I always have to wipe a tear after hearing “Cat’s in the Cradle” and, lately, “Dance With My Father” by Luther Vandross.
What songs always get you right there?
Josh Groban’s “To Where You Are”
“Wasted Time” on the Eagle’s Hotel California.
There are others, but they make me cry for personal reasons rather than the tearjerking qualities of the song itself.
Also, as a kid, “One Tin Soldier” and “Wildfire” always broke me up. :o
“The Ballad of Curtis Lowe” by Skynyrd. Also “Patches.” I don’t really cry, but close enough.
The whole “Lady in Satin” album by Billie Holiday is a tear-fest. All the more tearful because you could hear her dying.
Adam’s Song by Blink 182 gets me every time.
“Asleep” by The Smiths and “Jezebel” by 10,000 Maniacs.
Ripple and Broken Down Palace by the Greatful Dead.
“Fare thee well my only true one”
“100 Years” by Five for Fighting.
I’m okay until it gets to “I’m 99 for a moment, dying for just another moment…”
Ack.
Heaven’s Highest Hill by Billy Falcon is one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard. In fact, it’s so sad that I sometimes get pissed listening to it as it seems blatantly manipulative.
Lyrics
"Leavin’ on a Jet Plane" always brings tears to my eyes. For the better part of the last four years, leenmi has travelled for his work, leaving (often on a Jet Plane) before the kid and I wake up Monday morning and coming home on Friday night. We’re used to the schedule, but we still miss him when he’s away.
(For the record, this part of the second verse
There’s so many times I’ve let you down,
So many times, I’ve played around,
I tell you now, they don’t mean a thing.
is not relevant to us. But by the time it comes around I’m usually too weepy to notice it.)
If I’m feeling a little pensive or down about my family’s lack of tolerance, Cyndi Lauper’s Shine will get the waterworks going.
Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning by Alan Jackson. It was read into the Congressional record.
A lot of songs get me weepy (sometimes oddly, or unexpectedly), especially if I’m doing something else and not consciously listening to the song. But that seems to have more to do with the music than the lyrics.
One song that gets me nearly every time I listen to it, though, is This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush. I can hardly stay dry-eyed just thinking about it.
(But a lot of the songs mentioned above just sound corny to me. Maybe mine will sound corny to you, though, so then we’ll be even.)
Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now, and Case of You, particularly the line
I don’t udnerstand why. But I’m crying right now.
There are many more ! I will be back …
For a while, I couldn’t hear Billy Joel’s “Miami 2017 (Lights Go Out On Broadway)” without getting choked up. It’s passed a bit by now, but it can still get me a little melancholy. And in some moods, U2 “Pride (In the Name of Love)” does a pretty bang-up job.
And though the music itself doesn’t do it to me so much anymore, thinking about the staging at the end of Rent during the Finale/Curtain Call gets me bawling. My girlfriend found it endearing when we went to go see the show together early in our relationship.
Johnny Cash’s “Supper Time” always did it for me. Even more so when he died.
Harry Chapin’s Taxi gets me every time (even now, just reading the lyrics), as does Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Dammit, where’s my kleenex?
Living Years - Mike & The Mechanics
Brick - Ben Folds Five
and Tears in Heaven - Eric Clapton.
Tears in Heaven just breaks my heart. I could listen to it no problem before my Mom died. My fiance and I were getting ready to go out Friday night and this song came on the CD shuffle. I just sat there and cried.
“A Case of You” gets me choked up, too, but there’s also a James Taylor song, forget the title now, starts something like “Just yesterday morning, when they said you were gone…” that always makes me think of a specific loved one, gone these many years.