The Nuance

Why Listening to Sad Music Makes You Feel Better

There’s science behind the coping benefits of melancholy art

Markham Heid
Elemental
Published in
4 min readSep 5, 2019
Illustration: Kieran Blakey

InIn a 2018 tweet, country music star Reba McEntire said that, for her, singing sad songs “has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.”

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Markham Heid
Elemental

I’m a long-time contributor at TIME and other media orgs. I write mostly about health. I grew up in Michigan, but these days I live in southwest Germany.