You See Me Crying: 10 Songs that Mess Me Up

So, in my last post I made mention of something that had brought me to tears, and I guess it caught the four people who read this blog by surprise.

The truth is, I'm kind of a crier.

I'm not a bawler.  But it's pretty common for me to indulge a creeper in the corner of my eye at the end of Slumdog Millionaire. Or Philadelphia. Or Hotel Rwanda. Or  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Or Its a Wonderful Life.

(The above list excludes probably my second most shameful crying episode: that time when my wife and I had just started dating, and we went to see Together.....a film that should probably be required viewing for anyone who had ever desired--or regretted their decision--to play music.  I won't spoil the ending, but the climax of the film happens to coincide with its very sudden ending.  And this means that there's no time at all to compose yourself should you happen to burst into tears as the story comes full circle.  

So, unless you can convince your then-new girlfriend that you like to sit through the entire credits of foreign films -- even if you both know you don't speak a word of Mandarin -- well, then, big guy, she's gonna see you cry for the first time.)

((The most shameful crying episode?  Oh, that was when I was in fifth grade, and I saw some  goddamned TV ad, featuring a kid leaving for college as his dog watches him drive away, the poor mutt's tail slowly stopping its wag as a tennis ball drops out of his mouth and rolls down the driveway. For reasons I cannot express today, this broke my heart, causing me to run into the bathroom and sob.  Over dinner that evening, my mother asked me what had been troubling me all night, and I foolishly reenacted the advertisement for her, bringing on yet another sobbing fit in front of the entire family.

I will never forget the look of exhausted confusion on my father's face as he sat in front of his dinner, waiting for me to please shut the fuck up)).

So, yeah: tears are sort of my thing, I guess.  And, so, it got me thinking about the many songs that have been known to make me cry.  Here is a sampling for your enjoyment and mockery:

Elliot Smith -- Waltz # 2

 

The grandaddy of all tearjerkers, in my book -- and not just because I'll always associate it with Smith's suicide. In fact, I once lived with a guy who was going through a tremendous depression over an unrequited love, and he listened to this record endlessly. 

A mere three years later, I went through a similar patch myself, and I suddenly understood the senselessly defeatist (yet willful) decision to not get over someone.

"I'm tired/I'm tired"

It somehow says so much.

Ain't No Nice Guy  (acoustic) -- Motorhead

 
Not only is this Lemmy's single most beautiful vocal performance, but damn near every couplet is a depth charge of self-awareness, timed to release only after its too late to change the reality of what a total fucking jerk you actually are.   
 

Sigur Ros -- Svefn g Englar 

 

I could not make the first guess as to what this song is about.  But I swear that there are times when I hear it that I wish nothing more than that I'd never had to have left the safety of my mother's womb.

He Moved Through the Faire -- as sung by Sinead O'Connor

For those of use who grew up in Irish households, Sinead knows how to hit that sad, sad note that permeates the best Irish music -- nearly a Celtic blue note, except less sexy and more.....miserable.

Celebrated Summer -- Husker Du



This song's indecision -- bouncing between exuberance, nostalgia and a vague sense of regret --  harnesses an emotional confusion that most people live with throughout much of their teens and even their 20's.  It is a true credit to Bob Mould's songcraft that he captures the sadness and futility of those years most clearly in retrospect. 

I'm supposed to see Mould live in three weeks and its pretty much a lock that I won't survive the middle section of this song intact.

You See Me Crying - Aerosmith

Jesus, do I hate what Aerosmith has become. Even so, this song has such a masterful, hazy, 70's AM radio vibe (god DAMN, that wonderful oboe and those awesome string arrangements!) that you can overlook the ridiculous-even-by-Areosmith's-standards lyric, "cuz my love is like a merry-go-round."  

No doubt about it: this song is unabashed in it's self-pity.  But at times we all need that.

Let It Loose -- The Rolling Stones

Mick Jagger might be a conceited jerk, but he has a way of turning some very vulnerable lyrics. That whole half-bridge, "Maybe your friends think/I'm just a stranger/Some face you'll never see no more" section, where his voice becomes thin and exasperated, has always struck me as one of the more honest and sincere vocals in the entire Stones catalog. 

Who ever would have thought Jagger gave a damn about what his groupies thought....much less what his groupies' friends thought?? 

