Excellent- what I came to post.
My vote too - I can’t listen to it any more since my kids were born. Sorry I read your post, now I’m crying.
In a moment of irony a few weeks ago… the DJs on the radio were talking about songs that really stick it to ya. My mind immediately went to Tears In Heaven, though that wasn’t mentioned. I walked into the office a few minutes later. Dashed down to the cafeteria to get a soft drink. That was playing in the background. Yep, just exactly the perfect song to relax to. Damn.
Me and a Gun - Tori Amos:
Two that are at least worth mentioning:
Warren Zevon’s cover of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, recorded when he knew he was dying of cancer.
A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request, by Steve Goodman, is a funny song, sung from the point of view of an old man describing his ideal funeral at Wrigley Field, filled with references to the Cubs’ decades of futility and ending with a pyre of baseball bats and his ashes being blown over the outfield wall. Here’s a video of him singing the song on one of the outfield rooftops, with Wrigley Field in the background
Goodman died of leukemia at 36, and some of his ashes were scattered at Wrigley.
Wish You Were here - written by David Gilmour and Roger Waters for their friend, Syd Barrett, who had had a mental breakdown and was slowly going insane.
But really Zevon’s entire last album fits this category. The album was made in the last year of his life. He had been given only weeks to live, so he went into the recording sessions pretty much every day with the fear that he wouldn’t survive until the next one. The final track was recorded in his home studio because he wasn’t capable of travel. He died shortly after the record was released.
One track on the album is a personal goodbye to a woman he was no longer in contact with. Another was a story about death row, as a metaphor for his cancer. Yet another, recorded with his buddies and all having a grand time, laments that he party can’t go on forever. And of course, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, in which Zevon can be heard in the background during the ending shouting, “Open up! Open up for me!” And of course “Keep Me in Your Heart”, where he begs everyone to remember him - for a while.
Saddest album ever.
Biko - Peter Gabriel
“September '77
Port Elizabeth weather fine
It was business as usual
In police room 619
…
Yihla Moja, Yihla Moja
-The man is dead”
Brings back the 80s for me like nothing else can, not even Johnny Clegg. I can smell the tires burning, I can see the purple stains from the watercannons. I can feel the sjambok cracking down on my skin…
Celine Dion did a tearjerker in French called “Le Fils de Superman” (The Son of Superman).
Supposed to be based on a true story about a little kid who did a header out of an apartment building window in his Superman costume and died. They bury him in his costume. Makes me sad as hell when I think about it.