Line #6 TearJerker/LoreenaMcKennitt


1	[[Music/LoreenaMcKennitt This Canadian recording artist]] [[TearJerker has some very moving songs]].
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4	%% * Her rendition of the Alfred Noyes poem "The Highwayman".
5	%% * "Dante's Prayer" is another one.
6	* "Ce He Mise le Ulaingt/The Two Trees". The lyrics are from a Creator/WilliamButlerYeats poem -- but the singer's rendering of some of the bleak imagery, plus the beautiful melancholic pipe intro, is incredibly isolating.
7	* "The Lady of Shalott" is another one. The whole song is beautifully rendered, gorgeously played, and poignant -- but it's the last verse that can really do it because of the shift in the melody to bring the song to a close, ending ''exactly'' where your ear and heart wants it to.
8	%% * "The Dark Night of the Soul"
9	* A lot of her songs are based on old poems (in particular Irish ballads) which were tragedies -- "Coventry Carol", "The English Ladye and the Knight", and Shakespearean passages set to music such as "Cymbeline" and "Prospero's Speech" (the high, ethereal voice, almost a descant, combined with the melancholy organ pipes and strings on that last one really does it). In all these you expect sadness. But there are also some surprise examples, such as her early piece "Standing Stones" (the moment where the lover's scream "disturbed the silent night" is especially visceral due to her forceful delivery of the line, followed by quite the wail of pipes) and "Skellig", the story of a dying monk passing on his knowledge and books to a younger brother of the order.
10	* Her 2010 album is in fact chock full of these: "The Sally Gardens", the title track "The Wind That Shakes the Barley", "The Death of Queen Jane", and "The Parting Glass"--not only sung as wistfully and mournfully as possible, but actually ending with the last line broken and choked out, followed by one last, gasping breath as if the singer had just died.
11	%% * Her song [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn6ysOeqiIs "Penelope's Song"]], which presents Penelope's perspective as she awaits her husband Odysseus to return home, is made all the more poignant when one considers that [[LifeImitatesArt her fiancé, his brother, and a friend were killed in a boating accident]] in 1998.
12	* Anyone who is an animal lover will surely tear up at listening to "The Ballad of the Fox Hunter"--not because of the plight of the foxes he had hunted, but because of his bond with his dogs, who all gather around him as he dies and asks for the hunting horn to be sounded one last time.
13	* "The Breaking of the Sword", a single originally released in 2017 and then later included on 2018's ''Lost Souls'', is prime TearJerker material to begin with, seeing as it's told from the perspective of a mother who lost her son in UsefulNotes/WorldWarOne, but the fact it's a stirring march and, by the end, is backed by a full military band and choir, is touching even for those who don't want to tangle with its nationalist backdrop.
14	* The title (and final) track for ''Lost Souls'' is already a poignant piece, both lyrically and melodically. But several of the lines ("The journey's over; another's just begun", "So far we drifted, like ships upon the sea", "I'm coming home again/to you") resonate with Loreena ending her tours and her songwriting indefinitely after such a long career and with several long gaps in it; they also echo some of the lyrics of her earliest songs on ''Parallel Dreams''. As a result, it feels like a sad and wistful goodbye from her to her fans, too.

Context TearJerker / LoreenaMcKennitt