Sentimental Songs
for Sentimental People
Join pop music scholar DJ Sentimentemily for a cross- genre exploration of sentimental songs. Based on her current research, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People merges the sounds of sentimentalism with critical historical commentary that follows the long arc of pop music—from the late eighteenth-century through to the present. Get into your feelings and feel all the feels.
Episode 9 searches for songs that feature the keyword “sentimental” in their titles. Prepare for a sentimental stroll through sentimental reasons, melodies, fools, and even sandwiches.
Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People returns to Threads*sub_ʇxǝʇ with an isolation episode to connect communities, imagined or otherwise. We’ll lend an ear to loneliness and longing, extend empathies across epidemics, and analyze intimacy over distance and time.
Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People returns to Threads*sub_ʇxǝʇ
On Saturday, 15 February with a post-Valentine's Day exploration of love songs. Join me, DJ Sentimentemily, for a deep dive into songs about platonic, familial, romantic, and unrequited love as well as love lost, love’s limits, and love of self, place, or god. We may even answer the perennial question: What’s love got to do with it?
Warning: This playlist contains big ballads and big emotions. Sorry, not sorry.
Join pop music scholar DJ Sentimentemily for a cross-genre exploration of sentimental songs. Based on her current research, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People merges the sounds of sentimentalism with critical historical commentary that follows the long arc of pop music—from the late eighteenth-century through to the present. Get into your feelings and feel all the feels.
DJ Sentimentemily's regular dive into songs that tug at the heartstrings and those that try and fail. This edition (live from the ZK/U flea market gütermarkt #42) suitably deals with beloved objects and nostalgia of a material kind.
Episode four was broadcast live from ZK/U’s 40th Gütermarkt flea market. The playlist celebrates the artists and vendors who make the market the special Moabit community event that it is with songs about your favorite sentimental objects—objects lost and found, bought and sold, forgotten and remembered, broken and repaired. Included here are jams by Sam Cooke, Die Prinzen, SZA, Klaus Lage, Gwen McCrae, Fanny Brice, and more.
Pull up your old rocking chair and get ready to (gently) rock.
On Saturday, 20 July, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People participated in the Threads*ZK/U Berlin All-Day Pop Up #5. Picnicking listeners gathered in the Moabiter Stadtgarten while I broadcasted episode three from up in the Ständige Vertretung radio studio.
For this special birthday edition, for the young, the old, and the aging, we even managed to pull off a sentimental sing along! Episode three features songs by New Kids on the Block, Drake, Adele, the Young@Heart chorus, Boney M, and more.
Pull out your tissues and sing along.
The second installment of Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People tackles the theme of death. Listen to sentimental songs about death by Kanye West and Paul McCartney, The Staple Singers, Mike + The Mechanics, Prince, Chavela Vargas, Nina Simone, Michael Callen, The Shangri-Las, and more. Pop music scholar Dr. Matt Jones makes a cameo appearance.
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
In March 2019 Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People debuted as a radio show on ZK/U Threads* Radio. The pilot episode provides a theoretical introduction to my research and features tracks by Whitney Houston, Ella Fitzgerald, Sam Smith, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Yoko Ono, and more.
Grab your hankies and take a listen.
About
Dr. Emily Gale is an interdisciplinary music scholar who specializes in North American popular music. Her book in progress, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People, explores the intersections between sentimentalism, gender, class, and race with chapters on: sentimental ballads of the long nineteenth century; the early Chicago radio program The National Barn Dance; Mitch Miller’s 1960s television show Sing Along with Mitch; and 1970s soft rock. Her article on citizenship and settler colonialism in Calixa Lavallée’s 1883 operetta The Indian Question: Settled at Last was published in The Opera Quarterly. Emily completed her PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia in 2014. From 2014-2018 she was Lecturer in the Global Arts Studies Program at UC Merced and she revived Arts UC Merced Presents, a campus and community arts series. She currently lives in Berlin where her monthly feminist music column History Witch appears in the Schmutz zine.
Contact: emily@sentimentalmuseum.com