Tear Jerker / Genesis (Band)

Almost every song the famous Progressive Rock band Genesis produces is quite emotional.

• "Duchess": A tale of a fallen pop star (possibly a One-Hit Wonder), who lost her touch with her audience and is now reduced to sadly reminiscing on when people still wanted to hear her perform.
• "Ripples". If the instrumentation doesn't get to you, the lyrics (about how beauty eventually fades) certainly will.
  While you're down, a pool appears
  The face in the water looks up
  And she shakes her head as if to say
  That it's the last time you'll look like today
• "Please Don't Ask" from Duke is a heartbreaking, dejected, very personal Break-Up Song, emotionally sung by Phil Collins. Added points for the Reality Subtext of Phil having written the song in the wake of his first divorce around that time period.
• "Since I Lost You" from We Can't Dance is, rather than a love ballad, a song sung from the point of view from a father to his prematurely deceased young son—the specific toddler in mind who inspired the song being Phil's friend Eric Clapton's son Conor.
• "Misunderstanding", which describes the feelings and thoughts of someone whose date stood them up. Not only that, but at the end of the song, the narrator, after looking all around for their date, discovers that the date found someone else.
• "Driving the Last Spike" is a ten-minute epic about the workers who built the railroad. Given the often horrifying conditions the labourers had to work under, it's frequently quite emotional, especially when the song's narrator speaks about his family and the possibility that he'll never see them again.
• "Squonk" tells the tale of a beast of legend who is hunted down, tricked into capture and evaporates into a "pool of tears", "placing trust upon a cruel world". The liner notes for A Trick of the Tail describes the Squonk as having a "retiring disposition and due to its ugliness, weeps constantly".
• The ending of "Supper's Ready" has been known to induce Tears of Joy in listeners.
  • The ending of "Los Endos" has been known to have the same effect. Most of the song is built on tension created by Collins' frantic drumming and the ensemble band playing, but as the song draws to its close, it slams into a triumphant sounding fade-out, and if one listens closely, Phil can be heard quietly singing "There's an angel standing in the sun... there's an angel standing in the sun... Oh, free to get back home...". Simply powerful.
• "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight," from Selling England by the Pound. Peter Gabriel's melancholy vocals, combined with the mournful lyrics and medieval instruments, make for more of a crushing sadness than a full-on catharsis.
  • Ditto the reprise at the end of the album, "Aisle of Plenty". (Note that originally these two and "The Cinema Show" were conceived as a single track, but the band later split them up to avoid comparisons to "Supper's Ready". It's still debated among fans whether this was the right choice.)
• "In Too Deep", from the album Invisible Touch. The song is a rather heavy-hearted tale of failed commitment in a relationship that eventually becomes broken. If the lyrics and the background music weren't enough, the bridge from 3:07 to 3:33 is a Mood Whiplash, building itself to sound uplifting only to drop back to sadness. The final verse adds more to the emotional blow.
  It seems I've spent too long
  Only thinking about myself
  Now I want to spend my life
  Just caring about somebody else.
• "Hold On My Heart" and "Fading Lights" from We Can't Dance. The former might seem like a sappy love song at first, but it does improve as one gets older, while the latter...Oh, "Fading Lights" is indescribably powerful.
• "Heathaze". Just... "Heathaze". Both musically and lyrically.
  Beware the fisherman who's casting out his line
  Into a dried-up riverbed
  But don't try to tell him, 'cos he won't believe you.
  Throw some bread to the ducks instead
  It's easier that way
  I feel like an alien, a stranger in an alien place.
  
  The trees and I are shaken by the same wind
  But whereas the trees will lose their withered leaves,
  I just can't seem to let them loose.
  And they can't refresh me those hot winds of the south.
  I feel like an alien, a stranger in an alien place.
• Another one that may fall into the Tears of Joy category is the Triumphant Reprise of "Guide Vocal" at the end of "Duke's Travels". The lyrics are ambiguous enough that they may cause the other kind of tears as well, though:
  I am the one who guided you this far,
  All you know and all you feel.
  Nobody must know my name,
  For nobody would understand.
  And you kill what you fear.
  I call you for I must leave.
  You're on your own until the end.
  There was a choice, but now it's gone.
  I said you wouldn't understand.
  Take what's yours and be damned.
• Much like Slaughterhouse-Five, "One for the Vine" has a Stable Time Loop story that does an excellent job demonstrating the futility of war in a manner that wouldn't be half as effective without the science fiction elements. Literally everything that happens in the song is ultimately revealed to have been entirely meaningless, and yet due to the nature of the plot, it's doomed to repeat cyclically, seemingly forever. Musically, the song also has quite a few Tear Jerker moments.
• "Blood on the Rooftops" and "After the Ordeal" both have Steve Hackett guitar spots that can probably lead to this trope for at least some listeners.
• Stagnation is simply heart-wrenching. It's worth noting that both the band and fans see it as a prototype of the aforementioned "Supper's Ready", and it's not hard to see why... both the lyrics and music are equally as powerful.
• "Afterglow", from Wind & Wuthering, appears to be a Heroic BSoD set to music. The dramatic Mellotron choirs and bass pedal droning throughtout the song add to the sombre mood:
  And I would search everywhere
  Just to hear your call
  And walk upon stranger roads than this one
  In a world I used to know before
  For now I've lost everything
  I give to you my soul
  The meaning of all that I believed before
  Escapes me in this world of none
  I miss you more