List: 'Top 10 songs that make men cry'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. I’ve previously written that I’m an emotional old guy [1]. It doesn’t take much to reduce me to tears. Reduce to tears? What a strange expression. As if being tearful’s a lesser – reduced – state of being. What bulldust. I’m not ashamed to weep. My feelings are close to the surface. I’m thin-skinned. So what. What gets to me most is my darling family [2]. But music’s pretty close behind. I’ve previously written of my love of music, and how it too brings me to tears [3, 4, 5]. Any music genre can do it: opera, orchestral, band, folk, and sometimes even country music. Of course when family and music combine – to wit darling Emily’s music [6, 7] – I’m a goner. Today’s list – ‘Top 10 songs that make men cry’ resulted from a 1,700-person survey by the the UK organisation PRS for Music [8], and was published by PRS [9] and reproduced in the Age [10]. To my knowledge I’ve heard only three of the ‘Top 10 songs’: ‘Candle in the Wind’ makes me puke. ‘Hallelujah’ never makes me cry. But ‘Tears in Heaven’ brings me close – maybe because it’s redolent of my weak point, i.e. the intersection of family and music. Having seen this list, I’m tempted to have a listen to the other seven. I’ll keep you posted.

P.S. h/t Sweetheart Vivienne for alerting me to today’s list.