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Nick Clegg admitted this week that he regularly cries when he listens to music. But which songs bring tears to the eyes of Guardian writers? Broken Heart – Spiritualized My dad fell ill just before I left home and he never got better. I was optimistic enough to believe he would, or maybe not grown-up enough to countenance the alternative. He was from a family who believed negative emotions should be packed away in a box and discreetly buried. So we didn’t talk about the fact that he was clearly depressed by his illness. Instead we talked about movies and TV shows, books and records. We both loved Spiritualized’s 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. A few months before he died, he mentioned in passing that he often played Broken Heart over and over. This is a song so opulently miserable that it’s almost a parody of heartbreak songs. You shouldn’t ever feel the way the narrator does. It’s too much. I should have taken the opportunity to talk to my dad about his terrible sadness, but I didn’t. The song was played at his funeral and became, emotionally speaking, a grenade with the pin half out. I couldn’t listen to it again until, almost 10 years later, I saw Spiritualized play the entire album at the Royal Festival Hall. When they reached Broken Heart I almost levitated with sorrow, hit by the realisation that this song represented the conversation we never had. Dorian Lynskey Silent Night (trad) Some might find slightly pathetic the fact that, when asked to name the song that makes me cry, my first thought was how to whittle it down to just one. Or even 10. But then, considering the emotional power of music and the way it entwines itself around defining moments of your life, I’d find it more pathetic if someone couldn’t name a song that made them blub like a big old stupid baby. I made the mistake, for instance, of listening to Antony and the Johnsons’ I Am A Bird Now during a traumatic breakup six years ago and still don’t dare play the track Bird Gerhl in public for fear people will rush over and pack me off to the nearest therapist. For similar reasons I can’t even risk playing my favourite song of all time out in the street – Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come (blame John Pilger, who used it as the closing track on his unbelievably moving documentary, The War On Democracy ). Still, the song that makes me well up most of all is the Christmas carol Silent Night. The melody is bound up with the magic but also the melancholy of Christmas. As December approaches I can’t go near a church. Or leave the house. Or answer the door. Or watch the sodding EastEnders Christmas special. Tim Jonze When You Need a Laugh – Patsy Cline Songs I’ve heard at dawn return to make me cry in daylight, however saccharine and bloated ( Kelly Clarkson’s Because of You , please be kind). But it’s Cline I reach for when I need a lovely weep. Specifically, When You Need a Laugh – the truest, most painful song in the world, the story of a girl who keeps returning to her unrequited love even though he rips the piss out of her and thinks she’s a dick. “At least I’m on your mind when you’re laughing, somehow that breaks the fall. So when you need a laugh, give me a call.” Have sadder words ever been sung? Eva Wiseman Candide – Leonard Bernstein As an opera, or an operetta or a musical, however you want to describe it, Candide has its problems. No fewer than six people, including Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellmann, Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein himself, not to mention Voltaire, had a hand in the book and lyrics, and each time it was revived musical numbers were added or removed. Now there’s no such thing as a definitive version of the score, and each performance has its awkward corners, its moments when everything sags. Yet all of that is forgotten and forgiven in the last 20 minutes, from the moment Candide sings Nothing More Than This, his bitter aria of self-revelation, right through to the final chorus Make Our Garden Grow . Set to music of almost Mahlerian intensity, it’s the antithesis of the easy-fix, happily-ever-after ending – an affirmation that “Life is life and all we know” and that you can only live your life by accepting your own shortcomings and taking people for what they are and not for what you want them to be. It’s an extraordinary passage, devastatingly truthful and overwhelmingly, unfailingly touching. Andrew Clements Ex-Factor – Lauryn Hill Most songs about breakups are retrospective, with the deed already done and the heart already broken, but Hill takes you right into the middle of it. Ex-Factor is a misleading title because he’s not quite an ex just yet, although the song hangs on the fact that the split is inevitable. But the real grief of it is in the crushing confusion. “I just can’t be with no one else,” she sings , immediately following it with “I know what we’ve got to do – you let go and I’ll let go too.” But knowing that it needs to end is not the same as ending it, which she can’t bring herself to do, and the fade-out of “Where were you when I needed you?” is a devastating finish, suggesting it could so easily have been avoided. I first heard it as a student, too young to imagine that love could ever be so blurry; as life happens, the jumble of longing and despair starts to make perfect sense, and I appear to have something in my eye. Rebecca Nicholson I Just Called To Say I Love You – Stevie Wonder Sometimes the most unlikely song can knock the stuffing out of you because it catches you unawares, in a heightened emotional state. I had intended to celebrate the birth of my first daughter by listening to something that combined aptness with a degree of cool: I liked the idea of Joey Ramone’s version of What A Wonderful World or Neil Young’s New Mama. As it was, the birth was chaotic and I didn’t have time to arrange a suitable post-natal soundtrack: driving home alone from the hospital after a sleepless night, I turned on the radio. I wasn’t even paying attention until I Just Called To Say I Love You, as awful a record as a bona fide musical genius has ever made, came on. At