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Is November the Most Depressing Musical Month?
You be the judge
With apologies to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, I am convinced that while all happy months are alike, each unhappy month is unhappy in its own way. Those happy months would surely include the summer trio of June, July, and August, and who can really tell them apart? The unhappy months, for me at least, are February (so bad they made it the shortest of the year), October (which begins the annual seasonal depression), and the worst of all: November.
November stands alone in the pantheon of horrible months. Here in Texas, the weather will vacillate between the heat of the end of summer and the cold of the dead of winter, with rain thrown in when you least expect it just to make things extra dreary. There’s the post-Halloween sugar crash, the looming specter of another Thanksgiving with relatives you can’t stand, and the panic that you’ve started Christmas shopping too late again. If you’re Catholic, just for good measure you get to spend the entire month focusing on the poor souls in Purgatory while you contemplate your own impending death. Fun times.
Nowhere is the sadness of this penultimate month of the year more evident than in the realm of music. You can find a happy tune for any of the other eleven months, but for November it’s a virtual impossibility. As proof, for my first Rate-A-Record…
