Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Radio & Music >

What's the last song that made you cry?

Page: (1)2

17:47 / 17.06.05

The last song that made me cry was The Magnetic Fields' Irma. This is because it has a nice, slightly sad, tune, and Stephin Merritt's very detached singing voice suits the lyrics very well. It is also because it is about a father who is a bit rubbish, but his daughter doesn't mind because he loves her very much (and, coincidentally, it is a song with lots of enjambement in it, which works in such a way that the singer has to put the emphasis on the wrong syllable a lot of the time - and that's something my own father really hates in songs).

(Is there another thread about this, btw? If so, point me to it and I'll repost this here so a mod can delete this thread. I couldn't find one by searching.)

18:04 / 17.06.05

Not quite the same thing, but perhaps a good companion piece.

19:14 / 17.06.05

I almost started this exact thread, not long ago.

The last song that really had me weeping was La Marseillaise, in that scene in Casablanca - I'm sure you know the one I mean.

But that was in a movie, and it was the moment as much as the song itself, so maybe it doesn't count.

The last song-for-song's-sake that brought the tears was the Gogol Bordello cover of the Mano Negra/Manu Chao song Mala Vida. They play it with such irresistible urgency, that even without understanding the Spanish lyrics I still find it terribly moving. Hutz sings like he's helplessly watching his love walk away for the last time, and is trying to pull her back with the sheer force of his voice. Heartrending and, in my opinion, it far outstrips the original.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

19:37 / 17.06.05

Jeff Buckley, Hallelujah. Almost every time.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

19:40 / 17.06.05

"Fish And Bird" by Tom Waits... it's the blend of fairytale innocence and tragedy that does it for me, I think, as well as the man's voice (obviously). It's unfortunate, cos the album from which it comes (Alice) is one I listen to a lot at work.

Professor Silly

19:50 / 17.06.05

There There by Radiohead

I think it was a combination of the mournful vocal delivery, the hopeful lyrics, and the pissed-off guitars--it all led to emotional overload.

Professor Silly

19:51 / 17.06.05

and by the way, that was when I listened to it on headphones--it didn't have the same effect any of the time I listened to it without...hmmmmmm....

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

20:09 / 17.06.05

If you read along with the The Forgotten Arm storybook while you listen to the album, "Beautiful" by Aimee Mann will totally make you weep.

20:59 / 17.06.05

there are very few songs that have ever made me cry, I will list them all here...

Neutral Milk Hotel - basically every song off of their In The Aeroplane Over the Sea album (one of those songs was probably the most recent too)

Amazing Grace (they played this at my grandmother's funeral [her name is Grace], the week after 9/11... I burst into tears walking down the aisle)

Nico - These Days

The Velvet Underground - "Jesus" and "Candy Says"

The Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)

Nick Drake - a handful of songs off of Pink Moon

The Notwist - One With the Freaks (the part where the guitar comes in always sends shivers down my spine. and for a song that's made me cry, it's rather danceable)

Weezer - My Name is Jonas (it doesn't pack the same punch as it did when I first heard it at the age of 13, but it's still an incredibly powerful song)

Nirvana - Where Did You Sleep Last Night (from MTV Unplugged in NY)

I guess that was more than a few, huh?

23:10 / 17.06.05

Totally agree with "These days", as well as "Needle in the hay", and anything vaguely Tenenbaums.

Magnetic Field's "Papa was a rodeo" hurts bad, and oddly, "The cracks are showing" by Viv. Stanshall cuts me to the bone.

23:55 / 17.06.05

Oh dear. I think the last song that really had me bawling was ABBA's Slipping Through My Fingers, when we went to see Mamma Mia with Xoc's sister and neices. In the show itself, it's the third and most emotionally lacerating of a trio of Swedish bittersweeties (the other two being My Last Summer and The Winner Takes It All). No mercy.

11:01 / 18.06.05

Watching Soul Deep, feeling a bit 'delicate', missing Mrs The Ball, all about Otis Redding, opens with recreation of the man walking towards a plane, 'I've Been Loving You (Too Long To Stop Now)' begins to play just a moment before the narration begins, tears well up, a single one rolling down my left check.

14:47 / 18.06.05

Cranes - "Beautiful Friend"
The reason should be pretty obvious.

