25 Songs That Bring Tears to My Eyes
Alright, to offset the snarky humor of the last list, here’s a heartfelt one.
One, I didn’t include Christmas songs. A lot of Christmas songs get me. Two, I didn’t include anything too personal, although if it’s not somewhat personal, you’re not going to feel it enough to be moved to tears.
1. Amazing Grace
Every. Single. Time. When we sing this at church, I can’t get through the first verse. Too many funerals and John Newton’s words hit too close to home.
2. The Old Rugged Cross
This one is pretty personal. It brings me back to the fall of 1992 as the whole family crammed into a tiny bedroom where our matriarch, my great-grandma Lane, lay dying of cancer and as we all sang this song she slipped into a coma that she would never come out of. I don’t have a ton of memories from childhood that don’t have to be coaxed out, but this is definitely one of them.
3. Coat of Many Colors – Dolly Parton
Even when we saw her in concert at the Hollywood Bowl I cried hearing this song. Everything about this song is beautiful. So much love in every line. Dolly is the patron saint of the Smoky Mountains.
4. Change Gonna Come – Otis Redding
Otis’ voice, much like Adele’s, is enough on it’s own to bring tears to your eyes, but given the cultural context of America at the time and the lines “I’m afraid to die, I don’t know what’s up there beyond the clouds” when he would only live another eighteen months after recording it. There are so many layers in his vocals, you just keep peeling them back over the years.
5. Fairytale of New York – The Pogues (with Kristy MacColl)
No one is better than the Irish at marrying beautiful, uplifiting melodies with heartbreaking lyrics. This story is as human as it gets, you set out with your heart full of hope and your head full of big plans, but life slowly chips at them til you’re left with just broken pieces of relationships and your sanity.
6. The Saddest Song – The Ataris
Songs about parenthood are tough to write and tough to listen to. Here Kris, a guy who grew up without his dad, is sending a message to his daughter who he is not around for. You set out to be someone better and you fail in spite of your best intentions. This is a hard pill for people to swallow, and Kris attacks it head on. Kudos to him.
7. Head Above Water – Avril Lavigne
This is a relatively simple song, but that’s the best part of it. It doesn’t need to interfere with Avril’s prayers. It’s a plea for strength in the midst of a crisis. It’s not someone giving up, it’s someone fighting for her life. And most importantly, it’s someone who understands she can’t do this on her own.
8. True Love Ways – Buddy Holly
First and foremost, Buddy’s voice and the orchestral arrangement is so incredibly gorgeous. It’s also a love letter to Maria Elena, his new bride, and you can hear in his voice how deep that love is. Gentle at times, on the verge of breaking due to vulnerability and then he powers through confidently just like I am sure he would have done for her time and time again.
9. Will the Circle Be Unbroken – The Carter Family
A classic song about one of humanity’s most basic traumas, the death of your mother. On the original recordings, Sara’s voice betrays all the pain of her life that she tried to hold inside until much later. Mother Maybelle’s superb picking on her Gibson L-5, creating a new style of picking that would change American music forever. The Carter Family belonged to all of us.
10. Sinners Like Me – Eric Church
Brilliant song about faith and family. We rebel against our families. We like to think we’re special. But, the truth is, we’re all alike. And as the song points out in the last verse, one day many of us will stand in a long line of sinners just like us. Our family is much bigger than just the folks we shared a house with when we were young.
11. Like Jesus Does – Eric Church
Especially those of us who are creative and driven by these inner forces we can’t explain or control, we have to understand how we impact those who love us. I don’t think EC thinks his wife literally loves him like Jesus does, but he’s recognizing she loves him because of who she is, not because of who he is. We should all be so blessed to marry someone like this, I know I am.
12. Father of Mine – Everclear
By the time I lived in West Los Angeles, it was forty years after Art grew up there. A lot had changed, but somethings hadn’t. I used to ride my bike from Culver City to the beach at Playa del Rey and down to El Segundo. I took the Ballona Creek path and I rode right by the Mar Vista Gardens projects where Art grew up. I wouldn’t have wanted to live there now, much less in the early 1970s. While our society has a lot of problems, if we solved the problem of fatherhood, almost all of them would go away. It’s hard to be a good dad. It’s hard to know what the right thing to do is sometimes. But, it’s not hard to love my kid more than anything else on the face of this earth, and I will never understand why a man wouldn’t move mountains and oceans to be in their kid’s life every day.
13. Song from an American Movie, Part 2 – Everclear
No one has ever written so clearly about broken homes like Art Alexakis. He’s seen it from both sides. Having grown up with a single mom and having been married at least four times. Here he bares his soul, he thinks about how things could have been different and how the simple times with his daughter are why he is able to keep it all together. He can’t break apart, no matter how broken he is on the inside, he has to be strong for his daughter. As he said in the movie about fatherhood, The Other F Word, “Everyone is going to leave their kids with baggage, the goal is to leave them with less baggage than your parents left you with.”
14. Iris – Goo Goo Golls
This song is incredible from every angle and I’d make the argument that it’s not the same without Tim Pierce’s mandolin and slide guitar. John Rzeznik was in a dark place when he wrote this. He was recently divorced, living out of a hotel in Los Angeles when Rob Cavallo asked him to write a song for City of Angels. He gave it a shot just to have something to do and sat down and watched the film. He was moved by it. He picked up his guitar and the majority of this song is as it was on the first four track cassette demo he did in his hotel room. To me, it represents what connecting with other human beings and their experiences, through art, can do for us emotionally. And, this changed John’s career and life ever after.
