Has music ever REALLY made you cry?

So. There have been plenty of times when music has been the catalyst for some way I was already feeling -- sadness that gets matched by music which brings out a tear. But here's the trick, maybe: there have also been lots of times when music has elicited that response from me based on emotions I wasn't even previously aware of, or emotions I didn't think were as strong as they were at that moment. And that can be a little bit blindsiding, especially if the triggers and connections are really hard to understand. I mean, I can remember being on the subway this spring listening to a Pipettes song -- a happy one! -- and suddenly feeling completely verge-of-tears (in a happy way?). And I can know this has more to do with other stuff that was going on with me at that time, stuff I was stressed out and emotionally sensitive over, etc., but I can still on some level give credit to the song: there was something about it that provoked that emotion and amplified it.

So yeah, it's not so much that you're walking around minding your own business and a random snatch of song sends you bawling for now reason. But often the song can drag up all the reasons you might have been crying anyway, and force you to sit there and experience those feelings for 3-5 minutes.

i saw the video for "hurt" by johnny cash the morning he died and that made me cry - which was very surprising to me.

nabisco otm

I had that happen with Jewel once. She was singing "Foolish Games" on television and it struck me as totally unfair and horrible that Jewel should have to deal with being hurt like that.

Haha! What a pussy!

I am half-man, hear me roar!

Anyway, I often cry at choons, though not so often as once I did. Think it depends at least as much on my own emotional state as the song in question. The first few times I heard that guy who couldn't swim covering Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" it brought me to tears. Now, it's a lovely song and all, but I have to admit that I was feeling awful damn depressed and lonely at the time. Chicken or the egg?

The usual suspects:

"Hallelujah"
"Fairytale of New York" - the Pogues
J. Pachelbel's "Canon & Gigue in D"
"Ave Maria"
Etc...

but still nabisco's amplification idea, which seems pretty otm - a confluence of factors - was required. For me it's often as little as driving round in some nice area with the right song on, though it's rare that i'll full-on cry. fuck that shit.

I once got a ride from an airport from a professor who tried to tell me that sentimentality is the antithesis of intellection. He also spoke with a fake french accent and called ginger ale "gingerbeer."

Sven-G-Englar or whatever the fuck.

And Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" though I guess that at least partly falls under the "reminds you of lost love" clause for me.

when "american pie" gets to the line "the marching band refused to yeild" it makes me cry almost every time i listen to it. i feel like a wuss for posting that, but it's totally true.

x-post: I know exactly what you mean, that song always really got to me and I have no idea why people hate it so much (unless it's just been retroactively tarnished by the horrible Madonna cover).

I'm not sure this is true. Or at least, think about the person who's completely unmoved by Forrest Gump. On one hand, yes, it's not that the unmoved person thinks the events in the film are any less touching than the moved-person does; if they happened in real life they'd probably react the same way; the unmoved person might talk more about how the technique of the film didn't make it seem real, how it felt manipulative or overwrought or simplistic and those things kept it from being moving. Sure, that's true, and we'd probably say the same thing about lots of music: "This sad song doesn't move me because it seems rote, or 'fake,'" -- or whatever else.

But on the other hand, there really is something beyond that technical stuff, and I think it's something the viewer brings into the piece of art. Go back to that word "fake," I guess. If you find a big sad ballad (or a touching movie) fake, or manipulative, or not-worthy of your caring, part of what you're doing is making a value judgment that what's going on in the art doesn't jive with your notion of what's real. I mean, "sad" is a very big, vague thing; we all have our different experiences of sadness, and that means we all have our different ideas of what "sadness" is. If I watch Forrest Gump and find it mawkish and unmoving, surely part of what I'm thinking is that the film is wrong, that what it's showing me isn't sad, because it doesn't strike close enough to my idea and experience of what "sadness" is. (Expand that from "sadness" to "touching," actually -- "touching" is an even vaguer and more personal thing than "sad.") That's the personal stuff you bring to any art -- you inevitably have an idea of what the world is like, and one of the ways in which you're reacting to art has to do with whether you feel like the art is referring to that world properly, or whether it feels like it's faking it, or doesn't know of what it speaks. And that's in operation with music, too, just in a far less literal way. I might not find some hair-metal fun because the vision of "fun" it offers doesn't match my idea of what "fun" is -- that can be in the rhythm and the guitar solo as much as the lyrics. I can not find a Celine ballad "sad" because its constituent parts don't seem to me to have anything to do with what sadness feels like, or should sound like. (She can never seem "sad" to me because she's so controlled and grand and professional, like she's giving a presentation at a corporate retreat; I can't reconcile that with my experience of "sadness," but as I type this I can suddenly see certain reasons why a middle-aged woman might be able to.)

