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Top 5 songs that make me cry

Look, I don’t really want to be that guy, weeping in the corner, embarrassing everybody. As Limited News’ official obscure music reporter™, I should be talking about noise & electronica from Japan, glitchy postrock or my favourite NoMeansNo tracks (it’ll have to happen).

But we’ve all got songs that make us cry, whether it’s because they remind us of some moment, sport a lyric that really touches us, or just convey an emotion perfectly.

I’m not going to talk to you much about beautiful, moving lyrics either. If a piece of music does make me cry, odds on it’s just the music, or the music’s interaction with the words that does the trick. And as you’ll see, three (that’s over 50 per cent!) of my selections are instrumentals — got you there with the “songs” thing didn’t I?

Belle & Sebasian — Don’t Leave The Light On Baby

But let’s start with an honest-to-goodness song. This is the one that inspired this whole snotty, eyeglass-steaming leave-me-alone hoopla — Stereogum, bless their click-baiting socks, decided to post a list (meh, lists) of Belle & Sebastian albums from worst to best, and as if there was any doubt, they listed my fave at the bottom. HOW WRONG.

“It’s been a bloody stupid day”. The protagonist isn’t a happy chappy, and his lover’s left him. But the wrenching bit isn’t the minor-key verse, or the gorgeous string interlude over the chords of the verse. It’s when the chorus finally drops in, one phrase into the reprise of the first verse: so bittersweet, so lovely, in no small part because it’s in the relative major key. It sounds like hope, but it’s just remembered beauty.

“It finally dawned on me tonight / Best to go down without a fight / I know you will forgive me for my honesty”. Well yeah, he does a good lyrical turn, that Stuart Murdoch.

Stars — Your Ex Lover Is Dead (Final Fantasy Version)

The original is a lovely piece of indie rock, but for my money what fellow Torontonian Owen Pallett turns it into is sublime. The original’s strummed guitars turn into a piano line out of some fin-de-siècle Paris café, the original chords are transmuted into something sentimental and regretful, while the lush strings appear as bitingly discordant yet gorgeous multi-tracked lines on Owen’s violin. “I’m not sorry, there’s nothing to say”. The violin lines climb higher and higher, then drop back to a piano resolution, and yes, again in a major key.

Ravel Piano Concerto in G. 2nd mvt: Adagio assai

 

You’ll have to turn the volume up for this one.

It’s probably this piece of music that made me realise that major-key compositions can be the most moving. Pure piano for over 3 minutes, before the orchestra creeps in, in Ravel’s frequently favoured waltz time, with a simple melody that floats over the chords, often hanging back or pre-empting the next change. In the hands of a great pianist and conductor, it’s exquisitely poised — perfectly engrossing because it’s so restrained. This isn’t my favourite performance (that’s Pascal Rogé with the Orchestra Symphonique de Montréal under Charles Dutoit), but it’s pretty damn good all the same.

Boards of Canada — Everything You Do Is A Balloon

In 1996 I was already a few years into my obsession with electronic music, carefully avoiding the 4/4 pulse of house and absolutely digging drum’n’bass’s jagged, accelerated beats and low-slung bass. A couple of years earlier I’d discovered the early stages of “IDM”, that quasi-genre of home-listening dance music championed by the Warp label and pioneering artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre. As most of this music was hard to find locally, I was beginning to latch on to internet mail-order. So I would send off for releases every few weeks, some based purely on a one-paragraph review or a connection with a label or producer. Autechre had some relationship to this Manchester label SKAM, so I took a punt on SKA008 from Boards of Canada. It knocked the breath out of me from the first listen, a mixture of intensely nostalgic analogue synth melodicism with crunchy hip-hop and techno beats.

This personal history story is important because Boards of Canada’s music is so deeply imbued with nostalgic longing — those keyboard sounds sounding like they were mastered on a cassette tape left in a hot car, evoking science documentary soundtracks from our childhood (if you’re of a particular age). Plus the duo are already past masters at wistful odd-shaped harmonies that shift off in strange directions halfway through tracks.

It’s not really the case that this particular track makes me cry these days, and I’m probably more attached to the EP’s incredible opening track Hi Scores, but in my early 20s in the mid-’90s, still finding my way, I would sit listening to this last track on the 12″ and it would speak unspoken, inexpressible volumes.

Special mention for their single Dayvan Cowboy from 10 years later, pure day-glo soft-focus joy.

The Bad Plus — Prehensile Dream

This song has haunted me. I spent a whole day at “work” about 5 years ago skipping through MP3s trying to work out what this chord sequence was, going round and round in my head. It was on the bike home that I finally traced it to this song. The Bad Plus are best known for their jazz piano trio covers of artists like Aphex Twin, Blondie and Nirvana. But while I love the covers, their originals are at least as great, and this numbers among my favourite tracks ever. Surprisingly, despite being a classic piano piece, it’s by the band’s bassist Reid Anderson. It’s got that classic JS Bach feel that can surface in jazz sometimes.

And yes, it doesn’t exactly make me cry, but from the drums-only start through the stark repeated opening piano notes, and then the tumbling left-hand describing the harmonies over which this almost-static melody floats, it’s another example of that simple perfection we find in the Ravel above. It’s that classic arch structure, one big crescendo, cycling through the gorgeous chords till the next repeat, each more baroque and more redolent of jazz’s freedom of expression, the melody slowly unchaining itself until around 4:40 the trio break from the cycle, funkily wigging out for a mere 40 seconds before crashing back into the same pattern in full belt for a minute and a half, then subsiding into two final soft statements of the theme, seen out with some barely-heard twinkly organ sounds.

Anderson also wrote the touching People Like Us from their most recent album, if you’d like more of the same.

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