Ambushed by unexpected emotion

Squeeze's "Up The Junction" (one of my all-time top 20 songs anyway) made me burst into tears outside Mile End station one evening a year or so ago. Just the horribleness of the narrator's situation, the hopelessness in the lines about drinking, the stultifying, truly pathetic inevitableness of it all, got the better of me.

Occasionally I will cry during WNBA games on television.

"Say it Isn't So" by Hall and Oates used to make me cry. That song vividly marked a time of young teen rejection.

I just totally blubbed at the end of The Simpsons - it was "And Maggie Makes Three" when Homer covers the sign at work which says "Don't forget you're here forever" with pix of Maggie, so it reads "Do it for her". I must've seen it half a dozen times, and, frankly, this time I was piss bored. And then I started blubbing like a girl, wtf?!

So nice to get a witness on this one. I absolutely love this song. It makes me so happy.

"I climb through the window and down to the street/I'm shining like a new dime"
"And her hair was so yellow and the wine was so red back in the good old world"

and that's the point I stop being able to move or do anything for the next 4 or 5 minutes.

You can definitely add "Martha" to that list as far as I'm concerned.

I'll add to that list:

Time
The Train Song
Falling Down

Most recent unexpected emotional ambush: Keane's Somewhere Only We Know, doing the dishes, last night. I've not even LIKED it up until now...

Must be turning into some sort of a softie in my old age.

"I've got my friends in the world..."
"The world would show nothing to me/So what good would living do me?"

These give me shivers just typing them.

As for Tom Waits, I was listening to Small Change at lunchtime and the line "Tonight this broom will be my baby" (I think that's it) got me pretty bad.

Blubbering like a baby.

Likewise "New England" after I heard about Kirsty MacColl.

I also spent best part of a decade unable to listen to "Love Cats" by The Cure without wanting to burst into tears - but that wasn't really anything to do with the song itself.

Tears. Every. Single. Time.

2) The Byrds' "Turn, Turn Turn", The line "A time for peace / I swear it's not too late" plays, and then I bawl like a small child.

3) More recently, the song "Forever" by Bruderschaft was introduced to me by an EBM-loving coworker. Even though the song is your typical industrial disco angst-fest, I find the lyrics especially moving as they were written for the father of one of the group members, who died of cancer:

"I will walk this ground forever / and stand guard against your name / I will give all I can offer / I will shoulder all the blame / I am sentry to you now / All your hopes and all your dreams / I will hold you to the light / that's what forever means".

This speaks to me, as I was dumped this winter after an intensely brief relationship with a young woman who has cystic fibrosis. Most people with CF don't make it past their early forties, and while we don't talk anymore, I will always wonder about her health and whereabouts....

I got a flat tire once when mountain biking and the frustration of it coupled with the fact that I had Lou Reed's "The Kids" stuck in my head made me cry. Yes, I didn't even have to hear the song, I just had to think about it and it set me off.

And you can't really blame the flat tire because I've had loads of punctures and nothing like that ever happened.