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Roy Orbison - Crying

Roy Orbison - Crying Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Crying
Released: 1961

Crying Lyrics

I was all right for a while, I could smile for a while
But I saw you last night, you held my hand so tight
As you stopped to say "Hello"
Aw you wished me well, you couldn't tell

That I'd been Crying over you, crying over you
Then you said "so long". left me standing all alone
Alone and crying, crying, crying crying
It's hard to understand but the touch of your hand
Can start me crying

I thought that I was over you but it's true, so true
I love you even more than I did before but darling what can I do
For you don't love me and I'll always be

Crying over you, crying over you
Yes, now you're gone and from this moment on
I'll be crying, crying, crying, crying
Yeah crying, crying, over you

Writer/s: MELSON, JOE / ORBISON, ROY
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Barbara Orbison Music Company, Orbi-Lee Music, R-Key Darkus, BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Crying

Orbison claimed to have written this as the result of an encounter he had with an old flame with whom he was still in love. He refused to say how much she meant to him, and when he ran into her again it was too late.

Orbison started writing this song for a country singer named Don Gibson; the working title was "Once Again." Orbison's songwriting partner, Joe Melson, then came up with the lyrics, "Once again I'm crying, once again I'm crying," which became the basis for the song, so Orbison changed the title. Orbison claimed the stunning climax at the end of the song was not contrived, but just happened in the course of the song. He told the NME in 1980: "Immediately I thought of a past experience and just retold that, was the way that came about. It was the retelling of a thing with a girlfriend that I had had. I couldn't tell you right now what notes I hit at the end of the song, or anything."

At the time, rock artists didn't typically write songs about crying over a girl. Orbison wanted to show that crying was not weakness, but sensitivity. Other voices would have a hard time pulling this off, but Orbison could emote very naturally when he sang, which he did on many of his hits.

In 1987, shortly after he signed with Virgin Records, Orbison recorded a duet of this song with kd lang which was released as a single and later used as the B-side to his 1989 release "She's A Mystery To Me." This duet won the 1988 Grammy award for Best Country Vocal Collaboration, and was re-released in the UK in 1992, where it hit #13. Lang said that when they met to do the recording, it was obvious that their voices had a "tonal connection."

This recording was made for the 1987 Jon Cryer movie Hiding Out, and produced by Pete Anderson, who was Dwight Yoakam's producer. In our interview with Pete Anderson , he said: "The editor cut it for the movie, and he slowed it down for this scene where they were roller skating. So my daunting task was to recut 'Crying' as a duet with kd lang, Roy Orbison, and slow it down a little bit. It was great - it's Roy and kd, so you can't go wrong no matter what you do.

I more-or-less witnessed it because they were so terrific. The biggest plus out of it was just getting to know Roy a little bit and spending a little time with Roy, who was a very, very special person."

Roy Orbison explained in 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh how he came to write this song: "I was dating a girl and we broke up. I went to the barber shop to get a haircut and I looked across the street and there was this girl that I had split up with. I wanted to go over and say, 'Let's forget about what happened and carry on'. But I was stubborn. So I got in the car and drove down the street about two blocks and said to myself, 'Boy, you really made a mistake. You didn't play that right at all.' It certainly brought tears to my eyes and that's how I came up with 'Crying'."

In 1978 Don McLean recorded a cover version of this for his Chain Lightning album. It was originally released as a single in Europe successfully, and by 1980 it had become a #1 hit in the UK and #5 in the US. Jay & the Americans also had a hit with the song, taking it to #25 in the US in 1966.

Orbison broke convention by following up a hit ballad with another ballad: his previous release was "Running Scared," and while conventional wisdom was to never release two ballads back to back, it worked out just fine for Orbison as "Crying" was also a hit.

Roy Orbison - I Drove All Night

Roy Orbison - I Drove All Night Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: King Of Hearts
Released: 1992

I Drove All Night Lyrics

I had to escape , the city was sticky and cruel
Maybe I should have called you first
But I was dying to get to you

I was dreaming while I drove
The long straight road ahead
Uh-huh, yeah

Could taste your sweet kisses, your arms open wide
This fever for you was just burning me up inside

I Drove All Night to get to you
Is that all right?
I drove all night, crept in your room
Woke you from your sleep to make love to you
Is that all right?
I drove all night

What in this world keeps us from falling apart?
No matter where I go
I hear the beating of our one heart
I think about you when the night is cold and dark
Uh-huh, yeah

No one can move me the way that you do
Nothing erases this feeling between me and you
I drove all night to get to you
Is that all right?

