Dry My Tears and Move On – Richard Thompson

Guest post by Michael J Roberts,
Author of “33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters”

Dry My Tears and Move On – Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson came out of the British folk scene in the late 1960’s in his band Fairport Convention and he quickly became the guitarist du jour on the scene, playing sessions for many people, including label mate Nick Drake. Thompson was an accomplished player but left that successful band to pursue writing, not playing and soon he managed to become one of the most accomplished songwriters England has ever produced. Thompson’s output has been uneven as far as sound and production approaches, some styles being more sympathetic to his singular talent than others, but his song writing has shown no such accommodations to musical fashion. The Capitol album Mock Tudor from 1999 is uniformly superb with a sympathetically produced background that evokes earlier times as helmed by Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf. That production team had done wonders with Elliot Smith’s quirky talent on his highly regarded late albums and they proved a great fit for Mock Tudor which is full of wondrous gems with Dry My Tears and Move On a particular highlight.

Musically speaking….

Thompson picks out the simple tune across a verse pattern that moves between A major and E major across one bar, moving to the 4 chord and the major 2 for two bars each, before closing the phrase with a descending run through A, E/G#, D/F#, E and resolving to the tonic (A). It’s essentially a simple folk type tune but rendered almost as a soul/torch song, which it could easily be reinterpreted as.

This is an excerpt from my 33 Great Songs 33 Great Songwriters book available everywhere eBooks are sold.