Readers recommend: melancholy songs | Peter Kimpton

Bittersweet, articulate, beautiful or bold? Suggest selections for a special form of sadness in songs in this week’s sorrowful but strangely uplifting topic
“Misery is the river of the world,” grunts out an energetically downbeat Tom Waits. “Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness,” replies the eccentric, upbeat author Italo Calvino. And, now also entering the Readers Recommend bar (you never know who might turn up), here’s Rob Spragg, aka Larry Love