first round game
(1) Eric Clapton, “Tears in Heaven”
vs
(16) Grandpaboy, “Lush and Green”
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/10/26.
Tears All Fall Down: Margarita Campbell on “Tears In Heaven” by Eric Clapton
Loss. It is something that is experienced by every living person. On some scales it can be small. On other scales it can be life altering, as it is in the situation that promoted this specific song. From the very first chords you can hear pain and sorrow. What is being experienced is a loss so great, so unexpected it is one that almost has no recovery, the loss of a child. As we travel through the verses and chorus, we are asked to consider what it I went to the place I don’t belong to hold the person I love and have lost. If I could have one more chance to hold them for only another moment, would they even know who I was? Will we still have the same bond? Will they still be the way I remember? Can I have peace without them tangibly in my world? How do I even go on? What are my steps, how do I breathe? Knowing they are gone and can never come back. Will I ever repair from this betrayal? Time has betrayed me because I did not have enough. While they are away from all encounters with tears and sadness, mine fall freely because I am now also incomplete. I must develop a new existence for the rest of my life. This song expresses this in every note, in every melodic measure, there is pain. While reality is acceptance, pain is the existence. You are filled with what ifs and could have been and attempt to imagine who they would have grown to be, but you will never know, not for certain. Just the picture that you paint. Will you remember their laugh, their smell, the way their hands fit inside of yours? One day will it all be gone? If it does leave that is a sadness within itself. You will double over in gut wrenching agony. You will be reduced to a pile of rubble that you will eventually have to piece back together. You are supposed to visit the realm they call grief. There are no rules with how long you stay. This song amplifies just how empty and sad this experience can be. Eric Clapton went through this pain and turned it into a therapeutic moment that is etched in music. It can be revisited, not dwelled. It makes you consider that every time could be the last.
Margarita Campbell is a girl out of the Midwest with eclectic music taste and a love for writing. Since the moment she could form words and hold a pen she knew she wanted to write. She spends her days now penning poems and stories about a simpler more wholesome time...somewhere between the 80s and 90s. Mother, writer, musician, and singer.
barry montgomery on “Lush and Green” by Grandpaboy
“Lush and Green" is a melancholy meditation on death, grief, and communion with nature. It’s a likely contender for the most obscure competitor in the March Sadness 2026 playoffs, and the odds of it doing well here are correspondingly low, but that somehow seems appropriate, because nearly everything about this song feels a bit unlikely.
It was quietly slipped out into the world in 1997 on Grandpaboy, a five-song EP named after the artist who made it. The other four songs on this release were raucous, loosely tossed-off rock’n’roll fun (if you’re so inclined, anyway), but “Lush in Green” is cut from very different cloth. In this context, the song serves as a sobering walk in the fresh air, a quick break from an otherwise frenzied party thrown in the mobile home of a fading senior citizen trapped in the body of a juvenile delinquent, or vice versa. (“Grandpa needs a nap/Boy, he gets a slap,” goes a line in the opening cut, which revolves around a lusty appreciation of female bellybuttons.) But the polar-opposite tone of “Lush and Green” suggests that perhaps this eccentric, indeterminately aged character contains multitudes.
Behind the Grandpaboy mask lay an artist who split the difference between silver fox and precocious adolescent. For this was, in reality, The Artist Previously Known as Paul Westerberg, taking a small vacation from his more “professional” solo career. From the 90s onward Westerberg was, somewhat to his chagrin, The Artist Primarily Known as the Former Leader of the Replacements,* a band whose lifespan ran almost exactly the length of the 1980s. Not that he was ashamed of the work he did with his old band, but as a solo artist, he very much wanted to move out of their shadow, and that prospect was looking less and less likely the longer the 90s dragged on. Westerberg was, at the time he unleashed Grandpaboy on a mostly indifferent public, a musician in his late thirties who’d been touring and releasing albums consisting almost entirely of his own self-penned songs for almost two decades.
