Why does one want to listen to sad songs when one is feeling unhappy?

Most of the time, I'm quite an optimistic person :-). In that respect, I think I take after my mother who also usually looks on the bright side of life. However, my father can go through long periods of depression. I'm pretty sure that my father's bouts of depression were a major contributing factor in my parent's divorce, which occurred when I was 9 years old.

Although I'm usually quite a happy and gay person (the original English meaning of gay LOL), like any person I do sometimes feel unhappy. When that happens, there are a few sad songs that I like to listen to. But my favourite song in the "sad song" category is P!nk's song Family Portrait.

As soon as I heard the song, many years ago now, I knew that P!nk must have been through a similar experience of parent divorce that I had been through as a child. How else could someone have created such a masterpiece? The end of the music video where the child magically joins the happy family inside the television seems particularly poignant to me.

I was so sure that P!nk parents must have got divorced when she was young that I never bothered to investigate further. However, tonight I used google to find an article on songfacts.com where it discusses the song and says

A very intimate and personal song, Pink reveals her family dysfunction in this track. She explained in Entertainment Weekly: "That was from a poem that I wrote when I was 9 when my dad left. My mom cried for four days when she heard it. I've seen my dad cry three times and that was one of them; that was awful. And then my stepmom cried. She's so strong - she was an Army nurse in Vietnam, and I'd never seen her cry. That was a song I wrote for me, and I didn't realize how much it was going to hurt them."

Even though Pink's parents got divorced when she was 9 years old and she wrote the original poem at the time, she didn't record the song until she was 21. "I tend to hold onto things," she says.

So it even turns out that P!nk was the same age as me when her parents got divorced. If I'm in an uncharacteristically sad mood, then I always cry when I hear the song :-|.