Emily Gale (University College Cork)
"Teardrops On My Guitar" and Other Sad Sentimental Songs 

For as long as songwriters, singers, and musicians have written and performed pop songs, there have been ditties that depict crying. Some songs suggest catharsis while others either encourage or condone the act; there are individual and lonely tears and there are shared, collective tears. In sentimental songs, tears serve as the visual marker of the excess. They spill out and over, staining cheeks and pages, guitars and trackpads. The act of crying, weeping, or sobbing arises as a response to feelings of sadness, joy, overwhelm or anger.  

This presentation listens to the long history of tears in US sentimental songs. Whose sadness is represented and in what ways? How do Taylor's tears inform our hearing of older sentimental songs and vice versa? In so asking, I untether the longstanding and still prevalent associations between femininity, whiteness, and excess emotional expression. 

Dr. Emily Gale is Lecturer in Popular Music Studies at University College Cork. Her book in progress, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People: An Unheard History of US Popular Music, explores intersections between sentimentalism, gender, class, and race with chapters on home, love, death, tears, youth, and feels. She currently hosts a radio show about her research on campus station UCC98.3FM. 

Gale serves on the executive committees for IASPM UK & Ireland and IASPM US. As organizing chair, she coordinated the Society for Musicology in Ireland's hybrid conference of 2022. She is a regular presenter at the Pop Conference and her voice appears as a pop commentator on NPR's All Things Considered and in the Los Angeles Times.  

Gale earned her Bachelor of Music from the University of Ottawa in 2005 and an M.A. in Music Theory from the University of Western Ontario in 2007. After spending a year in the inaugural class of Western's M.A. in Popular Music and Culture (2007-08), she entered the Critical and Comparative Studies program at the University of Virginia where she completed her Ph.D. in 2014.