I also once cried my eyes out over "E.T. Phone Home" by a synthpop band called S.P.O.C.K., but I was totally exhausted and very, very drunk then. And alone, fortunately...

15:10 / 18.06.05

I've never cried to a piece of music. I have the heart of a robot on my desk. And also in my chest.

15:56 / 18.06.05

Mad World - Gary Jules version

15:59 / 18.06.05

Makes me feel rather vunerable and lost..

16:22 / 18.06.05

Look Inside America, by Blur, off 'Blur'.

Two or three years ago, there was something 'uncool' in the corner of my eye while I was listening to this, I had a funny cough, in that room, on my own. There's something about the way the strings catch in verse two that reminded me, at the time, of the time before the time when it seemed at the time I'd become... what I was. Terribly sad, I know, but I'm listening to it now with barely a flicker.

Perhaps a soul is something you're born with and need to get rid of, like say, your tonsils, rather than something that has to be 'earned' ?

Let's face it, those things, to the extent that even exist ( James Randi* says no ! ) are fundamentally antithetical to the experience of modern urban living, the bastards.

* Sp, possibly - Why doesn't Robert Anton Wilson include an index in his work ?

17:08 / 18.06.05

A couple of weeks ago I got the new Morrissey DVD Who put the M in Manchester. He did a concert on his birthday in Manchester last year, he entered the stage, the reaction of the crowd, and when he was singing, my eyes and cheeks got a little wet.

19:08 / 18.06.05

I think I have used songs as emotional triggers when I felt like I needed to or should cry about something more often than I have based on their inherent merits/significance.
Although I did brim up slightly upon thinking about the narrative in Nick Cave's Nobody's Baby Now once.

paranoidwriter waves hello

19:35 / 18.06.05

Sad as it sounds (groan), Johnny Cash's swan-song, his beautiful and (IMHO) superior cover of Nine Inch Nail's 'Hurt'. For many, many reasons....

22:32 / 18.06.05

Right.

I don't mean to sound as if this is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, I have a wide series of social interests, including live action role-play, live action role-play, and live action role-play, also I'm keen on everything, until it starts to make me see the red mist.

That said though, the Nine Inch Nails, original, version of 'Hurt' is really a lot better, see also 'The Mercy Seat,' and, horrendously for the Cash estate, that song by Depeche Mode. He'll be missed by some, Johnny Cash, but I'm not sure I'm one of them. If Roy Castle had committed the same tracks, word for word, to tape in the last days, no one would have given a rat's ass, would they ?

03:46 / 19.06.05

Trouble Me by 10,000 Maniacs used to get me in trouble every time I heard it for about a year after I broke up with my sweetie...

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:51 / 19.06.05

Got a little teary night before last, on the way home and listening to "Some Hearts" by Hammell on Trial, performed live on "Ed's not Dead". It's about seeing the lover of your best friend making out with another man in a bar a few weeks after you last saw him at his funeral, and is based on a true story. It's the lead-in that does it.

Tomorrow someone will ask you ""Who opened for Ani?", and you'll say ""Hammell on Trial". They'll say "Oh, yeah, the guy who sings about-", at which point you say "forgiveness and compassion".

It's a very sweet and very sad song.

13:39 / 19.06.05

the Nine Inch Nails, original, version of 'Hurt' is really a lot better

Hmm. I don't agree, but that's because I really hate the word "shit". The NIN version contains the line "I wear this crown of shit", which ruins it for me on two levels: one, you couldn't make a crown out of shit and it makes me have a completely unwelcome visual image of Trent Reznor (if such is indeed his name) with a poo on his head, which interferes with the movingness; and two, I spend the whole song waiting for the word and wincing. So Johnny Cash basically wins for me for turning it back into "crown of thorns", which makes more sense anyway.

Neither of them makes me cry, though.

paranoidwriter waves hello

15:49 / 19.06.05

If Roy Castle had committed the same tracks, word for word, to tape in the last days, no one would have given a rat's ass, would they ?

I think there's a reason for that Alex, no? To explain myself further, Mr Cash's version of 'Hurt' has so much impact for a couple of reasons,

1) The words mean more when they come from someone who has lived them. Not that I'm saying NIN (or Roy Castle for that matter) haven't had profound experiences in their lives (etc), but whatever you think of Johnny Cash, he did live a full and rich life with unbleievable highs and lows, and he still has a lot of years on us all.

