Terry Jacks recorded Seasons in the Sun. I’m not positive that Cat Stevens didn’t but I have my doubts.
Puff the Magic Dragon - I remember being told that my grandmother had died. It was the day before my 13th birthday. I went out and sat on the swingset and sang Puff and didn’t cry, then.
Thirty-three years ago today. Jeez.
Good call. It has the same effect on me for pretty much the same reason.
Warren Zevon’s last album has several songs that hit pretty hard, the two strongest being Please Stay and Keep Me in Your Heart.
Oh, dear me. Love, Me absolutely makes me bawl. I also cry at other country songs, Wish You Were Here by Mark Wills. And Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley. I am a perfect target for country songs. Even the sad ones I hate still make me cry.
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]("Seasons In The Sun" - Terry Jacks)2HopefullyInvisibleCharacters
I’m not really a sap. Really! But two that always bring me to tears are Cat’s in the Cradle and (gawd) Tim McGraw’s Don’t Take the Girl.
But I’ll never forget the day I was driving down the road and Colin Rae’s “Somebody’s Little Girl” came on and I just burst, completely unexpectedly, into sobbing tears. I get a teensy bit misty eyed every time I hear it now, just in memory of that one day.
Oh, and how could I forget Red Sovine’s Teddy Bear? Boo hoo city.
Well, yes; I didn’t say that Terry Jacks recorded it first – just that he did, in fact, record it.
(…passage of time…)
Okay, I’ve looked online for at least twenty minutes and I can’t find anything pointing to Cat Stevens recording other than several lyric listings that mention his name; ISTM that this is a bit of dis-information that has spread due to the proclivities of the internet. (I’m still not saying that Stevens didn’t record it, just that I see no evidence of such yet.)
Connie Francis’ I Will Wait for You
god damn it… 
And his website search says no too.
I didn’t know any of the songs history till I looked it up!
Child of the 70’s that I am, I only knew about the Terry Jacks version. When I heard Cat Stevens mentioned, I had a WTF moment “am I remembering this all wrong?”.
My tear bringer,
Don McLean’s, Vincent
Usually make me tear up, but only fellow South Africans probably get why :
Asimbonanga and December African Rain - Johnny Clegg
Weeping - Bright Blue
Biko - Peter Gabriel
Usually make me tear up, and I think anyone could get why:
Don’t Give Up - Kate Bush & Peter Gabriel
And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda - Pogues
Red Army Blues - Waterboys
Century Flower and* Silent Day* - Shelleyan Orphan
Fragile and They Dance Alone - Sting
3 Babies - Sinead O’Connor
but always, always makes me tear up:
Atmosphere - Joy Division. Poor Ian
How To Make Gravy by Paul Kelly.
He writes from jail to his brother on December 21 to talk about Christmas and as he begins to feel the loneliness blurts out:
And later in the evening, I can just imagine,
You’ll put on Junior Murvin and push the tables back
And you’ll dance with Rita, I know you really like her,
Just don’t hold her too close, oh brother please don’t stab me in the back
I didn’t mean to say that, it’s just my mind it plays up,
Multiplies each matter, turns imagination into fact
It’s… um… it’s on the Shrek soundtrack. I hadn’t heard the song before, but I was so struck by the bit of the song that I heard in the film that I went out and got the song, and it was so much more dark and sad.
Oh, and seconding Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush on “Don’t Give Up.”
I’ve been known to get weepy over Jolene by Dolly Parton.
She also does a song called I still miss someone on the recent album The Grass is Blue and that’ll do it too.
A lot of Townes van Zandt songs will make me cry, especially (*Quicksilver Daydreams of) Maria * which is not sad but very touching.
I hardly ever get through any Patty Griffin album without crying my eyes out. It’s something in her voice that really gets to me. The worst are Making Pies, The Long Ride Home, Tony and especially Useless Desires.
Any sentimental Italian thing, be it traditional or opera.
How Can I Help You To Say Goodbye by Patty Loveless. I’ve never made it through that one without tears. (I know better than to try singing it at the karaoke bar!)
I’ll be singing along, doing just fine through the first two verses, won’t even feel a lump in my throat, then comes this verse:
Sittin’ with Mama, alone in her bedroom
She opened her eyes, and then squeezed my hand
She said, “I have to go now, my time here is over.”
And with her final words she tried to help me understand.
Mama whispered softly, “Time will ease your pain.
Life’s about changin’, nothin’ ever stays the same.”
Crap, I’m crying just typing this.
Some songs usually make me teary-eyed (notoriously, the return of the theme in Hey You from The Wall,) but only one, so far makes me actually drip tears from my eyes:
Somewhere Only We Know by Keane. Most of the songs that do this have the same reaching epic sound to them, and those two are no exception.
The first song that comes into my head whenever I hear this question is “Watch TV” by Rasputina. Then my throat closes up thinking about it. It makes me so sad I actually haven’t listened to it in many years, and I couldn’t begin to articulate why.
The next one is Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and, as has been mentioned, particularly Jeff Buckley’s cover of it.
Then I think of “Fog” by Radiohead, which doesn’t actually make me cry (really, no song does unless I’m drunk) but does invoke a very strange state I can only describe as ‘delightful melancholy’, a phrase which it now occurs to me could be applied to a few Radiohead songs.
Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” was Our Song with my first love and it makes me sad today, but in a way I can handle. Ditto “As She Moved Through the Fair”, though a little more crazy sad.
“Wish You Were Here” is pretty hard these days, because it makes me think of an ex who committed suicide. But I think the song is so deeply imprinted into my brain that I could never fully shake its power to make me a little bit happy, though very bittersweetly so.
Yep, that’s by Alphaville.
- Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World* the version by Israel Kamakawiwo Ole’
gets me EVERY time…
Lightning Crashes by Live, specifically the verse
“…an old mother dies. Her intentions fall to the floor. The angel closes her eyes…”
From the very first time I heard those lines, I would get a vivid image of my own mother in a hospital bed, dying. It always seemed odd that I would have such a dramatic reaction over a theme that is universally sad and not particularly profound. Movies, poems, other songs about dying mothers never affected me, but this one would cause me to well up every time. Eleven years after it’s release I was called home to CA to say goodbye to my own mother, who, as she lay brain dead in a hospital bed, looked exactly as I pictured her every time I heard that song Oiy, now I’m all verklempt.