I drove all night, crept in your room
Woke you from your sleep to make love to you
Is that all right?
I drove all night

Could taste your sweet kisses, your arms open wide
This fever for you was just burning me up inside

I drove all night to get to you
Is that all right?
I drove all night, crept in your room
Is that all right?
I drove all night

Writer/s: STEINBERG, BILLY / KELLY, TOM
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

I Drove All Night

Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg wrote this. They have written many hit songs, including "Like A Virgin," "Eternal Flame" and "True Colors." Many of their songs start with a lyric or title Steinberg comes up with. He was living in the Coachella Valley in California and did a lot of driving back and forth between Los Angeles and the desert. He came up with the title on one of those drives.

Steinberg: "Tom and I were huge Roy Orbison fans. Tom grew up in Indiana and I grew up in Palm Springs, California and we really are as different as night and day as people, but the one thing that we have always shared in common is that we always liked the same music when we were kids. We both loved the Everly Brothers, Laura Nyro and Roy Orbison. We had, like most songwriters do, certain artists who inspired us and would inspire our songwriting, and one of those was Roy Orbison. When we wrote the song 'I Drove All Night,' we didn't entertain any fantasy about Roy ever recording this song. We just set out to write a song sort of in the style of Roy Orbison. In fact, what I would refer to as the B section of that song, the British would call it a pre-chorus, when it goes, 'Taste your sweet kisses your arms open wide,' that part that lifts into the chorus, it has a definite similarity to the Roy Orbison song 'Running Scared.' We had great fun writing that song because it felt like it authentically captured the spirit of the drama that Roy Orbison would inject into the great songs that he wrote, songs like 'Running Scared', 'Crying' or 'In Dreams.'"

The first person Steinberg and Kelly offered this to was Peter Kingsbery, a singer from Texas who was in the band Cock Robin. Says Steinberg, "We heard Cock Robin play live and this guy Peter Kingsbery had this great voice very much like Roy Orbison - it's a powerful voice. We thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if he would sing I Drove All Night, so we invited him over to Tom's house where we had a studio. Peter was a good guy, a little bit arrogant. He heard the song and he liked it, but he said, 'Well, I'm a songwriter myself. Why would I record one of your songs?' it was a nice meeting, but he didn't have any interest in recording our song."

