“Joe Hill” as sung by Joan Baez. Can’t explain it.
I Don’t Believe In the Sun–Magnetic Fields.
I don’t believe in the sun,
How could it shine on everyone,
and never shine on me?
Wouldn’t it just be easier to get the Mike Curb Congregation “Greatest Hits” CD?
Tho seeing this group also did “It’s a small world after all” and “I’ll give you a daisy a day, dear” I must admit my nostalgia for them suddenly lost a bit of its poignancy for me.
But it is a great tune. And great minds think… something something.
What Songs Make You “Tear Up”?
*Old Days * - Chicago
*Bridge Over Troubled Water * - S&G
I tear up at Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t she Lovely:
Isn’t she lovely
Isn’t she wonderfull
Isn’t she precious
Less than one minute old
I never thought through love we’d be
Making one as lovely as she
But isn’t she lovely made from love
Bob Mould, “Can’t Fight It”
Pearl Jam, “Black”
Mojave 3, “Mercy”
“Mercy” also has one of the saddest-sounding guitars that I’ve ever heard.
Slowdive, “Primal”:
Printing the lyrics for this song just doesn’t work. They don’t really make sense outside the actual song. There’s just a huge amount of emotion in how the song builds up and how it is sung. I suppose that’s true of any of the songs listed in this thread, but for this one it seems more so somehow. It’s kinda hard to explain.
“Watermelon in Easter Hay” by Frank Zappa (most gorgeous guitar solo ever), the Kronos Quartet version of “El Llorar” (I’m a sucker for any weepy Mexican music, especially with violins and falsetto singing), and probably a few Beatles songs. Sometimes Devo’s “Beautiful World” almost causes that reaction in me, especially after I saw the video, with its ironic juxtaposition of upbeat music and lyrics with found footage of old-fashioned optimistic ideas of the future along with horrors like the KKK, nuclear death, starvation, and police brutality. But usually it just makes me smirk.
This is true.
I always felt the song was about that feeling you have when you fall for someone, and you have no idea how they feel about you. It’s about searching for clues to their feelings, and dropping hints to them about how you feel. It’s about gearing yourself up to admit to this person your feelings towards them, and recognizing how exposed you are emotionally in doing so. It’s about that feeling of dread you have knowing that the other person might not feel the same way.
It’s that huge, nervous knot in your stomach, put into song.
The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer gets me every time ever since I was a little kid. This part has always really gotten to me:
But now I think this part gets to me even worse, because it reminds me of my Grandfather who was every bit the man that John Henry was and now has brain cancer:
I know this one sounds pretty lame…
I’ve never been able to test this theory, but I’ve always thought that if I ever heard a really good rendition of Beethoven’s 9th live in concert I might just well up with tears of joy.
Great.
I’ve cried twice in the last 7 years.
Once a little over a year ago when my girlfriend of two years dumped me, and once right now.
I shouldn’t have looked up the lyrics to that song
At the end of the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” – the lines “Oh no, I can’t deny it / Oh yeah, I guess I gotta buy it” make me tear up, because it’s such an amusingly knowing, funny twist. Will the narrator, who has spent the entire song sadly detailing how the pure, innocent memory of his old crush has been spoiled by the sight of her in an adult magazine, let ANY of that get in the way of some good ol’ masturbating? OF COURSE NOT! Because he’s a guy.
I think the last line, “Never more again / Will I believe the sun” is just so sad, the feeling that you can’t trust anything anymore.
The only song that ever did this to me was “Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon. Of course the context that makes it so weepy is that very soon after this song was released, John Lennon was killed. This part really makes me sad…
Out on the ocean sailing away
I can hardly wait
To see you come of age
But I guess we’ll both just have to be patient
Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
Actually, if I remember, he did play “Miami” at the Concert for New York, precluded with a statement something like “when I wrote this, it was science fiction. I would never imagined it could come true.”
And it definitely chokes me up when I hear it now. I’d put it on a mix CD about a month before 9/11, and haven’t really been able to listen to any of the album, just knowing that’s on there.
Other songs that do it: the finale of Rent, more because I picture the staging of the show when I hear it than the song itself.
Dang…I know there’s others, I just have blocked them so thoroughly that I just can’t remember right now.
Several Pogues songs do it for me, especially “Fairy Tale of New York”, “Broad Majestic Shannon”, and their version of “And the Band Played ‘Waltzing Matilda’”.
The them from Terms of Endearment never fails to make me misty.
Alone Again …Naturally
- by Gilbert O’Sullivan*
Just a little while from now
If I’m not feeling any more sorrow
I promise myself, to treat myself
and visit a nearby tower
Climbing to the top
Gonna throw myself off
In an effort to
Make it clear to who
ever what it like when you’re shattered
Left standing in the lurch, at a church
where people are saying
“My God thats tough she stood him up
no point in us remaining”
I may as well go home
cause now I’m on my own
“Alone again…Natrually”
To think that only yesterday
I was cheerful, bright and gay
Looking forward to, but wouldn’t do
The role I was about to play
But as if to knock me down
the allergy came around
and without so much
as a mere touch
shook me into little pieces
leaving me to doubt
talk about “GOD AND HIS MERCY”
Oh if he really does exist, why did he desert me.
In my hour of need, I truly am indeed
Alone again…Natrually
It seems to me that there are more hearts
still in the world
that can’t be mended
left unattended
what do we do…what do we do
lyrics…lyrics lyrics"
Looking back over the years
and all else that appears
I remember I cried
when my father died
never wishing to hide the tears
She was 65 years old,
my mother God rest her soul
she has left to stand,
by the only man,
she;d ever had been taken
Leaving her to starve
with her heart, so badly broken
despite encouragement for me
no words were ever spoken
When she passed away, I cried and cried all day
Alone again…natrually
Alone again …natrually
Cat’s in the Cradle by Harry Chaplin.
Truly Madly Deeply by Savage Garden.
Probably the saddest song possible.