Flavorwire

If you’re like us and basically everyone else in the world — unless you don’t drink, in which case we’re happy for you — you probably greeted 2013 with a fairly sizable hangover yesterday. There’s a surprising amount of complexity to be found in waking up and feeling like shit after a big night out, and it’s a subject that’s been addressed by a host of songwriters over the years. So we thought we’d welcome 2013 with an exploration of musical renditions of the morning after the night before, from the quietly contented to the morbidly, morbidly hung over. We hope the way you’re feeling roughly 36 hours into the new year falls somewhere toward the former end of the scale.

Kris Kristofferson — “Sunday Morning Coming Down”

We’ll start with a classic, the one song that appears on every one of these lists that anyone’s ever made — and with good reason. Kristofferson’s lyric does a beautiful job of capturing that awful empty feeling you get the morning after a colossal bender, when you find yourself questioning anything and everything. The moment where Kristofferson sings of how the smell of frying chicken “took me back to something that I’d lost somewhere, somehow along the way” is one of the most desperately sad moments in all of music.