Simpler way to put that, as always: there's a reason why, if my mother and I were to watch a film about a middle-aged woman getting a divorce, my mother would likely be more emotionally affected by it than I would -- because it would likely be striking closer to her experience and idea of what real sadness and hardship consisted of, and closer to the emotions that were actually in her at the moment.

i assume you are tallking about a song with this title done by a band that is NOT Big Black?

x-post: I know exactly what you mean, that song always really got to me and I have no idea why people hate it so much (unless it's just been retroactively tarnished by the horrible Madonna cover).

Madonna covered this??? in its entirety? that's enough to make me cry.....

It's true that we all experience art (songs, movies, etc.) as occurring within a personal context defined by our own memories, associations, thoughts and feelings. In fact, any emotion response we have to ANYTHING is always fully contingent upon the way we relate the thing in question to that same personal context-matrix.

The difference between, say, Forrest Gump and a song is that movies tend to communicate in direct, literal ways, where music's communication is more subtle and associative.

When we watch movies, we're seeing light on a screen. But we don't perceive "light on a screen", we perceive images. Images (in Forrest Gump's case) of people doing things. And whatever emotional response we have typically occurs in a semi-sympathetic fashion: we feel sad, for instance, 'cuz sad things happen to the "people" onscreen. I've never seen the movie, but maybe we're sad because Forrest's boyfriend refuses to rim him. I dunno...

But music works differently (or at least it can). For instance, because I am only half a man, Johannes Pachelbel's Canon & Gigue in D sometimes makes me quite sad. But that sadness isn't attached to anything being literally represented by the music. The music is just sound, and not even emulative sound at that. There are no characters, objects or events in the music for me to sympathize with. It's like crying at colors, smells or the way certain fabrics feel. Weird, huh?

Music has that power. The power to arouse profound emotional responses without any narrative context at all. Movies can't do that. Patterns of light projected on the screen, if perceived SOLELY as patterns of light, won't arouse strong emotions in most viewers. Sure, some guy might find a particular pattern sublime, and another might be reduced to tears by a pattern that reminds him of that boat his dad never finished building, but most folks won't be fazed.

That's the difference between Forrest Gump's rimjob and that one guitar part in Castles Made of Sand.

Anyway, I need to get home and see if there's still any Jewel in the apartment.

Hearing Mark Eitzel of American Music Club perform an acoustic version of "I've Been A Mess" in a very small and intimate venue was almost too much heavy emotionalism for me to bear without turning into a blubbering fool.

I think Madonna's "American Pie" was greatly truncated, but yeah.

Oh, and I'm sure I've cried at either the original "Fast Car" or the Xiu Xiu cover (probably both).

Glad I'm not the only one who boggled at this.

Shortly after my favorite aunt died, I was listening to my iPod on the train, going to work, and the Talking Heads song "Heaven" (live Stop Making Sense version) came on, and I damn near started sobbing out loud.

That's close to part of what I'm saying here: that we as listeners do the work of turning abstract sounds into meaningful social stuff -- "characters" and "actions" and so on -- and that we do this based on stuff about ourselves, our experiences, and our emotions. A sound can't technically be angry, but we can very easily read a sound that way. I think we're constantly doing this when listening to music -- interpreting concrete real-world things that way.

You're absolutely right that film does more of that work for you -- it literalizes that stuff right in front of you. As a result, it's easier for us to reach agreement about whether (for instance) a film is meant to be "sad" than whether a song is really "sad." But I guess my point is that despite a slight possible difference in the level of interpretation we're doing, the process is the same in both circumstances; the process still involves a ton of us. Film is not so literal that we can all agree that Forrest Gump is just actually inherently "touching," like there's no denying that that's what's on the screen. And music is not so abstract that we don't have a common social system of interpreting things the same way, of having music cues that we know are supposed to correspond to real-world objects and ideas; the sounds exist in a context, and when we hear certain things (an acoustic-guitar strum versus a saxophone honk versus a distorted Stratocaster -- or hell, most of all tone of voice, or the motions we know a human would have to perform to make an instrument make a certain sound) we're trained to understand a lot of stuff about the reference they're making to a world outside of themselves.

So maybe my point is that I think you're overestimating the difference between music and film in terms of reference to concrete things -- I think film has less of it than you think (because it doesn't just create a reality on screen, it has to convey that reality to you through its own choices), and I think music has more of it than you think (because sounds can "mean" things, just like words can).

[actually, forget i ever posted this.]

