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December 8, 2023

Crying Songs

It Doesn't Make Any Sense

I never understand what type of song will make me cry. There's never a theme through each song I blubber over. Most of the time I'm not even crying, I'm just unable to speak and I gesture to my wife that she can't talk to me for a second.

Here's a quick list of songs that have made me at the very least tear up recently:

WreatheGreen Messiah

The Hole song: 90s power pop rock through and through.

"Tank on E" a metalcore song.

The Wreathe song, crust / d-beat / doom.

"Lost Everything" is hyperpop / EDM stuff.

For anyone that knows me moderately well, I'm a very emotional person. Though not always visually. There's a lot of stuffing in this turkey.

I know what qualities of each song might get the dam to burst.

The EDM trope of swelling pre-choruses. The transparently bleak lyrical content of "Awful" playing chaotically off of the crystalline pop rock backdrop. The fact that my tank feels like it's "on E" most of the time. Wreathe's "Green Messiah" full of effusive anarcho-environmentalism that has a very cemented place in my soul.

Emotion in music usually appears for me when there's a lot of competing structures.

"forever" off of Charli XCX's album how i'm feeling now has a really chaotic bundle of vocal manipulation and glitched music. It's like someone took really beautifully recorded vocals and took a cheese grater to the master.

"My Last Serenade" from Killswitch Engage off of Alive or Just Breathing (which if you grew up in New England in the early-2000s knowledge of this album was like a citizenship test) is a masterpiece of Jesse Leach's chewed, almost black-metal vocals juxtaposed with his euphoric clean singing in the chorus.

Ethel Cain's music in general manufactures a feeling for me like "it's so beautiful, but why do I feel so sad?"

"American Teenager" off of Preacher's Daughter has this Friday Night Lights-infused American landscape expansiveness to it.

"Detective Lieutenant" by Drug Church from their latest LP Hygiene I know contains emotional depth for me because of the lyrical admission of individual integrity. The truth that above all things my personal taste is essential to my existence as a human being. Same with Incendiary's song Deed Before Creed. I remember sobbing in my car in a parking lot off of Skibo Rd in Fayetteville, NC listening to this song. Why? Because it's so openly inquiring what makes us become whole people and how difficult it is to have integrity and feel fully realized.

Music is catharsis.

Damn, you're not trying to feel the most?


If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail

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