What makes a song feel like a rainy day

Ask people for a rainy day song and they rarely say a song about rain. They name something slow and soft: Bon Iver, Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones, a piano piece. Rain is a mood more than a subject, and certain sounds match it surprisingly well.

The sound of grey weather

• Slow, unhurried tempos, often around the pace of a calm walk or slower.
• Acoustic guitar, piano and strings rather than heavy drums.
• Close, quiet vocals that sound like someone in the room with you.
• Space and reverb, like sound in an empty house.
• Melodies that sit between happy and sad, warm but a little wistful.

Cosy, not sad

There are two kinds of rainy day. One is heavy, when the weather matches a low mood. The other is cosy: a mug of tea, a blanket, nowhere you have to be. Most people want the second, and the difference is in the details. Cosy songs are soft but warm, with gentle melodies and lyrics about home, love or memory. Heavy songs dwell on loss. If you want a rainy day to feel comforting, say so: “rainy afternoon, cosy and a bit wistful” gets a very different tape from “rainy and sad”.

Let it move like the day

A grey afternoon isn’t flat. It starts quiet, brightens a little and fades into evening. A good rainy day tape does the same: hushed songs to start, one or two warmer, livelier ones in the middle, then something slow as the light goes. Our own rainy day tape follows that arc, from Bon Iver’s “Holocene” through Beabadoobee’s “Coffee” to The National at the end.

Rain in other languages

Every music culture has its rainy day songs. In Greek, the gentle éntekhno ballads of the 70s and 90s; in Russian, a bard with a guitar; in Hebrew, the soft Israeli folk-rock of the 70s. If you want rain in a particular language, just write the mood in it, or ask for it: “ελληνικά τραγούδια για βροχερή Κυριακή” works as well as English.