Listen Up: On Crying and Having Absolutely No Idea Why

The day Michael Jackson died, I cried—but not because Michael Jackson died. I cried because I was at work and that afternoon Those Darlins came and played at our studio and, best as I can figure, the room was cramped enough and they were fantastically sweet and gumptious enough that the badass levels in the small, enclosed space of the studio just skyrocketed and smothered me and made my face crinkle up and my eyes start tingling and tears come chugging down the duct-tracks.

It wasn't all-out boo-hooing—more like the suffocating, false-starting burn of slamming your knee against a sharp coffee table edge, and I somehow managed to choke the tears back in before it got really messy—but I count it as crying anyhow because it was most definitely headed that way. And I have no idea why. I've experienced that feeling before in reaction, to, you know, actually sad things, but never anything as obviously gloriously fun as three tiny Tennesseee girls in their coordinating thrift-store dresses and busted-up cowboy boots and dirty hair and snaggly voices singing about eating whole damn buckets of fried chicken. I am kind of a master of rooting out ennui and letting it bum me out when everyone else is having a great old time, but there was nothing remotely sad about what was going on up on our tiny wooden stage—not sad and not even sad's more sophisticated cousins, wistful or poignant or bittersweet.

So, I guess I cried because it was awesome?

And it happened again a couple of weeks ago. One Thursday night I drove by myself down to The Earl to see Visqueen, who I've nearly overstated my love for in the past but only ever seen play one song live. They were opening for a band who was opening for a band and so when I got there, fifteen seconds into the first song, the crowd was not very big and I got my wrist stamped at the door and stumbled in and everyone was standing, clutching beers and weirdly silent for The Earl, facing the stage and what was happening: bandleader Rachel Flotard standing alone at the mic with her cello player to one side and instrumentless bassist to the other, singing the one downbeat song on their last album, just Flotard's voice and some harmonies and the cello droning away. It's a sad song—I don't know for sure, but I can't see it being about anything other than her dad, who died just before the album was made—but I have never cried listening to it on record.

That night, though, I was struck by the same rolling cloud of smothering emotion that felled me when I saw Those Darlins. I'm used to pressing and rubbing my eyes at The Earl, but usually it's in reaction to the clouds of cigarette smoke that tend to fill up the back room during sets, but it was early enough in the show that I couldn't even use that for an excuse. So I stood there among the evenly-spaced-out sparse crowd with my face crinkling all weird hoping that they were all entranced enough by the band—as they should have been—that no one would see me teetering on the verge of weeping like some unbalanced weirdo. I shoved it all back in and it clotted up and settled in my throat.

Perhaps this puzzlement at my own emotions seems strange or immature, so let me say this—I am usually pretty in touch with my weird-feelings! About 60 percent of the time that I feel grumpy or sad or weird, it's actually because I'm on a blood sugar crash and I'm about to get ragingly hangry. Ten percent of the time, it's because the temperature of the room I'm in is too high. And 30 percent of the time, it's just your good old fashioned whacky-brain-chemistry panic attack that's got me down. I am also very aware of the kind of things that make me sad. Among them: parents and children being separated (this is why I sobbed during Finding Nemo) and old people being taken advantage of (why I could not sit through Glengarry Glen Ross). There are others, but listing them might make me sad and you bored. Anyway. All of this is to say that I generally understand why I am feeling the way I am feeling, which makes it all the more baffling why these fully-great or only-kind-of sad things hit me like this.

And I do mean “hit me,” because most of the time that music makes me cry I feel like it's coming up from within me, like it's unlocking some weird drawer of sadness in my brain—the feeling is already there, just waiting to be pulled out (and in many cases, stuffed back in and then pulled out and stuffed back in...). Generally this happens while I am alone and listening, like while I am driving or sitting on my bedroom floor the night before I go to college, not in a dark room surrounded by friends and strangers and also the very people doing the thing that is making me cry; in fact, at this moment I can think of only one other time that I've ever cried or wanted-to-cry at a concert, and it was when I saw Bon Iver last year and he/they played “Blood Bank” which always gets me when I'm listening on my own but then again lots of songs do on record but not when I hear them live but this one totally did and I got all privately blubbery at the same point where I always do, which is the line about Christmas morning. And while the tears were eking out I was wondering if it made me some kind of miserable hipster cliché but then I decided I didn't care.

But in these other cases, with Those Darlins and Visqueen and however many other times I've felt this way without really remembering it, it's like the bizarre need to cry has rolled up at me in a cloud and seeped into me. It's like I'm being gassed or besot by a cloud of swarming gnats, except unlike those analogies it's more of a happy-sad feeling than a dead-sad feeling or a gross-sad feeling. It's a little confusing and maybe a little socially inconvenient but it's not totally awful; I'd just kind of like an explanation for it, even if it's something about mirror neurons or pheromones or even wacky, rock-induced low blood sugar. Until then, maybe I should start bringing Kleenex to shows. Just in case.

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s associate editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday. She thinks that if you have a couple extra bucks, you should donate to help Nikki Darlin's broken-arm surgery.