Welcome to Great Tear-Jerkers, a blog about music. Updated less than once per year since 2008, it's a source of search-result embarrassment and guilt in my life, so I'm trying to get back on the wagon.
The Great Tear-Jerkers concept came to me in 2007, at Grimey's Records in Nashville, where I stumbled upon this compilation album.
Initially I was impressed by the cover art: the handsome cursive lettering, the thousand-yard stare of a sad clown rendered in Rembrandt chiaroscuro on a muddy maroon field, the hat festooned with a flower that probably squirts water. So many layers of...wait, what? Is this supposed to be Henry Gibson in The Long Goodbye?
The title, HALL OF MUSIC PROUDLY PRESENTS: THE GREAT TEARJERKERS, appealed to me, too. Why, indeed, should "tear-jerker" be pejorative when it could be reclaimed as something great? What's the function of music, if not to jerk us around and make us laugh and weep? Music, the emotional mainline, lifts us up out of the banal mire. And a tear jerker is an violent work of art!
I had never thought of myself as a tear-jerker specialist until I saw the track list. I found myself furtively glancing around the store: I saw a creepy quantity of my favorite songs there. I won't reveal them all now. But the track list taught me something: a song needn't be "sad" to qualify as a Great Tearejerker. It can be sublimely weird, too.
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