BRB, Crying
It’s no secret that I tend to favor women’s singing voices over men’s. Almost certainly, over 50% of my posts will be about women. Even some of the most popular and enduring male singers just don’t agree with me. That’s okay.
There are, however, some men with the voices of angels. I’ll write about many of them, but I’ll start today with one of my all-time favorites: Roy Orbison.
I know, I know, a music blogger writing about Roy Orbison. Life-changing. Well, tough, because every word about him is well-deserved. It puzzles me to end that “Oh, Pretty Woman” is his most well-known song, because of all of Roy Orbison’s catalogue, that song doesn’t even crack the top 20 for me.
Roy Orbison didn’t fit in neatly with other early rock-and-roll performers. His music was slower, less danceable, often with country twang. He wore sunglasses and suffered from social anxiety. An unlikely rock star.
But his voice—oh, his voice! It descended directly from on high and planted it into a young man from Texas. The entirety of his career focused on sadder songs. It leads to one of the peaks of his career: “Crying,” on the album by the same name.
The song is about good-ole Roy crying over missing a woman. The irony in this song runs deep, as his vocal gymnastics in this song rarely fail to make me cry. Falsetto to baritone and everything in between. But it really doesn’t matter what he’s singing, it’s his voice itself that is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever known.
Roy Orbison found a career resurgence in the 1980s, following 15 years of obscurity. He was a member of the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys, alongside Tom Petty, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, and Jeff Lynne. He also released a very successful solo album, Mystery Girl, in 1988, produced by Jeff Lynne. One month later, he died of a heart attack at the age of 52.
The great master David Lynch recognized the power of this song. He asked Los Angeles-based singer Rebekah Del Rio to perform “Crying” in Spanish on stage in his magnum opus, and one of my favorite films, Mulholland Drive (2001). “Crying” isn’t a song covered frequently, due to its extreme vocal difficulty. David Lynch wouldn’t just pick any rando to sing this song, though; Rebekah Del Rio similarly has a heaven-sent voice. The song, retitled “Llorando,” creates one of the most powerful scenes in all of cinema history. Sadly, Rebekah Del Rio passed away in June 2025. I’ll post both versions of the song below.