As the title says, it's been a bit of an odd evening for me.

WARNING: Four of the six songs here are about death, abuse and troubled lives. One features a disabled child, the last is about heartache.

Interestingly, one song is also about a gift passed down that made a positive difference, two more are about a child's life becoming happier.

I've been dealing with a migraine that started a little over a day ago and is showing no signs of ending soon. That makes me more likely to be slightly irritable, and me being irritable is not a good thing, so I've been listening to music to help me relax, something I do fairly often.

What is odd is that, over the course of the last twelve hours or so, I've heard about half a dozen songs, each one of which is likely to have me tearing up, sometimes actually crying a bit. To be more explicit, I very rarely cry, damp eyes is about as bad as it usually gets for me.

Well, over that equivalent period of time, I might be 'lucky' to normally hear two, maybe three of these songs in a day of listening.

Not today. I heard all of the six following songs. With songs that I like, I tend to sing along, and these six songs are all ones that I like a lot. The simple fact is that each of these songs often hits me in the heart hard enough that my voice breaks while the song is still playing.

That doesn't stop me from continuing to sing them. What can I say, I'm an extremely stubborn cuss in a lot of ways.

Anyway, here are the six songs that had me on the edge of tears and losing my voice briefly due to having my heart in my throat tonight:

1) Randy Travis' Three Wooden Crosses, this one gets me just about every time around the second chorus;

2) John Michael Montgomery's The Little Girl, this one hits me at the point where the little girl is in the church on Sunday for her first church service, points to a painting and says that he (Jesus) was with her on the night that her father killed her mother, then himself;

3) Elvis Presley's In The Ghetto, two versions of this, one just Elvis, the other Elvis with his daughter Lisa Marie, both had me nearly crying;

4) Vince Gill's When I Call Your Name, I'm not sure just why this one hits me the way it does, but it does almost every time;

5) Martina McBride's Concrete Angel, this one always has me losing it for a brief moment where the girl gets killed in the song; and

6) Red Sovine's Teddy Bear, this one almost always makes my eyes damp when it gets to where all the truckers are giving him rides.

You may notice that these songs are all country music. That is what I was raised on and what I seem to prefer to listen to nowadays.

Are there songs, not listed here, that just grab your heart and pull out the tears? Especially tears that you NEED to cry?

I'm generally easy going, but I'm also apt to be very blunt at times. It takes a heck of a lot to make me angry, even more to make me cry, but there are times when I'm right on that edge where the anger is just an eye blink away or the tears are a heartbeat away from falling.

Tonight, I had damp eyes after each of these songs. That in itself is a rarity for me, but one that I was pleasantly surprised by. Pleasantly, you ask? Well, on most occasions, I might get to the damp eyes part once, tonight it happened with each of these songs.

I can't recall a time in my life where I ever had tears in my eyes so often in one waking period. Maybe this is helping me to heal somehow?

Meh, sorry for all the blathering, I just felt like chatting about this before I forget it. With my leaky memory, that could be tomorrow. *sigh*