Music to shed tears to
I have mentioned before that certain songs can make me cry. Of course, with my mental wobbliness factor, I don’t necesarily need any songs to accomplish this goal, as at my worst somebody saying hello or a black cloud or nothing at all can open the floodgates, but there are definitely songs which can cause me to well up even when I am in a stable mental state.
I have expressed my tearful admiration for ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’ before, and it sits alongside other songs written for Broadway shows before the Second World War which have stood the test of time in both singability and the power to move listeners to tears. The Gershwin brothers’ ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ and Jerome Kern’s ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ (lyrics by Otto Harbach) are the greatest examples of this for me. Songs of love either lost or never found in the first place, expressed with simplicity, directness and a velvety melody. From the other side of the coin, Irving Berlin’s ‘How Deep is the Ocean?’ (not from a show as far as I know), which speaks of a love of incredible depth and fortitude can make me start to well up, as can ‘All the Things You Are’ by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein.
The Singing Librarian Talks 