The tear-jerkers that most affect me (Alexdg1's Sounds of Sadness Writeoff)
Jul 25 '05 (Updated Jul 07 '06)
The Bottom Line Cheer up from the comparison: these singers have it worse (and in the last one, way far worse).
I listen to sad songs (tear-jerkers) to make myself feel better. They make me feel that whatever is bothering me is trivial in comparison to the articulations of pain and grief. No Midwestern WASP can feel—let alone express—such grief. Others have already aestheticized it.
Without trying to rank the pathos, here are some of my favorites:
Ooo, Baby, Baby by the Miracles
After the opening "Ooh, la, la, la" and before the "Ooh-ooh--ooh, baby, baby"s, the song actually has a narrative" I did you wrong. My heart went out to play, but in the game I lost you: what a price to pay-ay. I'm crying."
Aside from seeing the Miracles live during my freshman year in college and seeing tears glistening on the face of Smokey Robinson as he sang this, listening to him and the Miracles is the music I've most often played when feeling down (followed by the Brahms German Requiem). In addition to "Ooo, Baby, Baby" there are other tear-jerker masterpieces from the pen and voice of Smokey, including "Sweet Harmony," " The Track of My Tears, " "The Tears of a Clown," "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage," "I May Not Be the One You Want but I'm the One You Need," and "A Silent Partner in a Three-Way Love Affair."
Also in the after-the-break mode is Always, and Forever, sung by Brenda and the Tabulations, which begins, "Goodbye, my love, I lost your precious love for someone new. And now the happiness I found with you is all over. It's All over." Nonetheless, "I love you always and forever."
Whitney Houston singing "I Will Always Love You," starts a cappella before lush orchestration joins her on the first extended "I." I find her especially poignant wishing "Above all this, I love you love" before a reiteration of "but I will always love you."
I find it hard to believe that Thelma Houston won't survive, though that is what she gins. He heart may be full of love and desire, and the love started may be burning out of control, and I guess I could hear the Don't Leave Me This Way as craven masochism. She made need her lost love to be set free, but not surviving without it? I don't think so.
The Police's I'll Be Watching You is threatening, promising to stalk. "It's you I can't replace" with a serpentine beat...
The preceeding three songs was after my time in popular music. From inside it was the Four Seasons' "Opus 17." The music is upbeat, nearly triumphant, as Frankie Valli understands and tells his love "Don't worry 'bout me." (Which season was he?) The others intone "I'll be strong, I'll try to carry on, though you know it won't be easy when you're gone." and hold out the offer "Remember if he ever leaves you high and dry" and Valli promises "I'll spend my whole life waiting if you want me to."
And Dusty Springfield's You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, "juse be close at hand. Who could believe her?
From just before "my time," the Zombies' obssessive She's Not There (better known from Carlos Santana's cover, I think). "But let me tell you about the way she lookedy..."
Since I Don't Have You doo-wop from before my time sung by the Skyliners bewailing "since you walked out on me":
"I don't have plans and dreams, and I don't have hopes and dreams, I-I-I don't have anything, since I don't have you-u-u."
It concludes with a dozen two-syllable "you-'" and then shoots up an octave to an a cappella four-syllable "you-u-u-u." I discovered it decades after its release on an oldies compilation.
Otis Redding rivals Smokie Robinson in providing many tear-jerkers. "I've been loving you too long (to stop now)";
"These arms of mine, they are lonely, lonely and feeling blue";
My Lover's Prayer ("I know deep down I'm not to blame" and "You don't let that be no problem"; "You GOT to come back home"...and those jeering brass!);
"Pain in my heart (just won't let me sleep)"
"Try a little tenderness" (bluesier than many other Redding standards);
and the resigned "(Sitting) On the dock of the Bay." Ooooo!