Acetone - Mudhoney

"Oh, Lord what have we become?/We're not fooling anyone"

Nothing is sadder than shame.

Roberta Flack -- Do What You Gotta Do

I found this record in parents' vinyl collection during a sick day in high school.  Long before I'd ever had a girlfriend, after listening to this record I believed that I knew precisely what a breakup would feel like.  This song is so painful, so beautiful, so feminine and so totally dignified in the face of heartache that it crushes me to this day.

I Loves You, Porgy -- as sung by Nina Simone

"Don't let him take me/ Don't you let him handle me and take me off somewhere"

Suggested Listening for "Like You Never Had Wings"

Like You Never Had Wings

I've been listening to metal in one form or another since 1986.  Even considering that I foolishly gave up on the genre sometime in the mid-90's (thanks a lot, Korn, and double fuck you, Metallica), and that I fully embraced punk rock in my 20's...and that my lifestyle became decidedly UNmetal in recent years (though still preferable to NUmetal), the genre never went out of rotation for me.

Because even though I've lived a very fortunate life, I've always been one for extreme peaks and valleys.  And metal has always gotten me through both.

When I constantly felt like a dork and a misfit back in high school, Metallica's "Fade to Black" and Megadeth's "My Last Words" were the soundtrack to my angst.

Back in college, when I didn't get that summer job I wanted so badly at the Library of Congress, it was Mr. Danzig's "Long Way Back From Hell" that I brooded over.

And these past few years, when I resentfully marched myself out of the Judiciary Square Metro station each morning to a job - and perhaps even a career - that I had tragically fallen out of love with, more often than not I'd damage my ear drums to the trifecta of Lamb of God's "Black Label", Bolt Thrower's "The Killchain" and Sepultura's "Dead Embryonic Cells" to gear myself up for what lay ahead.

Now listen: I know that blogging about work is about as dumb as eating Buffalo Wings while watching porn, but this is kind of important:

I had become very frustrated about what my career had become.  Frustrated, angry and sad, in fact.  The things I most excelled at in my profession - the things that brought me true joy -- seemed to have become oddly devalued and out of reach as my duties morphed.  Conversely, my daily tasks somehow felt at once mundane and impossible.  The more I committed myself to them, the more I felt buoyed on all sides by inescapable feelings of failure and anxiety.

Then there were the meetings in Boston and Texas and Oklahoma.  And the nearly weekly day trips to New York that would kick off with a 4:00 AM wake up, a 6:00 AM train and a walk back through the front door never before 10:00 PM. All to attend command performances at which I typically felt completely out of place and occasionally just plain lost (or as my supervisors repeatedly put it, "invaluable").

I felt trapped.  I ate more.  I drank more.  I weighed more.  I slept less.  

I withdrew from my best friends, and - even worse - came to resent several of them.  My sense of humor became mean-spirited as I accepted my own unhappiness. 

In time, my confidence eroded and the skills in which I took the most pride seemed to atrophy before me. For the life of me, I could not summon the passion I once had for my job, and it made me feel worthless.

I was going through changes.  I was killing myself to live. I was going off the rails of my crazy train.

I was losing my fucking mind, more than once asking myself if these feelings - this nearly constant fear and anger and helplessness -- was, in fact, the tipping point where an irreversible psychological descent might begin.

The nine minutes of metal I would listen to every morning served as so much more than an outlet for what I look back on now as impotent rage; it was a liberation of my spirit. As every primal scream has ever been, it was a declaration of independence...at a time when I had somehow shackled myself to an identity and a value system to which I had never aspired.

It took a hell of a long time to gather the courage to resign from that job, and as difficult as the decision was, the process of actually walking out the door was even harder.  My entire last week on the job I felt out of place, guilty and very uncertain about my decision.  I was terribly sad to be leaving the many coworkers who I liked and respected, even if we weren't meant to be together.

That final week, I fiddled with my iPod compulsively during my commute, never quite finding music that felt appropriate.  I was still anxious, but all of the anger had been drained from me. In fact, I was exhausted all week, and nothing about metal energized me.

My last day in the office was a Friday, and by some fluke of scheduling, several of my closest teammates were out for scheduled vacations that day.  That made it easier to stay late and slip out once everyone had left.  It was lonely, but it was fitting: this was, after all, my choosing.

