Songs that make you choke up.

What are the songs that make you overcome with emotion? The songs you'd never tell your buddies made you cry for fear they'd never stop ribbing you? The songs that make you pull the car over when they come on the radio? The songs that cut through the cynicism of daily life to remind you of the essential melancholy beauty of being alive?


Saw a similar thread a week or two ago, and thought I'd put my two cents in and allow those who didn't post a say. Please post more than one song, and mentioning reasons why these songs make you want to weep are unnecessary....

Here's a list of mine:


"Solsbury Hill" Peter Gabriel
"Twin Falls" Ben Folds Five
"Ooh La La" The Faces
"Golden Slumbers" The Beatles
"Change Gonna Come" Otis Redding
"West End Girls" Pet Shop Boys (I have no idea why, but this song makes me so sad! The chorus melody is so wistfully dramatic)
"Stepping Out Queen part 2" Van Morrison

You gotta be a parent to know why

"Kiss and Say Goodbye" The Manhattans
"Hello In There" John Prine
"Street Hassle" Lou Reed
"After The Fire Is Gone" Tracy Naison
"Ferry Cross The Mersey" Freddy and the Dreamers?
"Eight Line Poem" David Bowie
"Angel From Montgomery" John Prine
"let It Loose" The Rolling Stones

On promenades where drunks propose to lonely arcade mannequins
Where ceremonies pause at the jewelers shop display
Feigning casual silence in strained romantic interludes
Till they commit themselves to the muted journey home
And the pool player rests on another cue
Last nights hero picking up his dues
A honeymoon gambled on a ricochet
She’s staring at the brochures at the holidays
Chalking up a name in your hometown
Standing all your mates to another round
Laughing at the world till the barman wipes away the warm wet circles
The warm wet circles

I saw teenage girls like gaudy moths
A classrooms shabby butterflies
Flirt in the glow of stranded telephone boxes;
Planning white lace weddings from smeared hearts and token proclamations,
Rolled from stolen lipsticks across the razored webs of glass
Sharing cigarettes with experience
With her giggling jealous confidantes,
She faithfully traces his name
With quick bitten fingernails
Through the tears of condensation
That’ll cry through the night
As the glancing headlights of the last bus
Kiss adolescence goodbye

In a warm wet circle
Like a mothers kiss on your first broken heart,
A warm wet circle
Like a bullet hole in central park,
A warm wet circle
And I’ll always surrender to the warm wet circles

She nervously undressed in the dancing beams of the fidra lighthouse
Giving it all away before it’s too late
She’ll let a lovers tongue move in a warm wet circle
Giving it all away and showing no shame
She’ll take a mother’s kiss on her first broken heart
A warm wet circle,
She’ll realise that she played her part in a warm wet circle

It was a wedding ring,
Destined to be found in a cheap hotel
Lost in a kitchen sink or thrown in a wishing well

State of Independence, it has Martin Luther King - I Have A Dream speech

Especially these days. That's one of the songs I want played at my funereal. That, and John Lennon's "Imagine", and Etta James "At Last". So, remember that when my time comes.

I also have some big band.

Because You Loved Me... Celine Dion
Silent Lucidity... Queensryche
The Dance... Garth Brooks
All By Myself... Celine Dion
If You Ask Me To... Patty LaBelle

Tears in Heaven

must be my Irish blood calling to me to go back the emerald island.

Oh jesus. What a great, great... sad song. Seriously, D/L it, Propagandhi don't care, they are on a foreign and very liberal label (G-7 records). Good tune! I defy anyone to acquire it.

edit: lyrics

Sleeping masters roused to burning homes from beds. Sleeping toddlers plucked from their watery deaths: ribbons, plaques and soft-soap are the ephemeral rewards paid to the slaves whose selfless acts accord a higher value to their masters, while parting gifts (bolt pistols) console the rest. The remainder. Too bad the tributes paid to lives that relegate these thrones to lives spent valuing the runners-up, are known to be neither fleeting nor desirable. But nothing surprises me these days. I just sit and watch the box-cars roll by and wait. Patient. Unattended. A package under a terminal bench. A short fuse to scatter steady hands if I forget to remember that better lives have been lived in the margins, locked in the prisons and lost on the gallows than have ever been enshrined in palaces.


