Post number three of song stories from ‘Beauty Survives’ is the song Cry Now. 

For this song, I wanted to post the lyrics first before I talk about it.  But please keep reading on.  There has been a lot of interest and information about mental health awareness recently. This song for me, whether I listen or sing it reminds me to check in with how I’m feeling.

Cry Now – 

Music & lyrics – Shelly Quarmby

Verse 1

I’ve done all my time listened to lies

Been back to the place I never wanted to go

In this room every night

Living in my mind, wishing I was everywhere but home

And my heart wants to run

But I’m surrounded, I’m surrounded

Chorus

I just need to cry now

It’s all I can do to get by now

I don’t want to think about how to get real

Or how I should feel

Or how to control myself

I just need to cry now

Let me be me for a while now

Then, I’ll breathe in the light and swallow my pride

But I’ll cry (cry), cry(cry), cry(cry)

Now

Verse 2

Don’t ask why I’m here

Don’t ask how I feel 

I wish I could speak more than you know

As my heart sweats each tear

It drowns all my fears

But it’s taking everything I have to hope

And my heart wants to run

But I’m surrounded, I’m surrounded

Chorus

I just need to cry now

It’s all I can do to get by now

I don’t want to think about how to get real

Or how I should feel

Or how to control myself

I just need to cry now

Let me be me for a while now

Then, I’ll breathe in the light and swallow my pride

But I’ll cry (cry), cry(cry), cry(cry)

Now

Oh I’m drowning….

I’m drowning in all of my tears.

Chorus

And I just need to cry now

It’s all I can do to get by now

I don’t want to think about how to get real

Or how I should feel

Or how to control myself

I just need to cry now

Let me be me for a while now

Then, I’ll breathe in the light and swallow my pride

But it won’t be tonight

Just give me time

Let me cry (cry), cry(cry), cry(cry) now

Cry now.

I think I briefly mentioned in the first post about You Lie, that that song and Cry Now started as the same song.  However, I wrote a different chorus and the verse of You Lie became Cry Now.  It was only in its very early stages so I did basically have to write most of the rest of the song.  Skip forward a few years and the meaning and sentiment took a different route and this song lyrically became so poignant for me.  It essentially captures what this whole album is about: not knowing if things are going to be ok, about hope – hoping but not knowing.  The whole album is about will, trying, but very much about being in the moment and doing what is best for that moment alone.  So the reason Cry Now represents that for me is because it essentially does what it says on the tin.  Cry Now is about unapologetically going against the constant advice you’re given when going through a bad situation, which may all be very well-meaning, things such as “don’t worry, it’ll all be okay in the end” or “wipe away your tears, forget about it”, “put on a brave face and show them what you’re made of”, “you’re so strong, you always know what to do for the best”, “don’t let it upset you”.  I literally could go on and on with an endless list of the things I’ve heard people say when you are going through a hard time.  I was one of them once!  And then it was another song that I absolutely adore that helped me finish this one.  “Last Tears” by The Indigo Girls was my favourite track on Despite Our Differences and it is one of those songs about moving on, one of the best.  I listened to it over and over, I even started to send it to other people, I did a cover of it at a gig just two months after recovering from surgery – https://youtu.be/KZ91eRwWn0M

But, I tricked myself into thinking that’s what I should be feeling.  Like many of my songs,  Cry Now isn’t about a single event, or even really about me.  It’s universal, or at least I alwasy want them to be.  If you read the other post on You Lie about how I was hearing about someone else’s very bad luck and situation, I started writing about going back to a place you never wanted to be in again, along those lines.  But, one of the reasons I spearated You Lie from Cry Now, was musically one felt it needed to be full, punchy and fiesty because I was angry and the other a little more bare, with a slower, more melancholy feel.

