How low can you go? Singer Iestyn Davies’s melancholic playlist

What connects a tea towel, a double-decker bus and a facial? The countertenor picks his 10 favourite tracks that distil the great thing about tears, pull on the heart strings and suspend time

Music is “a sovereign remedy towards despair and melancholy, and can drive away the devil himself”, wrote Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, first revealed in 1621. But music shouldn't be simply a remedy for unhappiness or grief; it speaks where phrases run out, it allows these in mourning to commune with the inexpressible, and possesses the distinctive means to access and transfigure our feelings of lack and loss. Are we wallowing once we take heed to unhappy songs or are we hearing a deeper fact behind the plain details of minor chords and chromatic dissonances?

As we speak, the term “melancholy” has misplaced its foreign money in the psychological lexicon. “Melancholy” has emphatically replaced it because the analysis for our culture’s relationship with loss and struggling. Yet if one word greatest describes the experience of so many up to now few years of pandemic life, it is melancholy – and it's to music that so many have been capable of turn during those isolated months for solace and contemplation. As Burton wrote four centuries in the past, “Sorrow is each mother and daughter of Melancholy, symptom and chief trigger; they tread in a hoop, Melancholy can only be overcome with Melancholy”.