While taking a drive this morning, I decided to listen to Journey into the Westby Annie Lennox.
By the end of the song, I had tears streaming down my face.
This song seems to bring me to tears so easily.
I’ve heard other singers cover this song, some very good, but it’s Annie Lennox’s version that moves me the most.
Her voice is almost grating when it rises to the stronger points of the song, but for me that makes it truer to the theme of parting and separation.
(Dammit. Just made myself cry again by testing the link just now.)
Another song that I can easily cry to is Nick Cave’s Into My Arms, because the themes are so pertinent to my life right now.
There are a few other songs that have made me cry before, but I just can’t recall right now.
What songs are genuine tear-jerkers for you?
Are there any that just seem to squeeze your heart and pierce your soul?
What about them do you find so moving?
(Don’t know if this belongs in IMHO or here, but I figured music . . . culture . . . CafeSoc. Also don’t know if this topic has been done, but after 7 failed searches, fookit!)
There are a couple for me. “Never Without You” by Ringo Starr, which was a tribute to his late friend George Harrison made me tear up the first few times I heard it. “The Living Years” by Mike and the Mechanics and “Hell Yeah” by Neil Diamond make me think of my dad.
Yeah. The Living Years got me pretty choked up when I first heard it.
It made me think about the regrets in my own relationship with my father, or the possible regrets I might feel when he’s gone.
But even just the idea of regret over things left unsaid and undone, as an objective concept, is very moving to me.
For me, it would be because the guy who wrote it isn’t in a small bare concrete room with me so I can ask him to explain exactly what some of the phrases mean, and hit him until he comes up with something coherent. This is something that happens with every Train song I have ever heard.
The Men They Couldn’t Hang’s version of “The Green Fields of France” has about a 50% success rate at bringing the tears. Stan Rogers singing “The Mary Ellen Carter” will do it every time. I am okay with that.
What I am not okay with is the two ridiculously obvious tearjerkers that I can’t seem to get an immune response to. Red Sovine, you can take your “Teddy Bear” and the two of you can rot in hell. Meryn Cadell, be aware that “Cat Carol” actually caused me to have to pull over to the side of the highway because I couldn’t see to drive. That’s not safe, dude.
Had me blubbing regularly over Christmas tv just past and it’s just an ad for a department store.
Also, the theme tune to ‘The Littlest Hobo’- from before the age of 1 to now (some 30 plus years later) …WHY WON’T ANYONE TAKE HIM IN AND LOVE HIM FOREVER!!!WHY?!
Your second recommendation reminded me of one that deeply moved me when I was a wee lad in the early years of primary school: The Wild Colonial Boy. (Couldn’t find a decent clip for the australian version.)
A simple narrative. A simple folk story of a life with a tragic fate. Similar to Elvis’s The Ghetto.
Yep. It is hard to forgive a song that can choke you up while being so cloying.
It just feels wrong to be touched by a song that tells about a throng of hard truckers each taking their turn to give a little boy a ride before his mother gets home.
Also, the theme tune to ‘The Littlest Hobo’- from before the age of 1 to now (some 30 plus years later) …WHY WON’T ANYONE TAKE HIM IN AND LOVE HIM FOREVER!!!WHY?!
Not the only one that can get to me (I’m a sentimental fool) but I was waiting to get my hair cut a while back when Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” played in the shop and by the end of the song I had tears streaming down my face. Not sure why it got to me that particular day when I’ve heard it countless times before. I think I was just hearing the lyrics in a different way now that ‘I’m getting older too.’
“The Bluest Eyes in Texas” as covered by Nina Persson (former lead singer for the Cardigans). Beautiful song, and the fact that it plays over the closing credits of Boys Don’t Cry is just too much.
I’ve always reacted to music first and lyrics second in pop or rock songs. No matter how well-crafted the lyrics may be, they’re less likely to get to me if not placed in a musical setting that reaches me in some way.
Two Beach Boys songs have brought tears to my eyes more than once, again far more for their musical content than their lyrics: “Kiss Me, Baby” and “She Knows Me Too Well.”*
I know people react differently to Brian Wilson’s falsetto, but I find its aching and yearning qualities when he soars into the upper register to be devastating under the right circumstances. When you combine that with those close harmonies beneath him, it can put me right on the floor.
*Really, nearly all of Side 2 of The Beach Boys Today! affects me that way, including their goosebump-inducing cover of The Students’ “I’m So Young.”
The Mary Stanford of Rye - the RNLI’s biggest loss of life and a fishing community half wiped out. The youngest crew member’s body is still out there somewhere.
If I were a soap opera actress I could probably make myself cry whenever the script called for it just by thinking about the Roger Waters song “Watching TV”, about watching the June 4 Massacre at Tiananmen Square on TV and seeing the death of a beautiful young student. I wouldn’t even say this is a particularly good song, and the lyrics describing the (fictional) student cross over into creepy Orientalist territory a couple of times (“She had almond eyes, she had yellow thighs”), but I’m getting choked up at my computer right now anyway.
I’m not sure what it is about this song exactly, but the Tiananmen Square massacre is one of the first major news stories that I remember seeing on TV when I was old enough to be paying much attention. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but the song is about being emotionally affected by something seen on TV even when you don’t have a personal connection and maybe don’t even understand the context. The song also samples a recording by one of the surviving student protesters that was smuggled out of China. She’s obviously crying and she says (in Chinese) “People of China, do not forget the children who died for you. Long live the Republic.” I don’t even speak Chinese, but If I’m not already crying by that point then I’m sure to start.
Well. We are all huge U2 fans here, we all have our favorites, and find some songs sad and the others sadder. ‘October’ and ‘With Or Without You’ and a few others…two middle aged adults and one grown up child tear up en masse, driving in the car and hearing either of these.
