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Tear Jerker / Garth Brooks

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This voice of nineties country music isn't burnin' the house down, he's making you blubber.


  • "Burning Bridges", in which a man contemplates his string of broken relationships, and knows that despite wanting desperately to change, he probably won't manage to do so until it's far too late.
  • "Standing Outside the Fire" can make one cry tears of amazement that someone could write such a wonderful song. The video is just as much of one, chronicling a boy with Down Syndrome refusing to compete in the Special tournament and going for the regular one instead.
  • "Good Ride Cowboy", despite (or maybe even because of) its upbeat tune, is still a tribute to his late friend Chris LeDoux.
  • "The Change" was written just after the Oklahoma City bombings.
  • "We Shall Be Free" was written just after the L.A. riots.
  • The video for "The Dance" contained clips of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger, John Wayne, country singer Keith Whitley, and bullrider Lane Frost (who died during an event).
    • Garth performed the song live for both the memorial of Dale Earnhart, Sr. and the Grand Finale of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It’s also been used as the last song for several country radio stations before a format change.
  • Others include "When You Come Back To Me Again" and "More Than A Memory".
  • "Mom" can really get to anyone who has a close relationship to their mother.
  • "Wolves", for anyone feeling ground down by life.
  • "Stronger Than Me", which he wrote for his wife Trisha Yearwood and which talks about how, in all the ways that matter, she's stronger than him. The last lines are a killer:
    And I'd give her anything in life that's mine to give her
    'Til the last breath that I breathe
    And if I have a choice, I pray God takes me first
    'Cause she's stronger
    Than me....
  • "The Beaches of Cheyenne" is about a woman who "just went crazy, screaming out his name" upon hearing that her husband was killed by a rodeo bull in Cheyenne, Wyoming after they got into an argument about his rodeo career and she told him she didn't care if he ever came back from Cheyenne. The couple's dreams "died right there beside him" and the grieving woman's breakdown causes her to seemingly commit Suicide by Sea (although she keeps reappearing to people in a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane way).
  • "Where the Cross Don't Burn" off of Fun is a story of a relationship between a young white boy and an old black man. The song ends with the singer's eulogy to the old black man. What really twists the knife is that this is a duet with Charley Pride, who died a month after the album's release.
  • Whether interpreted as a father's song to his daughter or as a husband's song to his wife, "If Tomorrow Never Comes" is still interpreted the same: That he still loves her, and he wants her to have his feelings known even if he were to die the next day.

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