On at least one occasion:
Nick Cave
The Walkabouts

I'm sure there's more....

Easier said than done, right? I think, though, that the real question of this thread is whether any music has made you cry in the most visceral way because of its sound alone. This is not to discount the experience of music effecting one deeply during fragile mental or emotional states, but merely to say that I think that there is a vast difference between crying to (for instance) Spirit of Eden because you just broke up with your significant other and crying to it because the tones are so clear and pure and light.

I just reread that, and don't know whether it makes sense.

Anyway, I cry to music all the time. In the past six months, I think I've cried to the album mentioned above, Hey That's No Way to Say Goodbye, and this amazing album by Ben Kamen titled And So the Light Came to Contain Numbers. Maybe one or two more.

But even deeper than all that is how that record seems to spring from a primal level so that even on the most boring of days or following rigorous, enjoyable exercise, it can just unleash some sort of inner catharsis beast. Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane O'er the Sea" and, more curiously, Built to Spill's "Keep it Like a Secret" do this occasionally me, too.

I wonder if any academic studies exist of this phenomenon -- I believe that emotion carries with a system of tonality. It has to -- how else to explain, in another example, the passionate responses that James Brown's '70s output is capable of generating?

CBC played K.D. Lang singing this, I think from the Juneaus and I damn near melted. God, I so love music that does this to me.

Smetimes it's just when a certain sound enters the mix--a gospel element into a Goodie Mob song. Then there's the entirely subjective--after my first big break-up in high school I cried to every track on Rubber Soul repeatedly. And the Forest Gump effect--
I recently cried uncontrolably over a Rascal Flatts song about the
singer's grandparents even though, since my parents moved us to a remote state, I don't have any memories of my own grandparents.

Music has manipulative powers over us more banal than we'd like to admit.

i recently talked to a girl who said she was reduced to tears by an oscilating innards song.

what is it about/in/around noise music that people are emotionally reacting to? i often find my enjoyment of noise music is derived from how "badass" the sound is, not how emotionally affecting it is. that isn't to suggest that some people don't respond to noise in a very emotional way. i just could never image being reduced to tears by haters. maybe whitehouse, tho.

Also...depending on my mood, I can be very easily moved to tears by music. Especially if I'm listening in my car, for some odd reason.

Ariel Pink's best stuff has that same disarming quality, for me...something about a drifting, somnambulant melody...resonates much like a dream (and isn't everything better - and emotions stonger - in dreams?)

Works for me too. Alex, did you find it more intensely emotional once you became a father, as it certainly was for me?

I've found the most emotional responses I've had have been to do with pieces which are about family, friendship and loss. Or rather more abstractly about the loss of that feeling of 'joi de vivre' or the fear of never regaining that moment,Chic's Everybody dance, knocks me out every time in that respect.

in fact, much of the music that sort of "paralyzes" me, emotionally, is early Detroit techno...("Strings Of Life", of course, but also stuff like Octave One and Psyche)...it's the sound of machines crying...(there is a great Detroit comp called "Emotions Electric"...says it all, really)...

the strings on 'R Theme'!

The sadder Blue Nile songs like "Regret", "New York Man", and "Family Life" are tear-jerkers, too. Something about Paul Buchanan's voice just hits the sad bone.

there's also something about the line "I miss my pet" in the Beach Boys' "That's Not Me" that I find profoundly sad...(even though it doesn't reference a dead pet, the fact that here's a newly-minted rock star lamenting the fact that what he really wants to do is spend time with his dog/cat/fish/sea monkey is touching, to say the least)...

"Plastic Bird", by Galaxie 500...and anybody who has ever engaged in the cathartic but pathetic act of destroying the mementoes (photographs, gifts, letters, etc.) of a dead relationship knows what I mean...

See, I feel exactly the opposite way: I think the John Wayne Gacy song just seems a little too obvious, like "oh hey here's a sad subject, I'll sing sadly about it over some sad music". Plus, the tragedy here is so far removed from anything that I've ever experienced in my life that it's hard to get too emotional about it. If anything in that song really tugs at my heartstrings, it's Sufjan quietly sobbing at the end, or trying not to (especially in light of the smiling during the song, which sorta creeped me out the first few times I listened to it).

(and yes I saw that you partially rescinded this but I'm responding anyway)

Same here, Eppy. I actually started laughing out loud, imagining people weeping whilst clutching the Songs About Fucking record sleeve to their chests.

plenty of stuff has made me cry on record but i think i have to be in a heightened emotional state to be brought to tears by performance. i can't think a lot of times this has happened, with the exception of musical saw. the saw desroys me every time!