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Underground > Radio & Music >

Choke back those tears...

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01:44 / 24.11.02

Ain't there one damn song that makes you break down and cry? warbled Bowie, inimitably, on Young Americans.

Any tunes guaranteed to make you well up or even burst into floods?

I can recall having a good sob to these at one time or another and there's a catch in my throat most times when I sing along:
Angels, Robbie Williams
Rock and Roll Suicide, Bowie (when he sings "Oh no love, you're not alone..."
Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday
Maybe this time (Cabaret soundtrack), Liza Minnelli
Eleanor Rigby, Beatles

There are probably quite a few more but then I'm probably just a sentimental old queen.

Tellme, people. I'm feeling like a good wallow...

03:01 / 24.11.02

This week, I have mostly been crying to Belle And Sebastian. In this instance, songs from Fold Your Hands Child You Walk Like A Peasant but pretty much anything will do. I should not put it on my walkman in the mornings on the bus.

Goodness Gracious Meme

11:30 / 24.11.02

ooh, was talking about exactly this t'other day:

David Bowie - Quicksand, The Bewlay Brothers
Massive Attack - most of Blue Lines
Nick Drake - Cello Song.

12:42 / 24.11.02

Petula Clark singing "Downtown." Every time.

Greatest record ever made.

Jack The Bodiless

13:23 / 24.11.02

Ooooh. Two songs that always make me sniffle...

Sting, 'Why Should I Cry For You?' - a lament for his deceased father, couched, as the rest of the Soul Cages is, in imagery, story and metaphor surrounding a sailor... "Why should I cry for you?/ Why would you want me to?/ What would it mean to say/ That I loved you in my fashion?" Oddly haunting, but not as much as...

Jeff Buckley, 'Dream Brother' - another lament for a lost father, also a singer/songwriter of rare ability, Tim Buckley (died of an overdose of heroin and alcohol). With a lyric full of bitter regret which, yet, empathises and identifies with the father he only met twice, 'Dream Brother' ends with the frankly scary coda "Asleep in the sand with the ocean washing over..." Jeff Buckley drowned in 1997. The song is even more haunting now... it could almost be Tim singing a lament for Jeff...

Have just realised that I may have issues surrounding my own father. Goddamn it.

13:39 / 24.11.02

Mostly Tori Amos. A lot of her stuff, actually. And Jeff Buckley, too. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: 'The Ship Song', and various others, particularly from 'no more shall we part' and 'The Boatman's Call'.

13:51 / 24.11.02

The last song that made me cry on first listen was Do You Realise? by the Flaming Lips. It was that moment where the song seems to lift after the first chorus, combined with the previous lyric "Do you realise the sun doesn't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round."

One that never fails to get me is Storm by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I have no idea why... I guess it's that sense of sad triumph, the continual build until it settles into something hymnal, then shifting unexpectedly into apocalyptic fury, then down to just the sad minimal piano. If I'm alone it makes me weep uncontrollably.

14:33 / 24.11.02

And I forgot 'The Ghost of Tom Joad' (album) by Bruce Springsteen.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:53 / 24.11.02

"The Ghost of your Father", or "Love Songs", or "Green and Grey". All by New Model Army. Although Tom Waits' "A Soldier's Things" is coming close recently.

15:18 / 24.11.02

"Trouble Me" by 10,000 Maniacs. It started popping up on the radio again right when my relationship of 12 years was foundering on communication issues. There were a couple of times when I was driving that I had to pull over and sob for a while. I still get a little teary when I hear it...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:18 / 24.11.02

"this one's for bravery... and this one's for me... and everything's a dollar in this box".

I'm crying as I type.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:21 / 24.11.02

Oh, and I forgot another NMA classic- "Far Better Thing".

"in the white-washed cancer ward, with my hot blood running wild..... now, please give me the strength to cut- and to keep our secret..."

15:32 / 24.11.02

Little to do with the song itself, more my personal circumstances when it was released - "Fairground" by Simply Bastard Red. "I love the thought of coming home to you," - Mick Hucknall was mocking my heartache.

Matthew Fluxington

19:00 / 24.11.02

Cat Power's "Sea Of Love" and "I Found A Reason" kill me every single time.

19:28 / 24.11.02

Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" - oh man, that song really chokes me up.

So many Tori Amos songs, but they shift as they (vaguely or otherwise) match up to my mood or life events.

and that Radiohead song, "Like Spinning Plates." I can't even sing along; the tears just stream down my face before I have a chance to catch myself.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

09:06 / 25.11.02

'All Apologies', which I only heard post-Kurt's suicide probably got me the closest to tears.