On February 9, 1987, Steinberg and Kelly saw Orbison perform at a supper club in Lakewood, California called The Hop. Says Steinberg, "When we walked in, the place was jammed and most of the people there were middle-aged women. At that time Roy hadn't had a record on the charts in many years. He did not have a recording contract. Roy hadn't been heard from in a long time. The band went up on stage, Roy was not in sight and there were a couple of background singers. The band starts playing and the girls start singing the intro to 'Only the Lonely.' I sort of braced myself. I said to myself, 'His vocals on his records are so otherworldly and so unbelievable that there's no way the guy's going to walk in this club and sing those songs like he did on those records.' Roy Orbison walks out and he sang 'Only the Lonely' and he sang all his hits and if it's possible he sang them better than he did on his records. It was just unbelievable. It was one of the great moments in my life, just to be there in this small club and hear Roy sing one hit after another. When the show was over, Tom and I wandered outside and there was his trailer. Of course, we were hoping to meet Roy. We didn't, but we met somebody who I guess was Roy's manager at the time. We mentioned we had written a few hits and were Roy Orbison fans. Not much came out of that, then for some reason I went into a studio called Record One in Sherman Oaks and Roy Orbison was in there recording. I went up to him and said, 'A few months ago Tom and I heard you play at this club and you were so good.' We kind of connected and somehow we arranged that he would come by Tom's house and do some work with us and that maybe we would write together. We had already written 'I Drove All Night.' We had a demo of it with Tom singing it. Tom and I walked out and were standing out in the street. We looked down the street and we saw in the distance a red Ferrari convertible coming up the street and we both knew that had to be Roy Orbison. He was driving slowly like someone would who was looking for a street number. As the car pulled up, we saw a guy with big black sunglasses, black hair, and there on a residential street in Woodland Hills was Roy Orbison getting out of his red Ferrari to work with Tom and me. Working with Chrissie Hynde, the Bangles or The Divinyls is one thing because those are people of my generation, but Roy had been a childhood idol. Roy was somebody whose songs just changed my life when I was a kid, so to have him standing there as a peer, someone I was going to work with, my knees wanted to buckle. We walked into Tom's house and there was the idea that we could write something together and he just didn't seem to really want to start writing a song, so rather than write something we said, 'Well, we've got a song that we think you could sing really well,' and we played him 'I Drove All Night.' He said he liked it. Tom played either piano or guitar and taught him the song. Roy stepped up to the microphone. We all had headphones on and Roy sang two takes of the song. Tom and I had written into that song a section that goes, 'Uh-huh, yeah,' and when Tom sang it on our demo we would laugh because Tom was blatantly trying to sound like Roy, and then when Roy did it, it was a moment that was just unbelievable because Roy did it like it was supposed to be done. Roy did those two takes of the song and I gave him some song lyrics. He took them with him with the idea that he might write something to them or that we could work on something in the future. So we had this demo of Roy Orbison singing 'I Drove All Night,' but Roy didn't have a recording contract at the time and Tom and I didn't have the wherewithal to do anything with Roy Orbison's version of the song. We couldn't sign him to a recording contract or promote him or anything at that point in time. We didn't know what to do with it. By that time 'True Colors' had been a big hit for Cyndi Lauper and she had expressed an interest in meeting us and in writing with us, so Tom and I flew to New York and we took with us the demo of 'I Drove All Night' sung by Tom because we figured that she could sing it well. We wrote a couple of songs with Cyndi and we presented this song 'I Drove All Night' to her and she liked it and immediately went about recording it. Tom and I even participated in demonstrating the song to a couple of musicians that she worked with. She recorded it and it came out on her record called A Night to Remember (1989)."

Later in 1987, Roy Orbison got a recording contract with Virgin Records. Working with Jeff Lynne, he recorded the successful comeback album Mystery Girl, which contained the hit 'You Got It.' He also joined The Traveling Wilburys with Lynne, Tom Petty, George Harrison and Bob Dylan. Sadly, Orbison died of a heart attack on December 7, 1988. Says Steinberg:
"From afar we sort of watched Roy's career come back. We were pleased for him but we didn't participate because all the great admirers of Roy had started to come out of the woodwork. People like Jeff Lynne, Bruce Springsteen and Bono. He didn't exactly need Steinberg/Kelly when he had people of that caliber wanting to work with him. Roy died and a number of years went by. Tom and I took our demo of 'I Drove All Night' to Jordan Harris, who was an A&R guy at Virgin. We got to know Jordan because we worked with The Divinyls, who were signed to Virgin. We said to Jordan, 'Did you know Roy did a version of I Drove All Night early on?' And he said, 'No, I had no idea.' We played it for him and he said, 'We want to make a record of the remaining masters that we have on Roy. We'd love to use that.' Our demo had been a very rough 16 Track affair. We gave it to Jeff Lynne and Jeff rebuilt the track around the vocal that we had cut on Roy. That was very satisfying for us." (Check out our interview with Billy Steinberg.)

Cyndi Lauper's version hit #6 in the US and #7 in the UK. It was her last hit in the US.

In 2003, Chrysler signed Celine Dion to a $14 million deal to endorse their cars. They were looking for a song to use in the campaign and release as a single. Steinberg knew Celine Dion and had written "Falling Into You," which was the title track of her 1996 album. He sent a copy of Roy Orbison's version of "I Drove All Night" to her record company, who loved it and had Dion record it with Swedish producer Peer Astrom. She used the song in her Las Vegas show and it became the centerpiece of the Chrysler campaign. The commercials were great exposure for the song and helped sell a lot of albums, but they didn't sell enough cars. Chrysler pulled out of the deal after many of their dealers complained and it became clear the ads weren't working.

