The Meaning of Womack and Womack’s ‘Teardrops’

By Oliver Tearle

We can probably all agree (whenever a writer says that, you know that what follows will be something that invites furious disagreement) that some songs are Proustian madeleines capable of transporting us back to our early childhoods. Songs can be Pavlovian triggers which tell our unconscious minds to cue up some of our most formative memories.

For me, the most powerful of all Pavlovian bells summoning me to my five-year-old self has to be Womack and Womack’s ‘Teardrops’. For sheer musical ability to transport me back to the innocent days of the late 1980s before the world-wide-web, texting, Russell Howard, and Maroon 5, this 1988 dancefloor classic (that description is apposite for several reasons) takes the Proustian biscuit (or cake: I’ve never been quite sure, like Jaffa Cakes, on what side of the confectionery aisle madeleines are meant to land).

The song takes me back to a myriad childhood birthday parties at which every disco playlist ran: ‘YMCA’, then the Birdie Song, then the Grease Megamix, and then ‘Teardrops’. If you recognise this track listing, then I’m sorry: you’re also, like me, a child of the eighties and officially old.

If this makes me sound all teary-eyed with nostalgia, don’t worry: I don’t yearn to return to those days of warm orange juice and spit-sodden birthday cake. But then it’s fitting that the song should evoke such nostalgic memories in me, and in other listeners, because it’s fundamentally a song about nostalgia.

Yes, it’s a break-up song: more than that, it’s part of that subgenre of such tracks which are often known as ‘crying-on-the-dancefloor’ songs, into which august tradition we might also add Ultravox’s ‘Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’, Robyn’s ‘Dancing on My Own’, and countless others.

The Story of the Song

The ‘story’ of the song’s lyrics is easy enough to summarise: the woman has been unfaithful and lost the love of her life as a result, and vows that – if she got a second chance with him – she’d be faithful to him.

But until (or unless) that happens, here she is, going out, powdering her face (I always mishear ‘powder room’ – presumably the ladies’ loos? – as ‘parlour room’, but that’s probably because I read too much Jane Austen as a young lad), and hitting the dancefloor in a vain attempt to dance away her heartache and regret. But everything she hears – someone saying goodbye to someone else, footsteps on the dancefloor that were once (but are no more) her lover’s, people whispering amorously to each other – reminds her of what she once had and threw away.

Indeed, the crux of the song’s emotional power – and also the most affecting part of the whole track – is that couplet which forms the song’s bridge, when the singer acknowledges that nothing – not the music, not anything else – feels as good as it did when she experienced it all with her erstwhile beloved.

But what lends the song its power is the nostalgia that runs through it, as though the letters N-O-S-T-A-L-G-I-A had been scored into it on some subliminal level which our ears miss but our unconscious minds register. And what saves it from a cloying sentimentality is the upbeat tempo, the thumping bass, the infectious feet-stomping quality to this song which is simultaneously an eighties soul classic (Linda Womack was the daughter of legendary soul singer Sam Cooke) and a modern dance hit.

The Key to the Song’s Infectious Success

But the real star of ‘Teardrops’ isn’t the lyrics or the singing (powerful and infectious though Linda Womack’s voice undoubtedly is). It’s the organ which plays in the background. Sounding like a cross between an intercity train’s horn and that harp music which ushers in a dream sequence in every cheesy film, it is the sound of nostalgia itself.

Indeed, I remember that it sounded strangely wistful even when the song was first released, but now we stand almost forty years away from that moment, those organ notes sound even more nostalgic and Proustian than ever, sending us longing for a past we can never recapture, like those childhood parties at which I first heard it.

That soulful organ riff is also the reason why the later recordings of ‘Teardrops’ by other artists all fall at the first hurdle, whether it’s Elton John and K. D. Lang’s flaccid rendition from 1993, or Lovestation’s pallid garage-inflected cover version from 1998 (both of which at least had the good sense to omit the riff altogether, aware that, in this case, imitation would be the sincerest form of flaccidity).

Indeed, it seems an act of breathtaking arrogance (like those people who rewrite the words of Shakespeare to ‘modernise’ them) to think one can outdo such a stone-cold and yet red-hot, fresh-as-the-day-it-was-released classic. We have the original, which cannot be bettered: why even bother to try?