Elise
I have wanted to write about the songs that make me cry for a while. There’s something special about getting emotional over art. The way the tears just escape without expecting them, the choking up feeling, from something that exists outside of yourself. As my dad has gotten older (and he writes more about this), he get emotional all the time. His nostrils flare and his voice is flushed with emotion. I love experiencing those moment together and then talking about what “got us”. This will be a series of blog posts. We have been working on lists of our crying songs and we will write more about the songs that make us get all gooey.
Darin
When you get older, typically, the sphincter muscle at the lower end of your esophagus relaxes at the wrong time and you get more and more heartburn. I really enjoyed using sphincter in a sentence—not a word you typically use. For me, the other thing that has “relaxed” is my emotional lid. The cap I used to keep so tightly locked on my emotions, on expressing my feelings, has clearly broken. Or, perhaps, I have become more comfortable in my feelings and more willing to express them. I don’t know if clinically I am a highly sensitive person (HSP), but it would not surprise me. Many things affect me emotionally, and I can get “choked up” even expressing what some would call small emotional things. My kids occasionally find it funny, and they know the tell-tale signs when I am all verklempt.
So not surprisingly, a LOT of music makes me cry, or at least makes me very emotional. I suspect Elise is also a highly sensitive person, and as such, we have a whole catalog of songs that can make us cry—like, every time we listen to them. So many songs, in fact, that together we couldn’t really figure out how to write about them, so we decided to just pick one that was in common on our lists and give it a go. So here we go.
No Way Out
Darin
Peter Gabriel’s “No Way Out” from his 2002 album Up. First of all, this album masterfully explores a wide range of interior life, from fear (Darkness) to loneliness (Sky Blue), to loss (No Way Out), to death and grieving (I Grieve), to spiritual discovery (More Than This). It is a masterpiece. But we are here to talk about crying, and why “No Way Out” almost always makes me cry (or at least a bit verklempt!) Honestly, most of the songs on this album affect me strongly.
No Way Out is a song about losing someone suddenly. It’s about the crisis of a loved one’s life suddenly being in danger. It is not clear who the loved one is, and I think that is deliberate. It could be one’s spouse, or one’s parent, or one’s child. One need only recognize that at any moment something horrible could happen and you find yourself sitting next to a loved one in the hospital praying for them to hang on—to not let go. The song is about that emotional anguish. What always gets me about this song is how it comes at you. The opening measures almost sound like a segment for a James Bond film—kinda groovy, just floating along on a deep bass line with rhythmic accompaniment and a simple guitar line and keyboard ornamentation. You can’t really anticipate where the song is going, and I think that is exactly what Peter Gabriel was trying to accomplish. Musically and acoustically, it is a little dark, and has lots of resonances with the opening track of the album “Darkness,” so if you are a careful listener, you will feel a little uneasy.
The brilliance comes in the lyrics. Gabriel is SO minimalist in this song. He has isolated the moments into simple images. A crowd of people. Someone running for a phone. A man kneeling down. And then the smack—“There’s a tightening in my chest/Oh God, let it not be you. . .” The vivid nature of those images is compelling. So few words, so much power.
Saw a group of people forming
Round a figure lying down
And someone runs to make a phone call
And the man kneels on the ground
The man kneels on the ground
There’s a tightening in my chest
I know that I’m drawn in
Oh God let it not be you
Whatever or wherever the groovy rhythm was taking you doesn’t matter. You are now riveted into the horror and pain of this moment. The song is only two verses with choruses, but the imagery in those two verses always gets to me. I have no experiential reference for them, but imaginatively, they are vivid in my mind’s eye like I am there. I am running to the crowd and looking over shoulders to see—what? My child? My wife? I never actually see, but I feel the horror and the terror.
The color in your shirt is darkening
Against the paleness of your skin
I remember how you held the goldfish
Swimming around in a plastic bag
Swimming around in a plastic bag
You held it up so high
In the bright lights of the fair
It slipped and fell
We looked everywhere
These verses are DARK and delivered in an insistent and brooding voice. They build a tension in you that is poured out in the chorus, where Peter Gabriel opens up and expresses the anguish as only he can. It always kills me. If I’m not choked up in the verses, the chorus never fails:
Don’t leave us (Your eyes are bright, your blood is warm)
Don’t leave like this (Your heart is strong, you’re holding on)
Don’t leave me here again (I feel your pulse, I hold your hand)
I’m not quitting on you
There’s no one else
You’re not quitting on us
There’s no way out
No way out
And the title of the song is so apt. There is no way out of the emotion of this track. You think you can run away, but you can’t. It grips you tightly and holds your hand right through the experience.