that moment, however, I was struck by the manifold loveliness of the sentiment – he’s just calling to say “I love you”! He means it from the bottom of his heart! – with such force that I had to pull over, even though the song made no sense whatsoever in my current situation. The protagonist spends the whole thing explaining that he has no particularly pressing reason to say he loves you, which I clearly had, and that in fact it’s just another ordinary day. This wasn’t the way I would have described the preceding 13 hours, which had included the terrible moment when I decided to peek at what was going on at the business end of a caesarean section, and now found me sitting in a layby, crying. Then the terrible little ending kicked in – cha-cha-cha! – and I collected myself and drove home. Alexis Petridis Someone Great – LCD Soundsystem My oldest brother, best friend and subject of my teenage hero worship, can probably take a bit of credit for my obsession with LCD’s epic bleep-making. He introduced me to most of what I remain giddily attac hed to even today (New Order; newspapers; American literature; my husband). Four years ago to the week, we had a massive falling-out and haven’t really spoken since. At the same time, I heard this on a bus and was set on silent autoblub for the entire journey home, mortifying the old man next to me who desperately tried to find another seat. I played it on loop for weeks. I still miss him loads. Nosheen Iqbal Dancing in the Dark –Bruce Springsteen We were heading out of London on a red summer’s evening, the car jerking through the choked suburbs on our way to Devon. A Springsteen compilation was on the CD player, and it came to the big hit single. The one with those facile lyrics about how this gun’s for hire, even if we’re just dancing in the dark. “You can’t start a fire,” Springsteen sang as the song neared its conclusion, “worrying ’bout your little world falling apart,” and suddenly – unaccountably – my eyes were streaming, the road turning blurry in front of me. Why was I crying? Was I harbouring some subconscious worry about my own world falling apart? Was it the middle-aged awareness of the fragility of happiness that made me tear up? I still don’t know. But since then, every time I’ve played that song while driving – but, oddly, only while driving – the result has been the same. My wife’s response? Don’t play it in the car; you’ll get us all killed. Michael Hann After the Goldrush – Neil Young Almost everything by Neil Young makes me weepy; the way he sings “Because I’m still in love with you” on Harvest Moon , the bittersweet pitch of Unknown Legend , his, frankly, underrated use of the vocoder on the experimental 1980 album Trans. OK, maybe not the last one. It’s mainly nostalgia on my part, because my dad used to play his music when doing the washing- up (which was every night; mum made dinner, dad did the dishes). But his 1970 song After the Goldrush gets me every time. Young brings together a vision of mother nature reaching her peak, with the quietly stirring chord change from D major to G, and an occasionally desperate tinge to his voice. The meaning of the song is the subject of continued debate, though the general gist seems to be of two diverging themes; the pillaging of earth, and of the human body, and images of futuristic advancement – portentous dreams of silver spaceships, and the like. You keep expecting the song, usually just played with piano and the occasional harmonica, to reach a dramatic climax, but instead it fades away. It always makes me think of someone nearing the end – “I was lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in my eyes” – looking back on their life with fond regrets. Rosie Swash Mendelssohn’s Octet I cry all the time at music. The last occasion was on Monday, during the reprise of the theme of the Goldberg Variations, played in Sitkovetsky’s arrangement for strings in a concert by the Britten Sinfonia. I can be relied on to cry listening to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s recording of As With Rosy Steps the Morn from Handel’s oratorio Theodora – the emotional intensity invested in this apparently simple aria by Hunt Lieberson, a great artist who died cruelly young, is staggering. But the piece I’d nominate is the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Octet. When I was a child, it was used as the theme music for a Radio 4 adaptation of The Mill on the Floss and, with its passionate, bounding energy laced with a melancholy yearning, I’ve always associated it with Eliot’s heroine, Maggie Tulliver. Last year I played it, very badly, for the first time, with friends including my partner. It’s quite demanding music and I never thought I’d be able to do it. I certainly had a cry after that. Charlotte Higgins Leave Right Now – Will Young As a former deputy editor of NME I shouldn’t really admit to the fact that it’s a Will Young song that can bring a tear to my eye. Yet of all the music I’ve been exposed to, it’s pop songs that have always affected me the most. In the late autumn of 2003, when this record came out, I was definitely emotionally susceptible to it; the song’s sad lyric, in which Young faces up to the fact that a relationship has to end as continuing it is too painful, pretty much described what was going on in my life at the time. Yet I’m sure the record is moving in its own right, too. Will’s singing is completely English; dignified, buttoned-up even; the tune is country-tinged and classic. Somehow the combination powerfully conveys how torn you can feel in that awful situation: trying to show a brave face to the world when you’re heartbroken; summoning up the will to extricate yourself from someone destructive, even though you love them. When Young sings: “If I lose the highs, at least I’m spared the lows,” the catch in his voice gets me every time. Alex Needham I See A Darkness – Bonnie “Prince” Billy “Did you know how much I love you, is a hope that somehow you can save me from this darkness”. It’s with these words – sung in a frayed, despondent sigh over minimal piano and distant drum splashes – that Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka Will Oldham, can reduce me to