Last Thursday night, I cried during an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I don’t mean that I laughed so hard that I cried. I cried because of song.
I’m not easily moved to tears. I’ve only cried because of a movie twice: Once in E.T. when Elliott is crying and then E.T. comes back to life, and he starts laughing but has to pretend he’s still crying; and once in Saving Private Ryan when Tom Hanks says, “Earn this”, and they cut to the old man asking his wife if he’s a good man, if he’s lived a good life. This particular song is the only song that has ever made me well up.
The song that made me cry while watching It’s Always Sunny is a song that I have heard literally hundreds of times, but the crying is a recent development. The crying started unexpectedly about a year ago. I was driving around Cleveland in my car and the song came on the radio. I was singing along until midway through the third verse and the next thing I new, I was pulling over because I was crying so hard that I couldn’t see the road. Then it happened again when I heard the song THE NEXT DAY. I couldn’t believe it. I have no personal associations with this particular song. It doesn’t trigger a specific memory, yet there I was in my car, weeping, to Thin Lizzy’s The Boys are Back in Town. Really. I was struggling with depression a little bit at the time, so I just thought that it was a weird funny coincidence. I even told a couple of people about it, but basically I had forgotten about it until about three months ago.
I was sitting in a Cheeseburger Charley’s in Nashville. The only other people in the restaurant were two Nashville Metro cops. I was enjoying a Beefalo burger with red onion, jalapeno, and spicy brown mustard, when I heard that familiar opening riff. And I thought, “Uh-Oh”. But I kind of laughed, and thought, there’s no way. Right? So I’m eating, and I’m listening to the song. Man, that song. That lyrical Irish vocal delivery style. The way the guitars stroke on the off-beat... and I’m crying. I throw away half a burger and rush out to my car.
I don’t really know why it makes me cry. It makes me feel nostalgic in a non-specific kind of way. Combine that with perfect pop rock hooks and i’m reduced to a blubbering mess. So when The Boys are Back in Town started playing during last week’s episode of It’s Always Sunny, I laughed, because I knew EXACTLY what was coming.