2012, what the Queen would call my ‘Annus horribilis’.  Understatement.  It was painful; physically, mentally and emotionally and I couldn’t think.  So, I was going through a difficult time in my life health wise and another person was going through a difficult time relationship wise.  I had a fairly major operation and lots of things started to become very stressful, it affected everything from work to health.  I found myself not wanting to sing or even play the piano.  I found it really difficult to sing as if everything had become far more difficult and at one point (since I teach singing too) I was convinced I had physicial damage to my voice.  My glands were constantly swollen, I had tight neck muscles, I couldn’t breathe properly and everything I knew to do about it didn’t work.

One day I walked in trying to help someone else with their problems, which I’m not usually very good at at all!  They held up their hand to me as if to gesture “just leave” and said something like I just need you to leave me alone, or something along those lines, then started to cry.  I felt quite helpless, but that’s because we can’t help but always want to help can we?!  The part of my brain that’s constantly thinking in lyrics thought “that’s a great line”! – “I just need to cry”.  I felt a little cold-hearted to think in song lyrics when someone else was upset, so I didn’t do anything apart from write it down.  A few weeks later for all my own issues, I was having a massage with my therapist friend Shirley Bradbury and at the end she asked if I wanted her to do a little Reiki on me.  I said yes if it’ll help!  When she got up to my neck and throat she said it was like she felt a cobweb in there and she felt like she just wanted to keep pulling it all out.  And weirdly she said to me, it feels like you need to cry.  Which immeadiately made me want to!  It was weird because at the time I had been smiling all the way through, but doing that thing of smiling and laughing because you know if you don’t you’ll just lose it!!  And, because I felt stupid, I didn’t want to randomly start crying mid-conversation, but that’s literally how I felt.  Shirley said something that was used a little in the song.  She said crying is like your heart sweating out all the bad stuff!

As my heart sweats each tear, it drowns all my fears.  But it’s taking everything I have to hope

So many things were going on for me and I wasn’t sure what I the most upset about.  I literally felt so overwhelmed I had no idea what to do or where to start.  So I took that feeling and did what I usually do, I went away.  I visited a friend’s apartment in Spain and had a lovely week of relaxing and writing in the sun.  Here I wrote Lay It On The Line and Beauty Survives, but nothing with this song I started.  I was SO frustrated but again wanted to appear normal, relaxed, tranquil and at peace.  Later that year, I went away again by myself to a small cottage just in the next county of Shropshire, in the middle of nowhere.  I was determined to finish writing because the other thing was I had a complete writer’s block.  I had been wanting to write an album for so long and when I actually found the time nothing would work.  I swear with the chorus to Cry Now I literally woke up at 2am and sang it as it is now.  I quickly wrote it down and recorded it into my phone.  then woke up the next day and finished the whole song.  Pride had held me back from being completely honest.  I know that there has always been a connection between your physical and emotional wellbeing, but we’re told to suppress things sometimes.  The words “don’t cry” although said with care and compassion are used far too frequently for me.  It happens from a child, you bump your head – “oh come on, don’t cry”.  Why not?  It probably really hurt!!!!  This song taught me that when you’re sad and you feel like crying, you should.  When you’re in pain and you feel like crying, you should.  When you’re grieving and you feel like crying, you should.  You get the picture I’m painting.  This song says I’ll do all the other things I’m supposed to do later, but right now I need to cry because I found the hard way that actually, it saves more pain and time.  It doesn’t mean you ‘get over’ whatever it is you’ve lost, are grieving for or upset about, but it means you take care of your needs and you do what you naturally know how to do.  We laugh when we’re happy, we cheer when we congratulate, we dance or jump up and down when we’re excited.  But we don’t cry regularly.  Something to think about, checking in with how you really feel about something from time to time.  We are all so busy, but I believe particularly in these times, we need to nurture and grow, not suppress and not feel as hard as that may be.

And the time comes when you’re able to say, ok, enough as the Indigo Girls say – these are the last tears I’m going to cry.  But, until then, try “Cry Now”.

Check out the song on the media or shop page of my website here.