a quivering wreck. I first heard the song after leaving university to move back home, the idea being to get a temporary job, save some money and start my life proper. Two and a half years later I was stuck working in a call centre, depressed and lost. In among the darkness the song describes, however, there’s a spark of hope and the line about holding on to the love of other people is just crushingly beautiful in its simplicity. Michael Cragg I Found a Reason – Cat Power Several years back I was on an assignment in Massachusetts. It was January, in the midst of a particularly harsh winter, and I spent my days sleeping and my nights driving. I listened a lot, on my night drives, to Cat Power’s album The Covers Record. This is her version of a Velvet Underground song. It’s only two minutes long, a song boiled down to spare piano and a dusty voice, but there’s something about it that makes my insides buckle. It is somehow forlorn and vulnerable and desperate and defiant all at once. In my favourite line she sounds half-bold and half-broken: “What comes is better than what came before,” she sings; it always brings me to tears. That January was a peculiarly lonely time in my life, and I remember driving with the roads empty and the snow falling heavily, feeling that this song seemed a distillation of what it meant to love and be lost, and all the frailty of being human. Laura Barton A Child of Our Time – Michael Tippett Tippett’s oratorio never fails to make me weep. It was written during the second world war and inspired by the murder in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan . The assassination sparked the Nazi attacks on Germany’s Jewish population which have come to be known as Kristallnacht. Tippett combines his own densely textured music with a group of traditional African-American spirituals, and it is at the conclusion of the hour-long piece that the tears invariably well, when the music wrestles painfully with the horror of all that has occurred before dissolving into the immensely powerful spiritual Deep River, pointing the way across the Jordan “to the gospel feast. / That promised land, / Where all is peace.” You don’t have to be religious to feel the power of this sentiment. This surely is what occurs at the end of all life – we are reconciled to what has been, we await our common end. Tippett was a conscientious objector in the war, and went to prison for his views. In A Child of Our Time he is standing back from the conflict, refusing to take sides, envisaging the universal peace and reconciliation that will follow unimaginable suffering. Stephen Moss Turn It Into Love – Kylie Minogue In 1989 I was 11 years old, I’d just started secondary school and I’d fallen in love for the first time. The girl in question somehow did not jump at the chance of being my girlfriend, and my love was unrequited. After one particularly mortifying Saturday afternoon when she saw me in the Wimpy with – the horror of it all! – my family, I got home and put the first Kylie album on. Most of the songs on that first album were about bad luck and uncertainty and lostness – that’s why she became queen of everything – but track eight made me cry that day more than the others. I probably listened to Turn It Into Love on repeat for about three hours. Fortunately I had no idea in 1989 that this fruitless obsession was going to continue at least until the end of the 90s. These days the song makes me cry a bit because it feels as if it represents the start of a teenage life I probably didn’t make the most of and can never get back, but that’s still far less traumatic than the memory of being spotted eating a burger with my mum. Peter Robinson St Matthew Passion – Bach I’ve never understood how music makes me cry. It’s just a truism that it happens, often without warning, rhyme or reason. Sometimes it’s because of a personal connection – the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues my grandfather loved the most, which we listened to together, or the Bruckner symphony I associate with our family home in the highlands of Scotland – but the welling-up can also come completely out of the blue. As a student, Stravinsky’s Abraham and Isaac reduced me to tears in the middle of a microscopic structural analysis of how Igor chose the notes, as if I had suddenly seen the soul of the music. But then, for sentimental reasons, songs by Sondheim, the Pet Shop Boys, and Björk also turn me into a blubbering wreck. However, there’s one piece for me that combines the musical, the personal, and the existential in an inescapably tear-jerking combination: the final chorus from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. It’s music that defines compassion, lament, and loss, to which you can only surrender in moist-eyed wonder. Tom Service And what makes Westminter’s rockiest MPs cry? A Man Needs a Maid – Neil Young I know it’s politically incorrect to those in the feminist camp, but it’s such a haunting song. Young had obviously reached a bad stage in his life, but the backing by the London symphony orchestra makes it luscious. I’d also have to choose It’s A Motherfucker by Eels. The raw emotion of Mark Everett’s voice hits the spot every time I listen to it. Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You, Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, from the film Platoon, have similar effects. Alan Johnson, Labour MP Goodbye – Steve Earle As a member of MP4 (a rock band made of MPs) I’ve often reduced people to tears, though not necessarily for the right reasons. Being half-Irish and half-Welsh, I’m a bit of a sucker for sentimental music. I’m a big fan of Earle, and especially Goodbye, which is a spare, pared-down song about a love affair in Earle’s lost years. Halley Came To Jackson by Mary Chapin Carpenter is another corny song that never fails to move me. Kevin Brennan, Labour MP and MP4 guitarist (Interviews by James Harker) Pop and rock Classical music Nick Clegg Dorian Lynskey Tim Jonze Eva Wiseman Andrew Clements Rebecca Nicholson Alexis Petridis Nosheen Iqbal Michael Hann Rosie Swash Charlotte Higgins Alex Needham Michael Cragg Laura Barton Stephen Moss Peter Robinson Tom Service guardian.co.uk