Also speaking of Warren Zevon - damn near all of The Wind - but in particular, “Please Stay” and “Keep Me In Your Heart”. Knowing that you were recording your last album and still writing such moving songs - I can’t imagine. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” indeed.
More personally, “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits - about 20 years ago, I was Juliet…
*“Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start
And I bet - and you exploded into my heart
And I forget, I forget… the movie song
When you gonna realize, it was just that the time was wrong… Juliet?” *
The video is goofy in only the way that an early 80’s video can be, but the song transcends it.
“A good day ain’t got no rain. A bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.”
and
“I know a father who had a son. He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he’d done. He came a long way just to explain. He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping then he turned around and he headed home again.”
If I were an actor and needed to cry on cue my go-to song would probably be Joey by Concrete Blonde. The way her voice breaks on the chorus every time kills me.
Even worse, the classical piece Valse Triste because of its use in Allegro Non Troppo*****. I literally had to hit the mute button while pasting the link!
Oh, yeah. That piece from *Allegro Non Troppo *leaves me a mess every time I watch it. I don’t watch it very often. Sometimes I check back in to see if it has the same effect. It always does.
My two:
“When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2
“30K FT” by Assemblage 23.
“Hello, if you’re there pick up the phone
I’m calling from 30,000 feet above you
The captain’s just informed us that our plane is going down
So I’m calling for one last time to say I love you.”
“Don’t Speak” by No Doubt. It was super popular right around the time that my grandpa died, so it got tied to that. Then it came on the radio at my college bookstore right after my first boyfriend and I broke up. I still like the song, but it always gets me in a melancholy frame of mind.
Every time one of these threads come up, I have to chime in with Sam Stone by John Prine. If “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes” doesn’t cut, I don’t know what could.
My husband Jesse/Gurjulup passed away this past Wednesday as most of you on here know. He listened to this song over and over again a few weeks before his death and cried as he thought about the relationship with his mother and this song depicted it pretty accurately. I will be playing it at his memorial service.
Tiny nitpick: My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) is the acoustic version. Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) is the electric one. Although I don’t know if he played one the other way in the past, as the lyrics are slightly different, so “acoustic version” could work for some.
Yes. It’s not so much the lyrics for me, or it’s not the biggest part of the impact. But strings can make things sadder in my opinion, it works so well.
Yes! I agree with you (and President Johnny Gentle as well…). “Here’s Looking At You, Kid” does it to me too, from the same album. On a similar vein to your experiences (sorry that happened…) is Sufjan Steven’s “Casimir Pulaski Day,” even if the lyrics are a little odd at times.
My iTunes was just on random, and 5 minutes ago “American Wake” by Black 47 came up. It’s about knowing that even if you can go back home with a plane ride, things will never be the same. Oww…
Good choice. Very haunting and the definitive version of the song for me now (much as I loved the Sting original), and that was BEFORE I learned what happened to Eva Cassidy in RL when I looked her up. “She’s great, she should do more than record cover songs!”
Similarly, the Cole Porter classic So In Love as covered by k.d. lang for Red, Hot + Blue (an AIDS benefit thing from the early 1990s) really got to me because in hearing it for the first time while watching the video, it turned a familiar song of desperate love to one of desperate loss.
Agree also on Chapin’s Cat’s In The Cradle or Mike + The Mechanics’ The Living Years regarding regrets over family bonds left untended until too late; also, especially as a parent now (of a young son), I can’t hear John Lennon’s song *Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) *without immediately thinking of how he recorded that song for his 4-year-old son only a few weeks before his murder.
*I can hardly wait to see you come of age …
Before you cross the street, take my hand,
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans
*
And then the last, whispered words: “Goodnight, Sean, see you in the morning” Just. Kill. Me.
For many years, Orleans’s “Still the One” did that to me. It was a reminder of my first marriage – we called it “our song,” and when it broke up, I couldn’t listen to it for decades. I’ve finally gotten over it, since I realized that it applied to my wife now.
+1 to the upthread commendation of Hurt. Either performed by Cash or NIN.
On the subject of NIN, rage and self-recrimination resonate:
from Wish:
just watching it burn in my steady systematic decline
of the trust i will betray
give it to me i throw it away
after everything i’ve done i hate myself for what I’ve become
and from March of the Pigs:
don’t like the look of it don’t like the taste of it don’t like the smell of it
I want to watch it come down
I hadn’t heard “Angie” for many years but chanced on it via radio a few years ago and was re-captivated.
Most of my favorites are from the late 1960’s and early 70’s, especially Dylan, Young and a few others including Leonard Cohen. But my favorite Cohen song may be a much more recent song: “Thousand Kisses Deep.” I replay the movie The Good Thief just to listen to this song.