Once again, I sat on the metro platform, smashing the shuffle on the iPod, hoping for anything that might bring me to a fitting place on a day when I felt a little bit sad and a little bit relieved, but mostly very alone.  Hopeful, but alone.

Taking my seat on the metro train, I kept fiddling with the iPod.  And moments later, the Deftones' "Change in the House of Flies" came up.

Even in the best of moods, that song will always have the potential to send me to the depths of despair.  Whatever the lyrics are actually about, it always stuck me as a requiem for a loved one who had decayed unnecessarily ...and by their own doing:

I watched a change in you 

 It's like you never had wings  

It all hit just a little too close to home.

Welling with a true feeling of horror and a sense of something that felt much like grief, I quickly hit the FWD button once again.  I paused, I swallowed, I scowled and I waited.

Every adult knows that immediately after a lump forms in their throat, there is a significant moment whereupon they can choose to indulge their ego's need for dignity, or their nervous system's need for relief.

But as the next track loaded, there was no decision to be made.  Evening rush hour be damned, as Mick Jagger sang that "she would never say where she came from," I began to cry just slightly.

After all of this talk about metal -- about powerlessness and anger and release, about it "being there for me" when things became dark -- it turned out that the genre wasn't to provide the emotional bookend to the past seven and a half years.

On a day when I may have finally learned to separate my sadness from my anger, when I was choosing "farewell" over "fuck you," it was time for something different.

That was three weeks ago.  I haven't listened to much metal since.

Video Footage of the Randy Blythe Incident

Via The Gauntlet (by way of the great people at MetalSucks), here's the latest on Randy Blythe, including video of the alleged incident.

I would love to say that this makes things any less unclear, but the film might as well have been shot by Zapruder.

Either way, check it out:

Better quality, via Metal Delirium

Also, sorry for fucking up the formatting on these videos, here and throughout this crappy blog.  I'm really bad at this shit.

To Never Recover the Pieces to All That We've Lost

Following up on last week's post, I have an awful lot swirling around in my head that I want to write about.  For the moment, that'll have to wait for me to collect my thoughts.


I'm writing this morning because I just read that Lamb of God front man, Randy Blythe, is facing 5-10 years for an alleged assault on a fan, who later died from his injuries.


These sorts of things are difficult to discuss. Much like the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman issue, I don't really have a good grip on what actually happened, so perhaps I should keep my opinions to myself.  

And, yet, I have to admit that I am going to give Blythe the benefit of the doubt on this one. Sorry, Zimmermen.  Them's the breaks.


Because I met Randy in 2010.  It is a story I've been meaning to capture here, but the short form is that my wife and I bumped into him while touring the Forbidden City in Beijing.  Even though it was his first day in China and he told us the jet lag was killing him, the guy could not have been friendlier:  he asked us about our trip, he talked about his wife and he even put us on the guest list for the Lamb of God show the following evening. Even as both my wife and I started to worry that we'd taken up too much of his time, Randy just kept on chatting.


This past year, I dropped him a tweet before their show in D.C.  Much to my surprise, the guy responded, referencing our conversation from nearly two years earlier.  Totally unnecessary, and very cool.


I guess that even in my old age, I'm apt to be a fanboy from time to time.

The truth is that I don't really know Randy at all.  But I'm inclined to say that he's a good guy, which is why this is so troubling.  

If you're skeptical, I invite you to read two selections from his highly entertaining (though desperately in need of editing) Tumblr page: I Love Boobies, and What Its Like to Be In A Band.  I like to think that they're both very good indications of the man's character.

Sadly, not lost in any of this discussion is the fact that a fan is dead. And quite, frankly, I'm struggling to create a pithy conclusion to follow that.

A Decision in Five Movements

The First Movement: Frustration


"Above all, I didn't want to take any more shit."

The Second Movement: Resolution


"And if they try to slow you down, tell them all to go to hell"

The Third Movement: Grief





"Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind"

The Fourth Movement: Rebirth 


"I believe I've waited long enough.  Where do I begin?"

The Fifth Movement: Conviction


"Let this be my annual reminder: We can all be something bigger."



So....guess what I did?

Having Fun With Axl

So, I have a few more things to take care of before I return to my half-assed monthly posting schedule. 

But in the meantime, I wanted to share the following bit of brilliance I found on FunnyOrDie earlier today.  Enjoy....