*AMAZING GUITAR SOLO!*

*weeps for both animals and humans!*

Wonderful tonight -Clapton
not sure why, but it does (in a happy way)

Oh Death - Ralph Stanley
first time I heard it was when my mother was dying, now it has that association.

Hotel hobbies padding dawns hollow corridors
A typewriter cackles out a stream of memories

Drying out a conscience, evicting a nightmare
Opening the doors for the dreams to come home

We live out lives in private shells
Ignore our senses and fool ourselves
To thinking that out there there’s someone else cares
Someone to answer all our prayers, all our prayers...

Are we too far gone, are we so irresponsible
Have we lost our balls, or do we just not care
We’re terminal cases that keep talking medicine
Pretending the end isn’t quite that near
We make futile gestures, act to the cameras
With our made up faces and pr smiles
And when the angel comes down, down to deliver us
We’ll find out that after all, we’re only men of straw

But everything is still the same
Passing the time passing the blame
We carry on in the same old way
We’ll find out we left it too late one day to say what we meant to say

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the water
Those problems seem to arise the ones you never really thought of
The feeling you get is similar to something like drowning
Out of your mind, you’re out of your depth, you should have taken soundings
Clutching at straws, we’re clutching at straws, we’re clutching at straws

And if you ever come across us don’t give us your sympathy
You can buy us a drink and just shake our hands
And you’ll recognise by the reflection in our eyes that deep down inside we’re all one and the same

We’re clutching at straws
We’re still drowning
Clutching at straws

with such rapier wit, and elegance, quite like Fish

TITLE Bitter Suite

A) brief encounter
A spider wanders aimlessly within the warmth of a shadow
Not the regal creature of border caves
But the poor, misguided, directionless familiar of some obscure scottish poet
The mist crawls from the canal
Like some primordial phantom of romance
To curl, under a cascade of neon pollen
While I sit tied to the phone like an expectant father
Your carnation will rot in a vase

B) lost weekend
A train sleeps in a siding
The driver guzzles another can of lager, lager
To wash away the memories of a friday night down at the club
She was a wallflower at sixteen, she’ll be a wallflower at thirty four
Her mother called her beautiful
Her daddy said, "a whore"

C) blue angel
The sky was Bible black in lyon, when I met the magdalene
She was paralyzed in a streetlight
She refused to give her name
And a ring of violet bruises
They were pinned upon her arm
Two hundred francs for sanctuary and she led me by the hand
To a room of dancing shadows where all the heartache disappears
And from glowing tongues of candles I heard her whisper in my ear

’j’entend ton coeur’, ’j’entend ton coeur’

I can hear your heart, I can hear your heart, I can hear your heart
Hear your heart
I hear your heart

D) misplaced rendezvous
It’s getting late, for scribbling and scratching on the paper
Something’s gonna give under this pressure, and the cracks are already beginning to show
It’s too late
The weekend career girl never boarded the plane
They said this could never happen again
Oh, so wrong, so wrong
This time it seems to be another misplaced rendezvous
This time, it’s looking like another misplaced rendezvous
With you
The parallel of you, you

E) windswept thumb
On the outskirts of nowhere
On the ringroad to somewhere
On the verge of indecision
I’ll always take the roundabout way
Waiting on the rain
For I was born with a habit, from a sign
The habit of a windswept thumb, and the sign of the rain
Rain on me, rain
It’s started raining


except maybe Peart


TITLE Losing It

The dancer slows her frantic pace
In pain and desperation,
Her aching limbs and downcast face
Aglow with perspiration

Stiff as wire, her lungs on fire,
With just the briefest pause ---
The flooding through her memory,
The echoes of old applause.

She limps across the floor
And closes her bedroom door...

The writer stares with glassy eyes ---
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage.

Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision,
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision.

And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more...

Some are born to move the world ---
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we’d like to be

Sadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you -- the blind who once could see ---
The bell tolls for thee...

 

If only he had the music to cover his words...

Myself will straight aboard: and to the state
This heavy act with heavy heart relate.

