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Underground > Radio & Music >

Choke back those tears...

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01:26 / 28.12.02

At risk of being disloyal, I'd have to go with Jack Fear on 'Downtown': there's something so terribly fragile about the slender balance of optimism that I find myself becoming sad and worried in advance for the singer whose wistful-but-lofty expectations ("and you may find somebody kind to help and understand you" - what are the chances of that happening?) will surely be crushed by cruel urban reality.

*sob*

At present, I'm listening to the Sunscreen Song, the one on the Baz Luhrmann soundtrack thing. I know it's cheesy, I know it's designed to elicit a particular reaction... but some of those lyrical truisms are just too damned bittersweet to dodge...

01:29 / 28.12.02

(And yes, 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' for the same reasons as 'Downtown': all-too-easily-extinguishable hope, with the added touch that the singer has obviously tangled with the law already and, despite a touchingly childlike naivety, probably has few options left...)

The Return Of Rothkoid

05:46 / 28.12.02

Exactly. It's that bottom-of-bottle childishness that makes it so painful; like it's a beautiful dream that you know, somewhere, doesn't exist, and is just shorthand for death in a boxcar.

Boy in a Suitcase

06:37 / 28.12.02

Props to "I See a Darkness," "Soldier's Things"... of course, the Holly Cole cover of Soldier's Things gets me even more.

Beyond belief: "Broccoli" by Coil (The death of the mother, the death of the father, is something you prepare for, all your life, all their lives...).
"AB/BA" by Throbbing Gristle, for some inexplicable reason.
"Decades" by Joy Division, not to be obvious.
The whole of "Plastic Ono Band" by John Lennon, especially "Mother," "Working Class Hero," "Love," and "God"
"Hey Joe" by Daniel Johnston. (Covered by Sparklehorse on "Good Morning Spider") Also the whole of Daniel Johnston's album "1990"
"Earth Covers Earth" by Current 93
"Black Eyed Dog" by Nick Drake sends me into convulsions of terror whenever I hear it.

All obvious answers, I guess.

The Return Of Rothkoid

11:12 / 28.12.02

Nick Drake: "Day Is Done" for the despair in it (and the Magical Lachrymose Chord Progression). And, for some reason, Abba's "Dancing Queen". There's something of that cheery denial of everything bad in it that just brings me undone. Fine lines.

wembley can change in 28 days

19:04 / 28.12.02

Oh, man. Ditto to just about everything that's been said so far. Definitely Maybe this time from Cabaret. When I was a kid I used to put on George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice Vol.I to get me crying - weird.

The entirety of Tori Amos' Under the Pink.

Morrissey, Will Never Marry.
Much of the Cure.
the Rheostatics, A Midwinter Night's Dream, Stolen Car, Northern Wish.
Divine Comedy, Tonight we fly, for no reason at all.
Beatles, She's leaving home (I've always sided with the parents)
Much dirty three, especially Lullaby for christy.
Tom Waits, Picture in a frame, Briar and the rose, Shore Leave
Beethoven's 9th. I started actually weeping the last time I listened to it, when something made me think of him sitting deaf and lonely in his room, scribbling these notes to an optimistic poem. I might have been in one of those moods that allows me to cry at Kevin Costner films, though.
And I don't want to admit it, but a lot of songs by the Manics make me well up. There's something about their sound that gets me really emotional.

19:59 / 29.12.02

Alison by Slowdive. Makes me wish my name were Alison sometimes.

13:31 / 05.08.05

This fits better here than in the "last song to make you cry" thread, though I'm not sure if it fits here either.

But anyway. I find myself rather unsusceptible to sad lyrics in songs* and almost always find the music more affecting.

The french horn (I think, I dunno me brass as well as I should) in You Can't Always Get What You want by the Rolling Stones always gets me, for instance.

Similarly, the piano in Northern Sky gets me more than Nick Drake's lyric. If I recall correctly, it's John Cale?

Trois Gymnopedies and Girl With the Sun in Her Hair also do this, as does a lot of Sigur Ros. I know there are musical reasons for my emotions to be affected like this, it's just odd that my emotions seem to be affected by the music alone and rarely the lyric.

Even if I am affected by singing, it's singing not the song which gets me. For instance, I'm affected by Black Dog by Nick Drake, but that's more empathy (some days) and terror (others) at how end-of-tether he sounds rather than sadness from the lyric. And it's rare that that happens too...

Anyone else get this?

*Shipbuilding is the one song which, lyrically, can get me every time; "diving for dear life/ when we could be diving for pearls"

09:54 / 06.08.05

Joni Mitchell, "California." It makes me feel all nostalgic and also feels very poignant in light of current events and because I live abroad (though I realize she's Canadian).

Very sad addendum to "Downtown:" While my dad was a teen, he had a particularly tumultous time due to his mother's mental problems. He was moved halfway across the world, essentially against his will, and every time he heard that song he would think of his hometown, thinking he would never see it again.

He did, but that story still makes me sad.

21:20 / 06.08.05

The Temptations, Little Green Apples - not sure why, as it is a happy-ish lyrical song about how much someone loves someone else, I guess it's just Paul Williams' voice on the song, partly the knowledge that the man was collapsing into a serious alcohol dependency at this stage, but also somehow he manages to make the song sound like the saddest cry for help, the lonliest call of unrequited love that I have ever heard.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:22 / 06.08.05

Boy In A Suitcase is totally right about Coil's "Broccoli"...