“Lush and Green” begins with a very low organ drone and then a few seconds of strummed acoustic guitar before Westerberg’s vocals kick in. His opening lines are striking both for their words and the dusky, world-weary tone in which they are delivered:
I kissed the wind and made the rain
Jealous enough to fall for days
Nice work if you can get it! It sounds like our narrator is a real nature (grandpa)boy, wooing the wind so passionately that it coaxes rain from jealous, jilted clouds. Is this a story of elemental spirits competing for romantic favors, like something out of ancient mythology? The next two lines change things up a bit, seemingly casting the narrator as the rain itself, rather than its rival:
I fall on you when I hear thunder
I kiss the ground you lie under
If there was any doubt before, it’s now clear that we’re in the land of metaphors, and shifting ones at that. The meat of the matter, however, is that the narrator is mourning the loss of a loved one. He finds himself in such a fragile psychic state that the mere rumble of distant thunder is enough to send him into a new spiral of despair. He imagines himself as a spring shower falling on the cemetery grounds where a close female friend has been buried.**
With this turn, the song enters the realm of an easily recognizable trope: a man weeps over the grave of a loved one, and sees his grief echoed in the natural world around him. To borrow the title of an iconic blues song, the sky is crying. The literary term for this practice of projecting one’s feelings onto nature is the pathetic fallacy, but when that term was coined almost two centuries ago, “pathetic” wasn’t being used in its modern, derogatory sense. It is instead related the word’s Greek root, indicating the ability to feel.
Regardless of whether or not nature possesses any feelings, anthropomorphic or otherwise, it is the deep human feeling in Westerberg’s performance that really puts “Lush and Green” across, because it is otherwise minimalist in every way. As a recording, it features just a vocal, a fairly simple acoustic guitar part, and a barely perceptible organ drone. And as a song, it offers an absolute minimum of melodic variation, nary a chorus nor bridge in sight, and a short lyric that’s poetic but almost cryptically devoid of narrative detail. Despite all this bareness, the way Westerberg’s singing rides the alternately rising and falling melody line conjures such intense yearning and sorrow that I have found myself spellbound by this spare song for almost three decades.
The third couplet adds new angles to the narrator’s despair:
Now I only sleep when spoken to
So I’ll lay here still in morning dew
That first line casually twists a stock phrase about the behavior of passive, introverted people into something surreal and disorienting; it would be hard to take literally, but it certainly suggests that the narrator doesn’t hear anything anyone is saying to him, at least not in his current period of intense grief. It also implies that he isn’t getting any sleep, and that perhaps the closest he comes to it is when the chattering voices of other people lull him into a calm place by drowning out his own obsessive, anxious thoughts. The second line of this couplet finds him lying on the ground above his friend’s grave, getting as close to her as is now physically possible, perhaps in an attempt to feel her presence. If he could only hear her voice, it might let him to catch some actual sleep, maybe even dream a little dream. That doesn’t happen, of course, but at least he finds peace enough while lying on her grave to achieve stillness. The moisture of the morning dew he lies in serves as yet another way that nature manages to match his grief tear for tear.
Another crucial factor contributing to the sense of tragedy built into “Lush and Green” is the melodic motif that repeats throughout. The song is constructed from a series of six couplets, all sung to the same melody. The first line of each couplet slowly rises in pitch and builds in intensity, climaxing in its final few syllables. The second line is almost identical to the first in its first two thirds, charting the same methodically rising path, but it diverges in its final few syllables, with the pitch falling and momentum dissipating. This fall manages to relieve the tension of the rising first line and bring things to a sort of resting point, although the tenor of these brief, tenuous landings suggest resignation rather than any true sense of resolution or progress.
As this slow-motion rising and falling scheme plays out half a dozen times over the course of the song, with no variation or relief, it seems to sketch out the rhythm of a life lived at a slow, sober pace, head down, deliberately sticking to set routines; perhaps this life has also been touched by depression.*** The relentless repetition of this long, slow climbing and falling pattern suggests someone plodding through each day, downcast but not defeated, periodically working up the energy to try to pull themselves out of the rut they’ve toiled in for too long, but inevitably losing momentum and sinking down into the feeling that if there’s any change to be made, it can wait. Rinse and repeat: Tomorrow brings another day to work on transformation, and another day for it to all fall apart again. (Westerberg lyric from 13 years prior: “One more night to get it half-right / One more time to get it all wrong.”) It’s almost as if this melodic structure were designed to evoke the myth of Sisyphus and his stone. Up and down that damn hill, up and down. One more time. Take it from the top.