15. In Color – Jamey Johnson
Most people who know country music, know this song, but other than songwriters, I don’t think anyone gives Jamey his due. A supremely talented songwriter, who can play the guitar and sing like no other. This whole record is perfect, but this song found success because we can all relate to it as we get older and we tell our stories to the younger generations. Maybe our stories aren’t that important to the world at large, but they’re important to us and these little things that we do, or that happen to us, ripple throughout time through our children and their children because what we experience, combined with our genetics, make us who we are and how we live our lives.
16. Check it Out – John Mellencamp
I wrote about this song in more detail in my post on this record, but this might be the most accurate song about being middle-aged ever written.
17. Dead Souls – Joy Division
While I prefer the Nine Inch Nails version from The Crow soundtrack, when Ian Curtis sings, “They keep calling me” and you realize that soon after, he’ll take his own life, it’s incredibly haunting and sad.
18. Here’s to Us – Lit
I love Lit, I think they’re insanely under-rated. This was a moving tribute to their life-long friend, and drummer, Allen Shellenberger, who had recently died of brain cancer. Having lost too many friends over the years, to car accidents, overdoses, suicides and more recently, cancer, it gives me fond memories of my friends. They may be gone, but those memories will always be with me.
19. Normal Like You – Matty Mullins
I could’ve chosen a lot of Matty songs, or Memphis May Fire songs, but I chose this one because of the subject matter is a little different than things you’ll find elsewhere. Being the singer in a band who sings about real things, Matty has thousands of fans sharing their pain with him. He, like me, is blessed to be given the gift of being a support to people in these situations, but it takes an emotional toll on you too. When you feel the pain of others, and that keeps getting piled on you, it can be overwhelming sometimes. As a Christian, Matty knows that he is just the conduit, it’s not up to him to heal these people, it’s just up to him to listen to them and give them a hug and reassure them. Matty’s music has done this for me too, so when we were hanging out with him, I was cautious to frame my comments in a way to lift him, not to burden him. I gave credit to the Holy Spirit for my sobriety, but I thanked him for his words because when I first quit drinking, “Somebody” came out and I would play that song over and over again crying my eyes out in my car as I went through those first few months. His words comforted me, but it wasn’t him who dried me out. He would’ve hugged me if he hadn’t just broken his ribs two days before, but he gave me a half-hug and just gave me this look of gratitude and told me thanks and I reassured him because that’s all we as artists ever want to hear, is that we helped comfort someone. And I couldn’t agree with him more.
20. Holding Things Together – Merle Haggard
An over-looked Merle Haggard gem. A dad whose wife has left him and the kids and he’s doing his best to minimize the damage for his kids, to the point of writing the wife’s name on the daughter’s birthday present, even though the mom was M.I.A.
21. Poetry – Pat Green
A good reminder to stop every now and again and appreciate the beauty of the world. “How a baby smiles and how Ray Charles sings, of course we were created.”
22. I’ll Stand By You – The Pretenders
My favorite Pretenders song is “2,000 Miles” and it could’ve been on here too, but I’ll put it on my Christmas list. In world where infatuation controls our emotions and we “fall out of love” as fast as we fall in love, this song is a song about what love should be. Love is a decision. It’s an action. It’s not a feeling. It’s commitment, which means it doesn’t always feel good. Love isn’t about you, it’s about the person you love. This was our first dance at our wedding and I don’t think we could have chosen any better. It certainly sums us up and it sums up how we feel about each other.
23. Stars – Skillet
A bit of a departure from my brothers and sisters in Skillet, but they nailed it. A song about the greatest love story of all time. The true, greatest love of all. Dr. James White, a friend of Jon Cooper’s, once said, if you don’t occasionally break down in tears over the Gospel, I question as to whether you truly believe it. I completely agree, how can I, even slightly, acknowledge what God has done for me, without being overwhelmed by love and gratitude to the point of falling on my face in tears? Because love isn’t about what I’ve done for God, it’s about what God has done for me.
24. All In (Apologize) – Stellar Kart
I love Stellar Kart. They were so freaking good. Adam Agee is now in the Newsboys, good for him, but I miss this band. The song is about finding strength in the right place and facing the fact that you might be standing on your own in this world. Our life is not a path to popularity, it’s a path of ridicule at best, it can be hard sometimes.
25. Death, Dyin’ and Deviled Eggs – Wade Bowen
Wade Bowen is one of my favorite songwriters and he should be world famous. I’m sad that he’s not, but I’m happy I get to see him at the Grizzly Rose and stand five feet from him instead of Corporate Bank of Social Engineering Stadium. If you’ve been to a Southern funeral, every line of this song will resonate with you. While this song is about a funeral, it’s not death that makes me cry at this, it’s the comfort I get from the familiarity of it. It’s the countless post-funeral potlucks I’ve been to in my life with fried chicken, potato salad and checkered table cloths. It’s getting out the guitars and singing “I’ll Fly Away” and other songs. And it’s the people I sang those songs with who have had their own send-offs in the years since. It’s just about missing those moments for me.