doleful

Gray was far from the first to tell a doleful tale about an orphan character—he borrowed from Dickens—but in writing for children in an art form that depends on caricatures, all subtlety went out the window.

Set in the high-rises of the Cabrini-Green housing project in 1992, when the beleaguered complex’s decline was palpable, it sounds like a recipe for doleful poverty-gazing.

“Civil War” shudders with doleful fury.

In a doleful irony, his digital rerecording of the piece, taken at a more stately tempo and with other changes, would be the last Gould album released by Columbia before his untimely death at age 50 in 1982.

In a sign of the strength of the “Barbie” soundtrack, the winner’s stiffest Oscars competition may have been another song from the film, “I’m Just Ken,” Ryan Gosling’s doleful lamentation.