The following song on the album is “I Grieve,” and it is absolutely about coping with the loss of a loved one. I have always linked these two songs in that the opening verse follows directly:
It was only one hour ago
It was all so different then
Nothing yet has really sunk in
Looks like it always did
This flesh and bone
It’s just the way that we had tied in
Now there’s no-one home
Based on Gabriel’s comments about these tracks, there really isn’t any explicit connection in that way, but that is how I experience them. Together the two tracks form the full trauma of a sudden loss and coping with the aftermath. Both of my parents passed suddenly. My mother passed quite suddenly in the middle of the night. I got a phone call in the morning (I lived 2400 miles across the country). My father went into the hospital and hung on just long enough for me to arrive. My brother and I visited in the afternoon I flew in to town. I remember holding his cool dry hand and him saying he was “going upstairs to see mom.” He passed a few hours later. I hope when my time comes, it is as swift and painless as that. There is no way to know how or when, so you must hold on tight and feel the pulse of those around you every moment. It is not that there is “no way out,” it’s that there’s only one way out and we never believe that until it’s too late.
Elise
If I had to pick one song that can make me ugly cry, it’s this song every time. I’ve listened to this song countless times. I know all the lyrics. The album came out in 2002 and I’m sure it was played over and over again by my dad in the car. Our prime music listening time. This song stuck out to me at a young age because of the line about goldfish swimming in a plastic bag. When I pointed it out to my dad, the english professor, he asked if I knew what it meant. I’m sure we spent that car ride talking about that line in the context of the song.
But it didn’t turn into a crying song until I became an adult. I’m not sure when the change happened, it was sandwiched between losing my mentor at 23 and losing my grandfather at 28. Those deaths made me wake up and see the finite nature of life. Everyone dies. It was a reality that I understood, but never felt real until then.
This song is hard to write about. I’m actively crying trying to write this. No Way Out is about death. It’s about the death of someone close and the feelings of denial which come with the grieving process. When I listen to this song, it’s about my dad dying.
When people talk about their soul mates, they always talk about the person they ended up marrying. I always felt that my dad is my soulmate. There is an ease that we have with each other that I don’t have with anyone else. Always wanting to experience emotions, dissect music, talk about sasquatch or just get a little inebriated and immerse ourselves. Sky Blue used to be the crying song because of the line “So tired of all this traveling, So many miles away from home.” I live too far away from him. Yet, there is something I love about pulling up to my parent’s house and the look of excitement on his face knowing we get to have more time together.
This song is hard because when I think of the person I’m most afraid of losing is my dad. The first verse of the song is so vivid about hoping that person in the crowd isn’t someone you love. “Oh God let it not be you.” The second verse, just as vivid, is when I know it will be him. In an instant, the goldfish is gone. I know that moment WILL happen to me and I will never be ready. There will be a day when I can’t call him about my writing or pull up to the house and see his face. There will be a moment when he’s done everything he will ever do in his life and there will be no more shared moments. No more sitting on the patio in the sun drinking a gin sling. No more listening to music in his media room. There is no preparation for losing those things. No Way Out is about a person who isn’t ready.
The song is also about my fear of that moment. The overwhelming feeling of denial throughout the song, the refusal to believe that it will happen. The line “Don’t leave me here again” rips through me because it’s a selfish moment. I don’t want to go through the pain that comes with losing him. It’s a song about fear. Fear of losing someone. Fear of who you will be without them. Yet, there is no avoiding those fears and the emotions that are dragged along with it. “There’s no way out.”
As my dad also mentions, the song I, Grieve. It’s almost essential listening after No Way Out. It is the second part of the story. For all the denial and desperately holding on, death will happen but I, Grieve reminds us “Life carries on and on and on.” It’s important to not fear moments of darkness, sadness, and grief, but to embrace them as a testament to the love you feel. The most human thing we can do is love and lose.
I know someday, I will hold my dad’s hand for the last time just like he held his father’s and never regret any of the time we had together. Today, I will call him and tell him how much I love him. Writing this is a moment of connection for us. We got to spend the day emotionally wrecked by a song while being over 400 miles apart. In the fear and darkness of the future, I make sure to leave room for moments like this. So when the darkness closes in, my grief will be made of love.