30) Not Crying - Part 1

I'm not crying, it's just been raining on my face
And if you think you see some tear tracks down my cheeks
Please, please don't tell my mates


Hello and welcome to another episode of Learning English with Lyrics, I am your host Jake, and today we are starting on a new song, that I am exceptionally excited about, and we will get to why in a minute. If this is your first time listening to this podcast, thank you for joining us today! Before you listen to this episode, I would highly recommend that you go back and listen to our first episode, which is titled "Introduction" before continuing. It will give you a quick explanation of how this podcast works, which will help you as you listen. To everyone else, welcome back! I'm super excited about today's episode, so let's jump right in! I think we're gonna have fun with it.

Today we are starting a short series on the song "Not Crying" by the band Flight of the Conchords. If you aren't familiar with Flight of the Conchords, they are a band...of sorts. In reality, they are a pair of comedians from New Zealand who perform under the name "Flight of the Conchords". They have all kinds of songs, many parodies, but often they just make silly, funny songs. They used to perform live quite a bit, but both members of the duo went on to have very successful careers in movies, and even had their own TV show! In fact, if you are able to watch the TV show, I highly recommend it. In my opinion, it's very, very funny and the songs are especially hilarious.

Today we are going to look at one of their classic songs, a song called "Not Crying".  In addition to being pretty funny, today's song has a TON of great words and phrases, so we are going to learn a lot. There are links to the song, as well as the music video in the description, so if you haven't listened to it yet, now is a good time to pause the podcast and go listen.

What did you think of it? Funny? Not funny? If you didn't think it was funny, don't worry! There's still a lot we can learn from the song.

So, what is the song about? This song is a bit of a parody, in that it pokes fun at emotional rock ballads. If you watched the music video you might have seen some references to some classic music videos in the past.

The theme of the song is of a man who's girlfriend recently broke up with them, and he is sad about it, but he's having trouble admitting that he is sad about it. He's so sad in fact, that he's crying. But he doesn't want anyone to think that he's crying. So, in order to appear more manly, or perhaps unaffected by her breaking up with him, he is making up excuses for why it LOOKS like he's crying.

Let's jump into the lyrics and you'll see what I mean. There are multiple versions of the song, one of which includes a spoken word intro. That is to say, it has a part where someone speaks instead of sings. We're actually going to skip that part and pick up the song right when the singing starts.

The first line says, "I'm not crying, it's just been raining, on my face."

I won't spend a lot of time explaining the jokes in the song, but in this case, it's just a funny image. That is to say, it's a funny thing to think about. This idea of tears flowing down someone's face and they claim that those aren't tears, but rain that just hit their face and nowhere else. They are completely dry except the rain that coincidentally seem to be hitting their face and only their face.

But it also brings up an interesting point of grammar. Everyone's favorite topic...prepositions. You've probably heard the phrase "It's raining" followed by a place before, but it can be confusing which preposition to use. Is it raining AT the park? Is it raining IN the park? Or is it raining ON the park?

Well...truthfully speaking, all three of those work! It just depends on what you're trying to say. I won't be able to get into ALL of the subtleties of these different prepositions, but I will give some general guidance. They aren't VERY different, and they can all be used to communicate the same general idea, but they focus on different things.

We'll continue using the park as our example.

If it is raining at the park, that is referring to the general area of the park. It might be raining in a wider radius around the park as well, we're not excluding that possibility, but in this case, we are trying to communicate that in the area of the park, it's raining as well.

If I say that it's raining IN the park, I'm specifically referring to the confines of the park. That is to say, the boundaries of the park. Again, it's not that I'm excluding other areas, but I'm wanting to specifically talk about the fact that within the park itself it is raining.

If I say it's raining ON the park, I'm talking very specifically about raindrops landing on the park, the physical park itself. When we talk about it raining ON something, we mean that raindrops are hitting that thing in particular. In our song for example, the rain is landing ON his face. We're drawing attention to the fact that the rain is hitting the area of his face. We would rarely say it's raining on the park however. We might say "It's raining on the grass!" or "It's raining on the swings!", to draw attention to the fact that they are getting wet.

I know...it's confusing. But with practice, and listening to how other people use it, you'll get it, don't worry!

Let's go ahead and move on.

"And if you think you see some tear tracks down my cheeks, please please don't tell my mates."

The vocabulary here is fairly simple, so we'll just spend a moment on it.

First of all, what is a "tear track". A "track" is essentially the evidence that something has passed this way. For example, if you walk through the mud, you might leave behind footprints. These could also be called your "tracks". Animal tracks are animal paw prints that are impressed into the ground.

A tear track, is the trace or remnant of a tear that remains after the tear has moved down your face. The wet streaks or lines down your face, before you've wiped away the tear. They are evidence that you have been crying, after the crying has ceased or stopped.

Tears move downwards, from your eyes, to your cheeks and then off of your face. That's why it says "tear track DOWN my cheeks".

The second point of vocabulary worth mentioning is the word "mates". You are probably familiar with this term, meaning "friends", but did you know that we don't use this term in America? Other English speaking nations use this word, but for whatever reason, we do not. In fact, if we talk about a mate, usually, we're talking about your significant other. So what would we say instead? Well, of course the word "friends" works well here. "Please don't tell my friends". But if we were talking about closer friends, what could we say? "Buddies" is a pretty common one in the US. Some people might refer to their close group of friends as their "crew" or their "boys" (or girls for a group of women). "Squad" is a fairly recent one that is used by some. "Gang" and "posse" aren't as popular as they used to be, but you'll still hear them from time to time.

Alright, let's finish up by talking about the sentence itself.

"And if you THINK that you see some tear tracks down my cheeks, please don't tell my mates"

Why does he use the word think here?

Well, remember, even though he is obviously crying, he trying to convince her that he is not crying. So, there is of course the possibility that she sees him crying. So what he is trying to do here, is to CAST DOUBT on what she is seeing. That is to say, he wants to make her believe that she is mistaken in what she sees. By using the word "think" here, he's implying that she is thinking incorrectly. If he had just said "If you SEE tear tracks", he would be admitting that there are indeed tracks from tears on his face. By saying "If you think that you see tear tracks", he's adding in the possibility that she is mistaken. He's not flat out saying that he's not crying with this sentence, but he's trying to make her doubt her own senses. We talked about this sort of behavior in one of our episodes breaking down "Somebody That I Used To Know". Do you remember the word we used for it?

Well, that's all we have for today. Join us next time as we get deeper into this song, and explore some more interesting words and phrases! I'll talk to you then.


As always, you can find the transcript for this episode in the description. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate it and subscribe, wherever you're listening to it! And of course, don't forget to tell your friends about us!We post a new episode every Wednesday! We also have even more English learning related content on Instagram, just search for the username "lelpodcast". Finally, if you have any questions, comments, critiques, or suggestions for songs, don't hesitate to send us a message to any of our social media accounts, or to our email address "[email protected]". We hope to hear from you soon!