09:57 / 25.11.02

Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Pathos by the bucketload.

The Natural Way

10:21 / 25.11.02

Is that that tune that samples the down-and-out singing?

11:19 / 25.11.02

Cat Power gets me every time.. I cried whilst watching her play in LA (though thankfully not quite enough so anyone noticed).

And sometimes I'm a sucker for a bit of old fashioned melodrama, so hense numerous old time country and folk songs have made me cry,
as have;

Do you Realise? - The Flaming Lips
The Kindness of Strangers - Nick Cave
And a song I don't remember the name of off Low's 'Things We Lost in the Fire'..

11:47 / 25.11.02

Codeine 'Ides', from 'The White Birch'.

'The Letter' by Kristin Hersh, from 'Hips and Makers' used to, but then I read an interview where she proclaimed herself very embarrassed by the song. It is kind of gushing, actually. But I wished I hadn't read that.

Palace 'Stablemate', from 'Arise Therefore' is pretty harrowing, too.

12:32 / 25.11.02

Is that that tune that samples the down-and-out singing?

Remembrunce, sorry to jump in on your question for Sax. But, yes. I think there is a whole album of versions of the song, including one where Tom Waits is effectively dueting with the down-and-out. Very moving.

Murray Hamhandler

15:03 / 25.11.02

"Caroline, No" by The Beach Boys. Even though I realize it's a bit...chauvinistic. Or something. It's the loss in his voice that gets me.
"Holland, 1945", by Neutral Milk Hotel. I basically can't get through In The Aeroplane... w/o losing my shit a little.

And the last time I heard "It's Not That Easy Bein' Green", I totally lost it. Seriously. It surprised even me.

17:27 / 25.11.02

The Mountain Goats "There Will Be No Divorce," linked to in two other threads on this site.
It's good.

That's the most recent one.

19:17 / 25.11.02

Maybe this time (Cabaret soundtrack), Liza Minnelli

That one gets me too, ZoCher. I cried when Jennifer Jason Leigh sang it on Broadway too, but that was for different reasons... (she was a very acceptable Sally Bowles, but Liza's a far better singer.)

This Woman's Work by Kate Bush will always find me reaching for my hanky, as does the Who's The Song is Over.

Locust No longer

20:21 / 25.11.02

Iron and Wine's "Upward Over the Mountain" from the best album of the year, THE CREEK DRANK THE CRADLE.

06:26 / 26.11.02

*Sob* Sniffle* just reading those titles...

Don't know how you can even listen to the Gavin Bryars thing, Sax, I'd cut my wrists to the opening bars, masochism!

And Downtown may very well be the greatest record ever made, Sir Jack, but I don't find it sad at all. Quite the reverse, makes me want to partayyy, just me and Petula swinging our handbags and hitting the bars, where all the lights are bright.

12:13 / 26.11.02

Well, yeah. That's why I cry, 'cher--it's tears of joy at the promise of hope renewed, that life is good and love is real and all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

I mean, it's fundamentally an optimistic song, but it's a hard-won optimism--reaching for the light while never denying the dark, saying Yes, there is hope, but it is fragile and must be nurtured.

There's this struggle even in the music--you've got these brassy builds, and then the reassurances come--"How can you lose?"--but the music decresendos and Petula's voice drops down, husky, almost breaking, as it shifts to the minor key... and from almost nothing the music fights its way back up, as Petula ascends the melody back up the high point.

"Downtown"'s promise of happiness is meaningless without the fear of loneliness to drive it. That it manages to suggest both (and the happiness it promises isn't specifically sexual--it's the promise of a kindred spirit: "You may find somebody kind to help and understand you, someone who is just like you and needs a helping hand to guide them along...") is what make s this the Greatest Record Ever Made (noi disrespect to "River Deep, Mountain High").

Trench optimism. Hope in hell. There's nothing as joyous or as heartbreaking as someone putting on a brave face, reaching for love in a cruel world.

12:37 / 26.11.02

I think there is a whole album of versions of the song, including one where Tom Waits is effectively dueting with the down-and-out.

Indeed there is, although the 'versions' run into each other, making the whole thing one huge movement. 75 minutes long. Oddly hypnotic, if highly disturbing.

(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay never failed me yet.

Murray Hamhandler

13:14 / 26.11.02

Well since we went down the Redding freeway, I must add "I've Been Loving You Too Long".

OH! And the Stevie Wonder! "Knocks Me Off My Feet" does just that.