Sheltering her ego on the edge of a floodlit arc
She’ll contemplate seduction, she’ll calculate the catch
When she moved, her presence speared me
When she spoke, her words ensnared me
Watch the lizard, watch the lizard, watch
Watch the lizard with the crimson veil

Distinctly a casual affair

She crucified my heart in the depth of a satin grave
As I lay in sweating monologue I sensed the lovelight fade
Within the spiral of the cigarette, you betrayed your bedside etiquette
I saw the lizard, touch
I touched the lizard with the crimson veil

I’ve seen a different doorway shut a million times before
The smiling she chameleon, the smiling vinyl whores

Distinctly a casual affair

They know what they want, they sing your name
And glide between the sheets
I never say no, in chemical glow we’ll let our bodies meet
So was it just a fuck, was it just a fuck, just another fuck I said
Loving just for laughs, carnal autograph, lying on a lizard’s bed
So was it just a fuck, was it just a fuck, just another fuck I bled
Degraded and alone, raped and still forlorn
Betrayed on a lizard’s bed, on a lizards bed
We chameleon, we chameleon, we (oui!) chameleon

Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a blackheath cell
Extinguishing the fires in a private hell
Provoking the heartache to renew the licence
Of a bleeding heart poet in a fragile capsule
Propping up the crust of the glitter conscience
Wrapped in the christening shawl of a hangover
Baptised in the tears from the real
Tears from the real

Drowning in the liquid seize on the piccadilly line, rat race
Scuttling through the damp electric labyrinth
Caress ophelias hand with breathstroke ambition
An albatross in the marrytime tradition
Sheathed within the walkman wear the halo of distortion
Aural contraceptive aborting pregnant conversation
She turned the harpoon and it pierced my heart
She hung herself around my neck

From the time-life-guardians in their conscience bubbles
Safe and dry in my sea of troubles
Nine to five with suitable ties
Cast adrift as their sideshow, peepshow, stereo hero
Becalm bestill, bewitch
Drowning in the real

The thief of baghdad hides in islingtown now
Praying deportation for his sacred cow
A legacy of romance from a twilight world
The dowry of a relative mystery girl
A vietnamese flower, a dockland union
A mistress of release from a magazine’s thighs
Magdalenes contracts more than favours
The feeding hands of western promise hold her by the throat

A son of a swastika of ’45 parading a peroxide standard
Graffiti disciples conjure testaments of hatred
Aerosol wands whisper where the searchlights trim the barbed wire hedges
This is brixton chess
A knight for embankment folds his newspaper castle
A creature of habit, begs the boatman’s coin
He’ll fade with old soldiers in the grease stained roll call
And linger with the heartburn of good friday’s last supper

Son watches father scan obituary columns in search of absent school friends
While his generation digests high fibre ignorance
Cowering behind curtains and the taped up painted windows
Decriminalised genocide, provided door to door belsens
Pandora’s box of holocausts gracefully cruising satellite infested heavens
Waiting, wai-wai-waiting, the season of the button
The penultimate migration
Radioactive perfumes
For the fashionably
For the terminally alise?
Do you realise, this world is totally fugazi

Where are the prophets
Where are the visionaries
Where are the poets
To breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary

As cars go by I cast my mind's eye
Over back packs on roof racks
Beyond the horizon
Where dream makers
Working white plastic processors
Invite the unwary
To reach for the pie in the sky
Go fishing my boy!

We set out in the spring
With a trunk full of books about everything
About solar devices
And how nice natural childbirth is
We cut down some trees
And we trailed our ideals
Through the forest glade
We dammed up the stream

And the kids cooled their heels
In the fishing pool we'd made
We held hands and we exchanged bands
And we practically lived off the land
You adopted a fox cub
Whose mother was somebody's coat
You fed him by hand
And then snuggled snuggled him down
By the grandfather bed while I wrote
We grew our own maize
And I only occasionally went into town
To stock up on antibiotics
And shells for the shotgun that I kept around
I told the kids stories while you worked your loom
And the sun went down sooner each day.
*Chapter six in which Eeyore has a birthday
And gets two presents
Daddy...come on dad
Eeyore the old grey donkey stood by the side
Of the stream and he looked at himself in the water
"Pathetic" he said, "That's what it is"
"Good morning Eeyore" said Pooh
"Oh" said Pooh, He thought for a long time

