🎵 😢 5 Songs That Make Me Cry

The problem with music & getting old!

Okay, the older I get the more sentimental I get. I think it’s because, like all men, the older I get the lower the testosterone level gets, which leads to becoming sensitive. I think all men suffer this. You get less aggressive and more prone to emotion as the years wear on.

I mean when I was twenty, I thought about sex about every five minutes or less. Now with seven decades under my belt, maybe twice a week. I know, sad, but WTF, what can you do? I mean, I hardly pick fights with other guys these days. (I kid) I don’t even like watching boxing matches anymore, which I used to love.

I’m just guessing, but judging by the way I have been getting emotional over movies, music, nostalgic memories leads me to that conclusion.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I’ll be sitting there watching a movie and a child dies in its mother’s arms. All of a sudden, tears. I never did that when I was younger. I felt sad for the woman, but tears? Really? Only women do that.

Nowadays, it’s not just acting performances, every time I watch something spectacular like really super excellent performance in any art — film, music, dance, even sports. I am just overwhelmed, and those wet drops flow. Music tops the list though.

I watched a documentary on Quincy Jones recently and his brilliance made me well up watching him work and perform. You look at the great talents like Quincy and are in wonder. It brought me to tears. I only wish I would have been born with a miniscule of his talent.

Seeing artists that are so directly plugged into the supreme consciousness, that their art flows through them like they’re an electric conduit can shake you up. They are plugged into a 220 outlet, and we barely pull 110 of juice. They hit the motherlode of talent, and while we mortals just get to pan for flakes of gold dust in the peripheral streams. Do I sound like Salieri? But I digress.

I like to cook. Always have ever since I was out on my own at eighteen, I cooked for myself. Once I got married a decade later, I realized I like my cooking better than my wife’s. So I took over. She was incredibly happy about it and never bothered to stop me. Fool am I.

I put on You Tube music and listen while I cook. I inevitably choose songs from my era, mostly classic rock. From that era I found these songs bring tears to my eyes. Not always, but many times, depending on how close I listen.

Here they are:

I Don’t Want to Talk About It, Amy Belle and Rod Stewart

The heartbreak is so bad it can’t even be mentioned. As these two sing, their two voices blend so perfectly and as they build to a crescendo, Katja  Reickermann, saxophonist in her blue dress,  jumps in with a riff that blows me away. I have to stop what I’m doing every time. And Irish singer, Amy Belle, is just stunning to look at. That alone will bring tears to any man’s eyes. 😊

I Will Always Love You, Whitney Houston

I never understood why he or she was leaving in the song, and why she was so sacrificial about it, but it gets to me. The voice, the melody, unbelievable. Ah, poor Whitney, we miss you. Her overdose death was just so unnecessary. Again, that alone will bring you to tears. Never that voice again with new songs.

Fire and Rain, James Taylor

Taylor wrote "Fire and Rain" in 1968. The song has three verses. One is about a friend who committed suicide, another is about Taylor's addiction to heroin, the third refers to a mental hospital and a band Taylor started called The Flying Machine.The two lines in the song that really get to me are about the suicide, “Suzanne they put an end to you…”and “I always thought I’d see you again…’ …that does it for me. How many people do you wish you could see again?

Tears In Heaven,  Eric Clapton.

In 1991, Clapton's four-year-old son Conor, whom he had with Lory Del Santo, died after falling from the 53rd-floor window of a New York City apartment belonging to a friend of Conor's mother. What a horrible, horrible tragedy. The song is hoaky as hell, but the sadness is devastating. I don’t even know how he could sing this song without breaking down every time.

Yesterday, The Beatles

Like “Fire & Rain”, the song just brings back the pain of memories of all the people we have lost, and a time in our past we’ll never see again. We can’t go back. And the McCartney voice just hauntingly drives it home.

According to biographers of McCartney and the Beatles, McCartney composed the entire melody in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then-girlfriend Jane Asher and her family. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and played the tune to avoid forgetting it. See what I mean about connected to the main juice.

There are more songs that get to me, but these five came to my mind first.

I don’t know these people, and the events they write about have nothing to do with me, but yet they get to me. Reminds me of one of  Shakespeare’s monologues in Hamlet where he watches and actor cry on stage for nothing at all and reprimands himself for not being able to cry for a real event. (Sorry, I was an English major)

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit (the part he is playing)
That from his working all his visage wann’d, (turns pale)
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba?
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her….

Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2

The actor cried for Hecuba, dead for a thousand years! Hecuba was the wife of King Priam during the Trojan War in Greek mythology who son was murdered by King Polymnestor. WTF!

No matter when or where, emotions can just float in our undercurrent and rise up when some personal chords are struck by sight, words or music.

Hecuba Blinding Polymnestor Oil on canvas,Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

It’s the songs about heartbreak and death that get us the most. As we all know, music has the powerful effect of transporting you to a previous time and place in your own life. So you hear about the heartbreak of lost love, and you remember your own loss. You hear about death, and you remember your personal tragedies.

Of course, it’s not just tragedies. A song can transport you anywhere, even specific moments. I remember in 1983, I was driving down Rte. 35 in Atlantic Highlands, NJ. I had just bought a tape of Tina Turner, and was playing it as she sang “Private Dancer.”

Now every time I hear her doing that song, I’m back thirty-plus years, driving down the highway in that blue caravan of mine. I could list scores of songs that do that, as I’m sure you can too.

It’s seem self-evident that whoever creates the music, whether the singer or a composer or both, lived through some event that moved them, which is why they can translate their emotions to sounds and words, and those vibrations can move us with them. Some time sadly, sometimes joyous.

Brilliant people and music can be tear worthy. But songs of heartbreak and dying…forget about it. Pass the tissues.

Have any songs that get to you. Share them in the comments.