BIG ! BIG ! shout outs to Miss Maile Young for letting me interview her about songs that make her cry! I loved talking to this adorable little lady and crying together :~) A beautiful thing that I was able to realize during this interview was that the songs that make us cry always change over time. As different events in our lives take place, the songs that used to make us sob only make us feel a sweet nostalgia, whereas a new loss can make a happy song truly depressing. I think this speaks so much to our ever changing opinions and feelings about ourselves and others, and I love it.
What song makes you cry?
1) Last Words of a Shooting Star by Mitski
2) Darden Road by Beta Radio
When did you first hear this song?
- Probably last year at about this time – last January. I got really into the whole album and this song is one of the later ones that jumped out to me. I got more into this song as I moved into the summer. The summer was transitioning weird because i wasn’t doing anything at home this summer besides working minimum wage. I felt a lot of anxiety about doing nothing and felt depressed about not doing well enough. Spring semester was hard too for a number of reasons, and this song started to feel like a culmination of everything I experienced.
- This was put on a playlist for me by a guy I was seeing at the time, like two weeks before I came to college for the first time. This song is super melodramatic which kind of fits the feeling of coming to college for the first time. When I look back now, I’m like “Why did I think my life was ending?” but it makes sense because I was moving to the other side of the country and it was a huge transition for me. Especially because I was in this relationship where I was very happy but I knew we were going to have to break up in two weeks. That’s a lot of pressure to be under. And this song is really about leaving home. I was in prime crying set up.
Why do you think this song makes you cry?
- This song is kind of about wanting to die but not really being ready to the point to actually kill yourself. In the song, she’s on a plane and it starts getting very turbulent, and she’s okay with dying. It’s a sad song, but it’s not necessarily the saddest song. It makes me cry because it’s sort of the resignation of not caring whether you live or die.
- It’s so associated with leaving home and leaving these people that I love that it makes me cry. There’s this huge sense of loss that I associate with this song.
Which lyric means the most to you/makes you cry the hardest?
1) I always wanted to die clean and pretty but I’d be too busy on working days
I have very vivid memories of driving back from work in the summer night, and this lyric is also the climax of the song, and it reminds me that we’ve all thought about it (dying). That scene of me being in the car is able to just mirror being on the plane. If another car were to hit me right now, I wouldn’t necessarily be so sad. It’s this weird limbo of knowing that you could be able to be more, but not caring enough to do anything about it.
2) I don’t wanna clean my room, because I might clean the memories of you
This one lyric was very very specific to my situation of when I left. It’s about how you can be so close to this person and seeing them every day and then having this reality forced upon you where you will not see them for four months, and you don’t even know if you’ll live in the same city again.You wanna cling to the temporary togetherness and it’s slipping out of your fingers. You live in your own sphere when you’re in a relationship with someone and when you’re apart that sphere is gone, whether you want it to be or not.