The last three lines of the song finally manage to inject a glimmer of hope into all this gloom. Here it feels like the winter of our narrator’s discontent has finally blossomed into a literal spring:
And I’ll drink up with these flowers and trees
I still love you, all is lush and green
Above you all is lush and green
The narrator’s grief may even have helped bring about this newfound beauty. The multiple days of rainfall described earlier, strongly linked to the narrator’s own tears of mourning, have worked their magic, drawing vibrant life from the cemetery grounds. The narrator understandably treats this natural bounty as good news to convey to his friend buried just below, but based on his delivery, it doesn’t sound like he himself takes nearly as much solace in this lushness as he would like to. It almost sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself that something positive has finally come from all this . . . because otherwise, how can he go on?
I’ve read that Westerberg once introduced this song in concert as “a song about dying in a season for living.” This is nicely ambiguous, since the death of the narrator’s friend has already happened well before the song has even begun. So if there’s any “dying” going on in the song’s present tense, it’s happening in the narrator’s heart, a shutting down of feeling as means of coping (hopefully not permanently). Perhaps the psychic wound of his friend’s death is still too fresh for him to enjoy his place in the song’s payoff, the lush and green world of the living. Maybe the signs of life blooming all around him as he continues to mourn his friend make her absence, along with the barrenness of his own inner landscape, all the more painful. April is the cruelest month, after all.
* I twice borrowed Prince's well-known Artist-Formerly-Known-As syntax above because, like the Purple One, Westerberg is not just a Minneapolis native, but one who settled in that city for life, rather than relocating to a coastal metropolis, like so many artists from middle America do after achieving success. Westerberg also knew Prince a bit, as a matter of playing at some of the same Minneapolis clubs early on in both of their careers. Later, both with the Replacements as a solo artist, Westerberg hired out the studio in Prince’s home compound, Paisley Park, for recording sessions. “[Prince] became comfortable enough to grace us with his presence, not bejeweled and not dressed up,” Westerberg remembered in the wake of Prince’s passing. “He’d be wearing maybe his jammies and sweatpants or maybe a pair of jeans and sneakers. He may have been a little more normal than he would’ve liked people to know. That’s the treasure that we got, to be able to sit in the big atrium where you’re taking a break and Prince shuffles by in his slippers and makes some popcorn in the microwave.”
** The original recording of the song I am discussing here never gives us any information about the person who has died—not even such basics as their gender or what their relation to the narrator was—friend, lover, or relative. For me, this gives the song more universality, and I’d love to leave it this ambiguous in my discussion, but I tried that and having to use the word “loved one” over and over again for the deceased became unworkably cumbersome. So I have reluctantly acted on information beyond what is contained in the original recording of the song. Some five years after the song’s release Westerberg began performing “Lush and Green” at some of his concerts, and he included an added bridge with lyrics that changed notably from one performance to another. He also spoke about his inspiration for the song in an interview around this time. Thanks to both of these things, especially the interview, it’s clear that the subject of the song was a female friend who died young and unexpectedly. I don’t consider the bridge added in live version to be a definitive part of the song, since there are at least three significantly different versions of it, and quite possibly more, so I’m leaving it out of this essay.
*** My hearing of this is unavoidably influenced by my knowledge of Westerberg’s life. The Replacements were notorious for their extreme alcohol intake, including in the hours before and during their live shows, but Westerberg got sober before the band’s final tour, and stayed that way for at least the next decade. He was also quite candid in many interviews about the fact that he was prone to periods of deep depression. (Another song on the Grandpaboy EP is called “Psychopharmacology,” a rave-up that explores his then-brand-new foray into psychiatric medication.)
Barry Montgomery rambled out of the mild Midwest on a meandering path that has included a bewildering variety of jobs, from scraping dried adhesive goo off the side of enormous metal tanks to editing the words of archangels and extraterrestrial overlords as channeled through human conduits. (He’s not making any of this up, though he suspects some of those human conduits probably were.) He won several regional Captain Beefheart lookalike contests, but was never able to translate that into success at the tri-state level. His favorite color is purple, despite what some of his so-called best friends will say on this subject.