13:54 / 26.11.02

The ones that usually get to me are songs about family.

My Father's Eyes by Clapton
He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother by the Hollies
Your Mother Should Know by the Beatles

Especially this last one, for some unknown reason. It makes me choke up and sometimes flat-out cry, which can be really embarrassing in public.

Plus there are others that end up twanging some kind of tear nerve in me to choke me up. Possibly due to beauty or just the right note at the right time.

O Holy Night
Gymnopedie #1 by Satie
Nocturne by Secret Garden
Walking in the Air from The Snowman
Won't Get Fooled Again by the Who

The Natural Way

14:21 / 26.11.02

"Knocks Me Off My Feet" is a truly fantastic song. Agreement. And weeping.

The bride - a fair battleoxen - looks so beautiful, and, LOOK!, the Proclaimers are here to give her away......

17:31 / 26.11.02

I have my fingers in my ears and my tongue sticking out, Jack Fear, and I'm singing loudly along to that happy, happy tune!

There's "Angie" by the Stones, which is perhaps more to do with memories of my bittersweet and ultimately doomed first heterosexual affair.

And there's always the Marseillaise for cathartic exsalination.

20:23 / 26.11.02

Actually, thinking on what Jack wrote, I have a similar reaction to the Mary Tyler Moore theme, especially if you take the first season theme as verse one and the subsequent seasons' theme (the more familiar one) as verse two.

The first verse then goes:
How will you make it on your own?
The world is awfully big,
and girl you're finally all alone.
Well, it's time that you started living --
it's time you let someone else do the giving.
Love is all around, no need to waste it,
You could have this town, reach out and take it
You might just make it after all.

Which is all about overcoming some sort of unspecified setback, leaving "you" alone and on your own.
(The implication is of a divorce, and a divorce from Dick Van Dyke at that, but it's not stated outright.)
Then, it carries on to the next verse, which is the version everyone knows and that Husker Du covered:
Who can turn the world on with her smile?
Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?
Well, it's you, girl, and you should know it!
With each glance and every little movement you show it!
Love is all around, no need to waste it
You could have this town, why don't you take it?
You're gonna make it after all.

So the aggressive questioning of the first verse transforms magically into this rhetorical cheering section in the second, sort of like a gatekeeper that has been satisfied by the fulfillment of a quest; the heroine has stood firm in the face of doubt, solitude and adversity, and returned a champion, worthy of all her hard-earned successes and with the promise of more... the whole town, in fact.

20:31 / 26.11.02

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:06 / 26.11.02

H.I.R. et al: The version of Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet on which Waits features was the 97 rerelease, I think. At the moment, it's the version as Bryars has revised the piece in line with recording technology - the first version was one side of one album (reissued by Virgin a couple of years ago) . Waits wasn't originally included, but he pestered Bryars because apparently he'd taped the original off the radio, years ago, and had played it so much that it'd become his favourite piece of music. So much so that Bryars thought of him and brought him in for what I think (it's been a while since I've played it because as much as I love it, it fucks me up) is the last track.

Speaking of Waits, some of his songs can do it for me, really easily. "Ruby's Arms" for the pain of leaving, taking the bare minimum; "Old Shoes (And Picture Postcards)" for a reason I can't pinpoint; "A Sight For Sore Eyes" for the fucking wino's lament at things, the ceaseless smiling through tragedy, alcoholic optimism ("I'll play you at pinball/naw, y'ain't got a chance/aw, go on over - ask her to dance"); "Picture In A Frame" for the basic, honest love that anyone craves; "Innocent When You Dream" for that lost-friends feel, and "Lucky Day" for what's always sounded to me like someone going away to die, waving and smiling to try and hold people together. "I'll be back some lucky day", he sings - and you just fucking know there's not going to BE a lucky day.

What else? "I See A Darkness" by Bonny "Prince" Billy, a fair chunk of Grant Lee Buffalo's Mighty Joe Moon for its morphine-covered woe, Big Star's "Holocaust" (which I'd only ever heard in a cover version until recently), assorted Low tracks ("Over The Ocean" and "Don't Carry It All" being main offenders) and "Done With Everything" by Sodastream.

When I was tiny, "Fernando" used to make me cry. I don't know why. I still don't like listening to it.

Actually, they're not "songs" per se, but the part of Bryars' The Sinking Of The Titanic where "Autumn" rises up out of the descending sounds is fucking heartbreaking. As, of course, does a lot of Dirty Three. Including "Everything's Fucked", which is just beautiful. Just fucking beautiful.

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