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Even more than those who have loved and lost and are mourning, I find songs by those who know they have no realistic hope heart-breaking. One of the most poignant though unmournful, un-self-pitying example is
Imagination sung by the Temptations fantasizing a relationship about a woman who doesn't he even know that he exists ("But in reality she doesn't even know me. It was just my imagination, once again, running away with me")
I who have nothing; I, I who have no one, Adore you and want you so. I'm just a nobody with nothing to give you, but Oh!, I love you..."
I love the "bright sparkling diamonds" and the hyperextended "I" in "I love you." I was introduced to it by Sylvester's disco cover of the second-greatest Leiber and Stoller song ("Stand by Me" is the greatest), but the one I carry with me is from "Smokey Joe's Cafe" cast recording, sung by Victor Trent Cook (the shortest and most soulful males in the show).
I also find Sam Cooke's up-beat Another Saturday night (and I ain't got nobody) in which he bemoans having "no chick to talk to" quite sad, sadder than the more dirge-like "I'm in a sad mood tonight."
Thanks to Jev04again who identified Save your love for me, a soulful 1978 disco plaint that ran nearly seven minutes. It's from "Just Blue" by Space, a French(!) synth-pop band, with the vocals by Madeline Bell. The title is the main and often-repeated lyric. Despite how often it is repeated it, on the tear-jerker tape I made (without noting the singer), I added another 3 minutes of "Save your love for me" to the repetitions already included. It can be heard at http://www.groove.nl/cd/2/29030.html.
My interpretation of the song (then and now) is that it is about the male ability to separate sex from love and the (female) singer, having given up on sexual exclusiveness,is pleading for emotional fidelity, an arrangement with which gay men are especially familiar (and far from invariably happy about, but tear-jerkers are about resignation, non?).
I was in my disco bunny phase, dancing the pain of a breakup of a nine-year relationship away. Unlike many of those with whom I was sharing the dance floor at the I-Beam, I was not doing any drugs and registered lyrics (of which there were more than "save your love for me").
I want you to want me (the way that I want you, the way that it should be) Lobo's also obsessed me for a while in my inter-marital period.
I always interpreted "the way it should be" (and "it took time for me to know, why you tried so hard not to show") as meaning that the girlfriend is a lesbian, though it could as easily be another sex/love disjuncture (with the male being the one who believes they should go together).
I think that Foreigner's I Want to Know What Love Is fits here, in the fantasy-about-romance grouping—with its spacey opening. "In my life, there's been heartache and pain... I've traveled so far to change this lonely life; I want to know what love is, I want you to show me; I want to feel what love is, I know you can show me..." Beautiful melancholy! I don't believe it's gonna happen, however, even with a whole chorus joining the plea!
As a teenager, Ain't No Way (for me to love you, if you won't let me) sung Aretha Franklin spoke to me (or articulated what I did not understand). It is slow, and builds, with female backups to the Queen of Soul. (Free association pops up Fats Domino's "Aint That a Shame": "You made me cry, when you said goodbye....")
I think that the actual narrative in Harry Nilsson's Without You is pretty lame ("You always smile but in your eyes your sorrow shows"), but the intensity of the chorus in which "Can't live if living is without you;"
I can't give, I can't give any more" is repeated each of three times convinces me. I don't remember when first I heard the song, but somewhere I have a 45 of it.
The Winner Takes It All by Abba was a reminder of being left, and was further lodged in my brain as the background music for a highlight film of the 49ers losing an NFC championship game. My anthem to counteract the first was Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," and when the 49ers won Super Bowls (five times), there was Queen's "We Are the Champions."
Some other candidates:
Maybe by the Delights, from before my time, introduced to me in the movie "American Hot Wax"
Why Do Fools Fall in Love? - Chesterfields
The End of the World -? (I don't know who first recorded it. I know it from the cover by Vonda Shepherd singing it in the bar at which most episodes of "Ally McBeal" ended.)