Roy Orbison - (Oh) Pretty Woman

Roy Orbison - (Oh) Pretty Woman Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Greatest Hits
Released: 1964

(Oh) Pretty Woman Lyrics

Pretty woman, walkin' down the street
Pretty woman the kind I like to meet
Pretty woman I don't believe you, you're not the truth
No one could look as good as you, mercy

Pretty woman won't you pardon me
Pretty woman I couldn't help but see
Pretty woman that you look lovely as can be
Are you lonely just like me

Pretty woman stop awhile
Pretty woman talk awhile
Pretty woman give your smile to me
Pretty woman yeah, yeah, yeah
Pretty woman look my way
Pretty woman say you'll stay with me
'Cause I need you, I'll treat you right
Come with me baby, be mine tonight

Pretty woman don't walk on by
Pretty woman don't make me cry
Pretty woman don't walk away, hey, okay
If that's the way it must be, okay
I guess I'll go on home, it's late
There'll be tomorrow night, but wait
What do I see?
Is she walkin' back to me?
Yeah, she's walkin' back to me
Oh, oh, pretty woman

Writer/s: DEES, BILL / ORBISON, ROY
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Barbara Orbison Music Company, Orbi-Lee Music, R-Key Darkus, BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

(Oh) Pretty Woman

Roy Orbison was writing with his songwriting partner Bill Dees at his house when he told Dees to get started writing by playing anything that came to mind. Orbison's wife Claudette came in and said she was going to go into town to buy something. Orbison asked if she needed any money, and Dees cracked, "Pretty woman never needs any money." Inspired, Orbison started singing, "Pretty woman walking down the street." Bill Dees recalls in 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh: "He sang it while I was banging my hand down on the table and by the time she returned we had the song. I love the song. From the moment that the rhythm started, I could hear the heels clicking on the pavement, click, click, the pretty woman walking down the street, in a yellow skirt and red shoes. We wrote Oh Pretty Woman on a Friday, the next Friday we recorded it, and the next Friday it was out. It was the fastest thing I ever saw. Actually, the yeah, yeah, yeah in Oh Pretty Woman probably came from The Beatles."

In the same book Bill Dees recounts how the distinctive growling cry of "Mercy" came about: "I can't do that growl like Roy, but the "Mercy" is mine. I used to say that all the time when I saw a pretty woman or had some good food. Still do."

Orbison and his wife Claudette had recently reconciled after some tough times, but as this song was climbing the charts, Roy found out she had been cheating on him and filed for divorce. In 1966, they remarried, but two months later Claudette was killed when the motorcycle she was riding was hit by a truck. Orbison faced tragedy again when his two oldest sons died in a fire at his home in 1968. He was on tour at the time.

This was Orbison's last big hit. His career faded fast, but was revived in the '80s when prominent musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and George Harrison cited him as an influence and invited him to join various projects. He was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and joined The Traveling Wilburys with Dylan, Tom Petty, Harrison and Jeff Lynne. As he was enjoying this career revival, he died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988 at age 52.

With his dark sunglasses and plaintive voice, Orbison gave the impression that he was always longing and sometimes miserable, which was not the case. Speaking with the NME in 1980, he explained what's going on in this song: "There's a ballad in the mid-section of it there: he's very sure of getting the girl when he first sees her, and then he's not so sure, and then he gets desperate, and then he says forget it, and then she comes back. It's quite complicated, but it's probably in the presentation, or if I'm really singing like I know I can and I'm doing the job that I should be doing, then it could be that the voice quality in parts has a melancholy something."

This was used in the 1990 movie of the same name starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. It also featured in the films Dumb and Dumber (1994) and Au Pair (1999).

In 1989, the controversial rap group 2 Live Crew recorded a parody of this song, using the alternate title "Pretty Woman" for their album Clean As They Wanna Be. The Crew sampled the distinctive bassline, but the romantic lyrics were replaced by talk about a hairy woman and her bald-headed friend and their appeal to the singer. Orbison's publisher, Acuff-Rose Music, sued 2 Live Crew on the basis that the fair use doctrine did not permit reuse of their copyrighted material for profit. The case, Campbell vs. Acuff-Rose Music, went all the way to the US Supreme Court. In 1994, the Court ruled that 2 Live Crew's parody did not violate federal copyright laws. (thanks, Bertrand - Paris, France and Graham - Perth, Australia)

In 1964, Orbison was the only American artist to have a #1 UK hit, and he did it twice - with "(Oh) Pretty Woman" and "It's Over." (thanks, David - Akron, OH)