Written by: Dave Cantrell
As the LP is just now on its busy way to record stores around the country, and as the offer to preview this new video just now arrived in my email with a suggestion of urgency that, being who it is was barely needed even as your correspondent is in the middle of being slammed in his ‘real’ job, I’ve sat down on the quick to bring you this smart touching video representation of the title track from Jad Fair & Kramer’s re-issue of their 2017 album now called The History of Crying – Revisited. Given the circumstances, however, I’m rather forced to take a bit of a short cut rout and crib both a few words from my own review of the album when it was first released and a few words authored by none other than Kramer himself regarding the nature of the track’s title. Have a read, have a listen, then make a space in your record stacks for an album that doesn’t just border on the essential but traipses all over it with a tenderly disheveled perfection (fill that slot, um, crying out for this album here).
“Utilizing as well as anyone the stripped-bare poetry of pop’s golden psalmbook, songs like the impassioned and jarring “I Won’t Eat til You Come Back to Me,” “Show Me the Way to Nowhere”‘s deft welding of an inveterate optimism to the constant presence of its exact opposite, and the stark but generous, slow soul of the title track, organ-drenched and unspooling like a gentle catharsis of heartbreak and acceptance, the lyrics’ intentions are marked more or less by a finely-crafted lack of ambiguity. Yet – and here’s the magic part – those songs are effuse with ingenuity.” – Stereo Embers Magazine, 2017
“The word “History” implies that the story you’re trying to tell has concluded to the point at which it can be told. but the history of crying holds no ending, and honestly, i don’t think it ever had a beginning. there never was a time wherein there was nothing to cry about. there were tears in the garden of eden, tears at the birth of language, tears at the birth of every baby ever born, tears at each and every sunrise and sunset, and tears as each heart hammers out its final beat. the whole bloody world is just a torrent of tears circling ’round the planet, like the oceans themselves. each droplet touches each and every other droplet, at some point in the cycle. it simply must.” – Kramer, 2021
