Krishna Deshpande's sad boy playlist

Everybody knows that a tearjerker beats a happy track any day. Who wants to crank up that questionable Pharrell song (you know the one) when you could wallow, crying into your cereal in the morning and listening to something that actually speaks to your blues rather than tries to erase it? Music's forever-sensitive singer Figure 9's Krishna Deshpande happens to agree. "I feel like listening to sad songs are a way of narrating your life and confirming your identity," he tells me. "All the best songs have an element of sadness." With that in mind, here are ten of his favourite tracks to shed a tear to.

joni mitchell – "case of you"

"Joni epitomises the goal of my songwriting. She states things so wonderfully, in these ways that are so plain but kick you right in the gut at the same time, like the opening lines – "Just before our love got lost you said, 'I am as constant as the Northern Star,' and I said, 'Constantly in the darkness, where's that at?'" She writes prosaically and beautifully. I'm never going to be as good as she is, but she makes me want to be constantly better.

burial – "untrue"

"A friend burned this song onto a CD for me when I was around thirteen or fourteen, and it's what got me interested in listening to more electronic stuff. Before then I'd stuck mainly to '90s pop, classic rock, and folk, and I hadn't realised electronic music could make you feel as deeply as rock and folk. But I listened to this track nonstop back then. I'd put my headphones on in the lunch room and use it to drown out the rest of the world. School was depressing as hell back then, and this song helped."

perfume genius – "queen"

"The first time I heard this song I wasn't paying much attention to the lyrics. I'm not sure why. It hooked me with its sound, and when I went back to give it another listen I was haunted by what Mike Hadreas wrote for it. I love the dichotomy of how depressing it is and how he's still defiant about it, which is his signature, and which is why I love his music so much. He's not afraid of saying fuck you. As bold as this is, I always read sadness into it, too. Like, yeah, it's great to have the power to make people uncomfortable, but at the end of the day I want to not be hated for this one part of myself."

bat for lashes – "laura"

"This is the kind of track you listen to when you want meaningless comfort. I was drawn immediately to it when I first heard it, and it was one of those songs I listened to back to back for days. Natasha Khan knows how to cut right to the core, reassuring someone who's stuck in one place and trying to cling to youth while everyone else around them has grown up and moved on."

sharon van etten – "your love is killing me"

"Sharon van Etten is someone I run to every time I need to feel like someone else understands what I'm feeling because her lyricism is incredibly powerful in its simplicity. "Your Love is Killing Me" is particularly raw. It makes me feel like I'm being scrubbed inside out. Her voice just digs into me – she sounds like she's dying, and it's a sound that encapsulates so much of that break up feeling. Or beyond that break up feeling, that confusion and desperation and general angst of being caught up in a relationship that utterly wrecks you."

sufjan stevens – "drawn to the blood"

"I mean, Sufjan. Need I say more?"

MZRHEE – "water me"

"I don't even know how to begin talking about MZRHEE. This was the first song of hers I heard about two years ago, and it blew me away. I relate to her writing in general, but the way she talks about sexuality especially is so refreshing and new. That line, "He won't make love to me, not now I've set the fee," is a feeling I connect with."

passion pit – "cry like a ghost"

"Whenever I'm looking for anything to make me feel ecstatic and miserable at the same time I consult Passion Pit – especially this album. It was hard for me to pick one song from it, but ultimately I wound up with this one because of how torn apart it is. Everything comes together to create this perfect storm, from the vocals to the synths to the lyrics, and there's something sinister and terrifying about the sound that thrills me. But I may be a little too enamoured with Michael Angelakos in general."

kacy hill – "experience"

"I only recently discovered Kacy Hill (if discovered is the verb I can use there), and I am just obsessed with her voice. There's something incredibly hypnotic about the vocals on this track. The simultaneous octaves emphasise that. This is one of those songs you listen to when you're winding down from a night out – from a night out when you've made a huge mistake. It's perfect lying on your back waiting for the spins to go away music."

tourist – "together"

"This is probably already clear by now, but I love sad dance songs. I also love repetition. I love how repeating something slowly transforms the tone of what's being repeated until the whole things becomes something else entirely. At the beginning of this track, the we should be together bit sounds kind of shy and sweet and hopeful, but by the end it takes on this level of desperation that I deeply identify with. It becomes this self-fulling prophesy of being let down."

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