Kris Kristofferson's Loving Her Was Easier Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again (and his song "Me and Bobbie McGee," best known through Janis Joplin's cover of it)
Liza Minnelli's Maybe this time from "Cabaret" (even without the spotlights and angles of the movie)
Percy Sledge's When a Man Loves a Woman, Jimmy Ruffin's What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?, The Guess Who's These Eyes, Brooklyn Bridge's The Worst that Could Happen, Jeanette's Porque te vas (forever linked in my mind to "Cría"), Bob Lind's Elusive Butterfly of Love, Janis Ian's Society's Child, "Unchained Melody (Al Green or the Righteous Brothers), Fleetwood Mac's Sara....
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Then there is "grand" opera with plenty of tear-jerkers (though I'm immune to "La Boheme"). Three that leap to mind:
Credeasi, misera! from the end of Act III of Gaetano Bellini's "I Puritani" (the opera with which Klaus Kinski want to open his opera house up the Amazon in Fitzcarraldo) is one of the most beautiful ensemble pieces in the history of music. It begins with Arturo (Giuseppe Di Steffano) singing
Credeasi, misera! da ma tradita,
Traea sua vita in tal martir!
Or sifidio i fulmini, disprezzo il fato,
Se teco allato potro morir!
(The poor girl believed that I'd betrayed her,
Her life was marred by that suffering.
I defy blows of fate,
If I can die with her at my side, commented on by Elvira (Maria Callas), Ricardo, Georgio, women's chorus, men's chorus. It's ultra-lyrical and heart-wrenching (more than Isolde's "Liebestöd," which is beautiful, certainly).
When I am dead and laid in earth, remember me, remember me, but [Oh! Oh! Oh!] forget my fate "sung between the departure of Aneas and Dido's death in Henry Purcell's opera "Dido and Aneas," sung by Jessye Norman or Leontyne Price. (Of course, it is Dido's fate that makes her a memorable character, the prototype of the abandoned lover...)
Con onor muore chi non può servare vita con onore (With honor he dies who cannot life with honor) Butterfly's aria after ordering Suzuki out and before stabbing herself and giving up her son to Pinkerton as she dies at the end of Giacomo Puccini's "Madama Butterfly, sung by Mirella Freni. Highly calculated, the prototype of tear-jerkers.
Seeing it might make me cry, but hearing it doesn't, though my heart goes out to her (as to Dido).
Perhaps I am so much more visual than aural that it is movies that can make me cry. Sound does not overwhelm picture to me. Lyrics matter to me. And I seem to have a special susceptibility to blindness flicks. I remember nearly drowning in tears at age twelve at "The Miracle Worker." This weekend, I was devastated by a movie about blind musicians with no end to the suffering (a beautiful end to a beautifully photographed film), Chen Kaige's (1990) Bian zou bian chang (which means "walking and singing," but the English title is "Life on a String"). The scene before the final song is already heart-breaking. The song begins with the fire-lit Old Master (Zhongyuan Liu), returned from a trip in which the hope that has propelled him through the previous six decades is shattered, which devastates his blind apprentice Shido (Huang Lei, already suffering a decade before "Fleeing by Night"). The ballad begins a cappella for the first encounter. Orchestral accompaniment starts with the second. The third in which children ask him what does he feel, has a conventional tear-jerker answer: "That I cannot say out loud/ Why don't you come inside me and see how I feel?" [which the movie has failed to do]. The orchestra really swells for the final encounter and the utopia in which
One day, all of us will sing
No more sadness
No more tears
We will lift our voices
And sing for joy.
These seem like uplifting, optimistic lyrics, no? All the more so with the kind of swelling cellos that signal triumph... But even the first time I saw the scene (with the camera tracking back to the circle of torches with Liu in the center, then back to him for a verse of "Oo"s), I was in tears. I didn't need to see the tears streaming down Huang Lei's face in the following scene, though knowing what follows makes me tear up even more, watching it again (and again)).
This is a tearful contribution to Alexdg1's Songs of Heartbreak Writeoff.
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