The leaves all fell down
Our crops all turned brown
It was over
As the first snowflakes fell
I realized all was not well in the camp
The kids caught bronchitis
The space heater ran out of diesel
One weekend a friend from the East
Rot his soul
Stole your heart
I said "Fuck it then
Take the kids back to town
Maybe I'll see you around"

And so...leaving all our hopes and dreams
To the wind and the rain
Taking only our stash
Left our litter and trash
And set out on the road again
On the road again

Bye Bye Daddy, Bye Daddy
You can bring Pearl she's a darn nice girl
But don't bring Liza

I hear him, before I go to sleep
And focus on the day that's been.
I realise he's there,
When I turn the light off and turn over.

Nobody knows about my man.
They think he's lost on some horizon.
And suddenly I find myself
Listening to a man I've never known before,

Telling me about the sea,
All his love, 'til eternity.

He's here again,
The man with the child in his eyes.

He's very understanding,
And he's so aware of all my situations.
And when I stay up late,
He's always waiting, but I feel him hesitate.

Oh, I'm so worried about my love.
They say, "No, no, it won't last forever."
And here I am again, my girl,
Wondering what on Earth I'm doing here.
Maybe he doesn't love me.
I just took a trip on my love for him.
He's here again,
The man with the child in his eyes.

Cruise you are making me sing
Now you have taken me under your wing
Cruise, we both know you're the best
How can they say you're like all the rest

Cruise, we're both travelling so far
Burning out fast like a shooting star
Cruise I feel sure that your song will be sung
And will ring in the ears of everyone

Saving our children, saving our land
Protecting us from things we can't understand
Power and Glory, Justice and Right
I'm sure that you'll help us to see the light
And the love that you radiate will keep us warm
And help us to weather the storm

Cruise, you have taken me in
And just when I've got you under my skin
You start ignoring the fears I have felt
'Cause you know you can always make my poor heart melt

Please don't take what I'm saying amiss
Or misunderstand at a time such as this
Because if such close friends should ever fall out
What would there be left worth fighting about

Power and glory, justice and right
I'm sure that you'll help them to see the light
Will you save our children, will you save our land
And protect us from all the things we can't understand?
Power and glory and justice for all
Who will we turn to when your hard rain falls?

"I'm hot, sticky sweet
From my head, to my feet."

(sniff)

Get's ya right there..... (pounds chest)

It just does. The ELP version makes me wanna puke though.

you have to cold blooded not to be touched by that song
----------------------------------------------------------------

Today I stumbled from my bed
With thunder crashing in my head
My pillow still wet
From last night tears
And as I think of giving up
A voice inside my coffee-cup
Kept crying but
And ringing in my ears

Don't cry daddy
Daddy, please don't cry
Daddy, you've still got me and little Tommy
Together we'll find a brand new mommy
Daddy, daddy, please laugh again
Daddy ride us on your back again
Oh, daddy, please don't cry


Why are children always first
To feel the pain and hurt the worst
It's true, but somehow
It just don't seem right
Cause ev'ry time I cry I know
It hurts my little children so
I wonder will it be the same tonight


Don't cry daddy
Daddy, please don't cry
Daddy, you've still got me and little Tommy
Together we'll find a brand new mommy
Daddy, daddy, please laugh again
Daddy ride us on your back again
Oh, daddy, please don't cry
Oh, daddy, please don't cry

I guess I learn something new everyday.

and "That's What Friends Are For".

And the Healing Has Begun - Van Morrison
Across the Bridge where Angels Dwell - Van Morrison
T.B. Sheets - Van Morrison
To Be Invisible - Gladys Knight (saddest song I've ever heard)
Sail On White Moon - Boz Scaggs
The Pretender - Jackson Browne

"And, Papa, I don't think I said 'I love you' near enough"

Just typing that gets to me.

Even his song Run For The Roses chokes me up. :cry:

when I listen to that one I have to slap myself in the face and mutter, "Pull yourself together, ya big sissy!"

I'm old, 47.

Today every song is choking me up.

"Mercy Seat"
"Stolen Car"
"Your Ghost"
"Say Hello"
"Great Beyond"
"My Son"
"1000 Oceans"
"Living for the City"
"Possession"

Quite cathartic.