It's Gonna Be OKAY. As we move forward into 2017, this is the kind of music that will give you the strength to keep going.

(It's off their latest album, Uncharted.)

My thanks to everyone who posted songs of mourning, resistance, joy, and everything else. I spent today mostly detached from social media, but went through this thread as a playlist. It was a good thing to do.

There's a lot I loved, including several old friends (I really need to dust the stray bits off my old Stan Rogers mp3s), but particular thanks to:

abi@0 for starting the thread and making the connection to the Coventry Carol;
Lenora Rose@25 for pointing out Vienna Teng's "Level Up", which I hadn't heard, but kept on a loop for a while today; and
Fragano Ledgister@34 for Max Romeo's "Let the Power Fall", which I'm going to have to come back to.

I know Robin Williams died before 2016, but it was 2016 when this song came out: Baggage, by the Drive-By Truckers. It and the song on this record about the Umpqua shootings have put me into tears more than once in the last few weeks. I'm a little raw and always a little weepy, but still.