2) His voice on the track is so fragile and old, it's like Old Man Time himself is singing to us.

Don't get me wrong Alex, I get your point, but though Roy Castle was an excellent trumpet player, let's face it, who the hell in (say) Jamaica has ever heard his songs or wept at his voice?

16:02 / 19.06.05

Not to pile on Alex, but I must agree with the above.

When Trent Reznor—a callow, whiny poseur, a millionaire superstar in his prime, with his whole life ahead of him and all the time he needs to repent—sings "Hurt," it's a fiction, a character song. Not a somng about Trent Reznor, but a song about somebody else, looking back on what he's done, assessing his life's work and finding it vain.

Cash doesn't so much sing the song as inhabit it: an old man in failing health, looking Death in the eye and haunted by his legacy of a failed first marriage, drug abuse, and ruined relationships. When he sings "the needle tears a hole," it's not Reznor's trendy heroin reference being trotted out for cheap pathos—he's talking about the insulin that keeps him alive.

For all that "authenticity" is generally a debased coin, in this case it transforms the song from a self-pitying moan to something stately and honest and (to me, anyway) quite moving.

Agreed about his other recent covers, though: as much as I wanted to like his versions of "The Mercy Seat" and "I See A Darkness" and such, they fell terribly flat for me. Twenty years ago Cash would've knocked 'em out of the park, but they simply didn't cut it when sung from death's door.

20:11 / 19.06.05

I'd love to hear Reznor's version of Record Breaker, though.

23:37 / 19.06.05

Oh, you know, it was probably 'the brute choir' off Palace Music.

I find songs with a little waver of the voice set me right off; track 5/6 on Codeine's 'The White Birch' ('City of Glass'?) does the exact same.

02:30 / 20.06.05

the cult's 'edie [ciao baby]'

remember driving three hundred kays to a friend's funeral a couple years back, playing this over and over, bawling all the way....

i still get teary thinking about it now - haven't played it for a while; dunno i can stand it...

Goodness Gracious Meme

11:04 / 20.06.05

Watching a programme about Black Icons on Saturday night.

About a minute and a half's footage of Billie Holliday singing 'Strange Fruit'.

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Gets me every time. Subject matter, delivery, composition. Everything about it is perfectly heartbreaking.

paranoidwriter waves hello

16:30 / 20.06.05

Ahh... Nina Simone....If I'd been born earlier.... I'd have begged her to marry me.....

'Mr. Bojangles' is a tear-jerker as well, seeing as it's true and all.

Also, after thinking of this thread and the Motown Remix thread, may I offer the following two tracks as well?

'It's Not That Easy'' Reuben Bell & the Casanovas -- Warning! If you're heartbroken already, this WILL make you cry.

'Pearls' by Sade -- I've been "in love" with She with the Voice of Honey and Coffee for a long, long time now, so I'm biased, but this song contains the most soul-wrenching halleluyah's I've EVER heard; even more so that Jeff Buckley's beautiful Leonard Cohen cover, which was mentioned earlier in this thread.

paranoidwriter waves hello

16:44 / 20.06.05

Sorry, GGM, I just realised you meant Billie Holliday's version. Oops! Mind you, if someone put a gun to my head and trried to make me choose between Ms Holiday, Ms Simone, and Ms Fitzgerald, I'd have to tell them to pull the trigger.

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:22 / 20.06.05

Always go for the dame with no legs.

20:25 / 20.06.05

I just have to point out, totally contrary to the spirit of this thread (though in keeping with many of the digressions that are spinning off it) that the best extant version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is the one sung by Leonard Cohen. So there.

11:05 / 21.06.05

Deva (and I am sorry, this is going to be off topic again so maybe I should go away to a Cohen thread) -do you prefer the music or the lyrics of the Cohen version? I don't know which one I prefer so I'd be interested to hear what you like about one more than the other...

The last song I cried to -or at least the last song to which I failed to prevent my lower lip from trembling more than usual -was Tom Waits' The Day After Tomorrow. This was mostly a result of base self-pity, I'd had a vile day and had decided to wallow in it. So I ended up listening to one of the saddest songs I know and allowing myself to think 'This dude's missing home and so am I!'. Managed to pull myself together when I realised that maybe 'having an argument with your boss' and 'having a rough time of it in Iraq' are, as far as 'vile' goes, not of the same order of magnitude.

Page: (1)2