Dead Can Dance's "The Host Of Seraphim"- there's a point in that track where everything is just so beautiful all at once that it becomes a bit much to take for me, and I cry like a particularly wussy baby. Always the same bit. Always the same reaction.

23:57 / 06.08.05

[I]"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...[/I]

I have a story involving that song.

in a bus station I came across a woman who had slash marks on her wrists, like she wanted to hurt herself just enough so that somebody would notice and say something.

as I did so, that song started on the music selection piped into the bus station.

up until then I had liked 10,000 Maniacs at first, then considered them kitsch. since then I have not considered them kitsch at all.

23:38 / 07.08.05

"Real Love" by the (sort-of) Beatles. It was simply a demo tape of John Lennon at his piano and for the Anthology, the rest of the Beatles (plus George Martin and Jeff Lynne) got together and laid some more instrumentation on it. The reason it puts a tear in my eye is because it reminds me of what we lost thanks to Mark David Chapman. Thanks, motherfucker. Thanks.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

00:00 / 08.08.05

Oh, and Terry Jacks's Seasons In The Sun, obviously.

Brigade du jour

02:06 / 08.08.05

'Maybe Tomorrow' by Terry Bush. Yeah, you know what I'm saying.

And I welled up a bit watching Brian Wilson sing 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' at Glastonbury. Funny that - I thought 'God Only Knows' would be the one that got me ...

Queensryche (the Stanley Kubrick of metal bands) even had me go all light-headed once with 'Anybody Listening?'. All I can say is that I was pubescent at the time.

Are Being Stolen By Bandits

11:58 / 11.08.05

I'm a sucker for really good narrative songs - Springsteen's 'The River' always gets me towards the end, usually around the point of

Now these memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse
That sends me down to the river...

In and of itself, it's an affecting but not overwhelming lyric - but in context, as the culmination of the life of missed opportunities and failures which the song relates, it's devastating.

Similarly, Richard Thompson's 'Beeswing' is one of those songs which gets me teary-eyed almost without fail. It's another fairly lengthy narrative about, essentially, the free-spirited hippie girl (A rare thing/Fine as a beeswing/So fine a breath of wind might blow her away) who the narrator couldn't pin down as a young man - and, crucially, what happened to her afterwards.

They say her flower has faded now
Hard weather and hard booze
But maybe that's just the price you pay for the chains you refuse

Unfortunately, it's a song whose appeal is virtually impossible to capture in words. But yeah, that one always gets me.

Plus, of course, a number of songs which have been mentioned here already ('I See A Darkness', 'This Is Yesterday', 'Strange Fruit'...). But I'm a sap - I'll cry at anything.

Withiel: DALI'S ROTTWEILER

15:32 / 11.08.05

Either "Zarozinia" or, (even more bizarrely) "Spirit of the Age" by Hawkwind. On the former track it's the completely minimal background synths and the way Dave Brock can't quite hit the notes that make it so tragic - he just sounds so alone, and the fact that it's a man's voice used to sing about the doomed wife of Elric in the first person is somehow terribly effective. Spirit of the Age because somehow the science-fictional scenario really got to me - this ship of clones drifting through space, all writing the same song at the same time about someone they barely remember.
Also, Leonard Cohen's "Winter Lady" is the most beautiful/tear-jerking things ever.

Excuse me, it's just something in my eye...

21:01 / 27.08.05

"There is a light", The Smiths
"Suzanne", Leonard Cohen
"Going to California", Led Zep

More anon. (I'm watching 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches, it's throwing me off track.)

23:47 / 30.08.05

I have to throw up Elephant Man's 'Willie bounce' here. Lyrically, it's a eulogy for his friend Willie Bogle, a big Jamaican dancer who invented a lot of the most popular dancehall steps of the last few years. The utter heartbreaking genius part, though, is basing the song on the rhythm from 'I will survive'. Imagine that song actually meaning something; imagine how it might have felt to those early gay lib kids it first spoke to (or am I totally mythologising?) - full of emotion, poignant, no-bullshit, totally implausible disco-glam dancehall smash:

so when dem a say / dance will never die / out and bad so badly bad / it a get intensify / i see the kids dem in the street / all the big man dem a practice fi dweet / although bogle pass and gone / we still a mek dem know him dancing live on / everybody just...

One of the reasons it hits me so hard is that a disco-sampling club banger slips by my defences so that one second I am bouncing along with Ele and then I remember what he's actually saying - I don't know any other song that is so packed with the joy of the life of someone who's gone; really it isn't mournful at all, but totally celebratory. And at the same time, it works for me because I am too cynical most of the time to be suckered by straight-out emotion, and this one is good to laugh with, too.

Meanwhile, am I the only one who finds Gwen Stefani's 'Cool' a little bit heart wrenching?

Jake, Colossus of Clout

03:02 / 31.08.05

Most of the music I like best tugs the old heartstrings- my favorite artists are Sting, Waits, Springsteen and Chris Isaak.

I suppose I could pick one (or two) from each...

Isaak- Courthouse or Somebody's Crying. Chris Isaak is the master of "lost love" songs.

Springsteen- Downbound Train or Brilliant Disguise. No one does desperation and longing like The Boss.

Sting- Fields of Gold, period. That song gets me every time.

Tom Waits- A Soldier's Things. There's something so bleak about that song, I can't even quantify it.

There are dozens more from those artists alone, not to mention guys like Mark Lanegan, Daniel Lanois, Elvis Costello and Morrissey, but I'll leave it at that.

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