Music Review // LeeSun "Dry Your Tears"

https://soundcloud.com/leesun/dyt //
https://leesun.bandcamp.com/track/dry-your-tears //
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUEkbn03b1w&feature=youtu.be //

"Dry Your Tears" has this cool, kind of slick vibe to it which reminds me of what little I know about Tracy Chapman.   Musically, it also has that style of the Elle King song "Ex's & Oh's" or some sort of modern swing type music.   I heard this song recently within a television show or movie that I had to Google search to find out what it was and I don't remember anything else about it to go back now for reference but it has that secret spy sort of vibe to it-- that's my best way to describe it.   It just reminds me of a woman with a lot of tattoos and a certain style, like a pinup model-- not quite Amy Winehouse, not quite Marilyn Monroe, but somewhere in between.

The video for this song has a dark feel to it, which seems to fit the song nicely, and it features a girl running carelessly through a field, stepping into and getting her foot caught in a bear trap.    It appears as if LeeSun is singing to the girl, as her mother would have told her to dry her tears at probably around the same age.    The video continues as the lyrics do, which is fun because this particular song seems to tell a story with each verse.  It's this combination of telling a story from the past, teaching an important lesson and then just being a song as well which makes this all that vital to experience not just in audio but in the video as well.

For the first verse, LeeSun sings about her mother teaching her a lesson but then for the second verse it's about school and her teacher.   What you will notice in the video is that this young girl, as she goes into the second verse and is at school, still carries the bear trap on her foot from the first verse earlier in the video.   This is so important to me because people don't ever seem to realize or give enough credit to the fact that we never really get over our pain-- we never really rid ourselves of it; we carry it with us for the rest of our lives and just learn to live with it.   Most importantly though, that pain isn't always as easy to see as a bear trap, so I do enjoy this visual a great deal.   

One of the most important lines in this song- I believe- is "The pain will end / You will come through with new found strength".   Too often in life (and we all need to remember this, perhaps me most of all) we go through thinking and really only focusing on the bad times.   We think every time we're down that is where we will always stay.   For me, this song is something that I've kind of imbedded into my brain and wish more people would too because I've learned in life that you can't stay down forever.

And more importantly, perhaps, than knowing things will eventually get better is knowing that your hard times, your suffering, is for a reason.   If you went through the world without any pain, without knowing real trouble, for say, twenty years even by the time something bad did happen (And just as we cannot be sad all the time, we cannot be happy all the time either) I don't know how easy it would be to process it for someone.   Going through life's troubles makes you tougher, it builds character and sometimes when it feels like you hit bottom you just have to remember there is no place left to go but up.