Crying outside is not nice. People can see you when it happens in the subway or on the street, and it is like crying like the piano: you don’t want to witness. I don’t know why this is so. It probably feels too unprotected to show this brittle side of itself. Although you should be clear that the observants have their own problems and worries. In the end, every person with his head is deep in his own ass, so what the fuck?
But still. Crying publicly is somehow bad. You walk around like an open wound.
I recently have one interview found that Mike Birbiglia led with Stephen Colbert. And that has initiated a free association chain in me.
Mike Birbiglia asks Colbert which song makes him cry. And Colbert’s answer is original: “Is there a song that does not make me cry?”
Men’s avalanche vs. Sheryl Crow
Speaking of: A few weeks ago I was washed in a live album by Sheryl Crow near Tidal. And maybe it was due to the increasingly brittle world situation, perhaps also on the brown-gray January weather, but when I was sitting in the subway and heard the live version of “Strong Enough”, the tears flocked my cheeks down. Like Marcel Proust, I bit into a Madeleine, only out of sound. I was fifteen again and stood with my father and friends in a circle in our old living room during the band test.
Papa to the drums, his now deceased friend Uli on the guitar. Anyone who was still there is lost in meandering face schemes. In any case, I stood there and had the American men’s avalanche like Willie Nelson, John Hatt, Lyle Lovett or Steve Earle only to oppose a single song. A song by a woman who earned her spores, as a background singer of Michael Jackson, for example and as a talented, rather casual songwriter. As a competent, equivalent representative of the American music tradition, herb beauty and timeless musical quality: Sheryl Crow.
Country song shelter
“Strong Enough” was my shelter in the men’s bands of my youth. Here I was able to hide my preference for music -like guitar riffs behind the shiny chrome seal of approval of the country. Here my feminine melancholy wore heavy cowboy boots. Here Crow told her that she feels like a piece of dirt because she no longer knows who is because she is constantly losing its version in her relationship. Almost defiantly escaped into an appeal in the title -giving line: Are you strong enough to be my husband? What does nothing else mean than: “Do you stay like me at all?”
In my father’s domains of my father’s male domain found their way into my father’s male domain in a Trojan horse of the Country at the time of fifteen. I was allowed to play keyboard in his band and sometimes sing a song.
I don’t know if this memory is right. Did we really play “Strong Enough” in this band constellation at the time? It is not important either. We played other songs from similar caliber, for example “St. Teresa ”by Joan Osborne. Also a song that deserves its own column.
World vs. song
Contrary to the assumption of some of my friends: I don’t fall in love with the inside, but Stephen Colbert’s wife can now be happy that he and me separate him and me.
His answer to the question of why he had to cry so much was (freely translated): “It is the tension. The tension between the cruel world, which seems to be more and more cruel and something tender, beautiful, which touches you. This tension drives my eyes almost every day. “
In the future I will try to be more careful when choosing the music when I drive the subway. I really don’t want to worry anyone.