Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying by Labi Siffre.
The songwriter and poet’s most commercially successful album is a bittersweet testimony to the beautiful imperfections of the human spirit.
In a 2022 interview with The Guardian, Labi Siffre recounts love and its consequent tragedies following the death of his two husbands. In lamenting his lost “perfect life,” Siffre poignantly declares his passion, the driving force behind his work as a songwriter: “I have always taken love very seriously…Not just what it is, but how disastrous it would be without it.”
It is this fervor for love—all-consuming and terrifying yet simultaneously the most beautiful thing you can fathom—that underpins the tracklist of Siffre’s 1972 album Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying. Siffre takes the listener on a journey through candid portrayals of love, lust, uncertainty, and yearning, all of which are made a wholly unique experience through Siffre’s sincerity. The conviction to not shy away from raw emotions, whether that be desperation, possessiveness, distress, or a plethora of other feelings on display in this album, is integral to Siffre’s songwriting process.
In a 1972 interview with BBC, Labi Siffre, divulging his love of songwriting, expresses a need for emotional vulnerability without worry. In this anxiety of expression, he finds solace in songwriting, describing the act of writing lyrics as “[a] cowardly way of saying things that you would never say in conversation.” The interview then cuts to a recording of Siffre strumming a hopeful cascade of chords on his characteristic acoustic guitar and singing a fluttering melody, the guitar and his lone voice the only disruptors of the studio’s silence.
In Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying, the stars of the show are Siffre’s hopeful overlayed guitar strums and his untampered vocals, acting in harmony with one another. Other instrumental elements are supplementary and exist to enhance the sprawling guitars and authentic vocals. “Cannock Chase,” the second track on the record, is the first song of Siffre’s that I truly fell in love with, particularly for Siffre’s trademark: layered guitars in seeming conversation that build on each other with instrumental crescendos, creating the effect of biking through a town, where there’s people and life and love surrounding you. The revitalizing instrumentals find their perfect partner in Siffre’s vocals, where his voice is unaltered, uniquely his own, and, at times, supported by his additional harmonies. The lyrics themselves tell an uplifting story of finding your way; Siffre himself finds hope in uncertainty and the blues. Over a whirlwind of guitar strums, Siffre announces, “I thought my day would never come / Maybe it won’t but I’ll have fun / And I’ll hold tight, ‘cause that way it might.” The hope and lust for life that radiate from his lyricism are infectious, and it is impossible to walk away from this song without your footsteps feeling a little bit lighter.
Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying serves as a testimony of Siffre’s emotional sphere, a role that the album embraces without shame. If the album is Siffre’s diary, “My Song” is the confession. Towards the end of the project, where this track resides, we have already seen Siffre at his most vulnerable, almost pitiable, state of disarray in the face of love. Instead of shying away from these emotions that are made so public, “My Song” shows Siffre standing his ground, “This is my song / And no one can take it away” the prideful statement that opens the track over a simple melody of piano chords. The track stands defiantly in the face of a culture of emotional repression. The sensations of love that he describes are his and only his, and this special feeling—regardless of its rawness—will keep him singing. He repeats, in a mantra of beautiful resignation at the end of the song, “That as long / As I live / I will sing my song for you.”
When I think of this album, which has been in my rotation on and off for years, I’m reminded of the emotional moments, for better or for worse, during which these songs resonated with me in their poignancy. My love for the title track is a newly found one. I was reintroduced to the song as the end credits of The Holdovers played. The second I heard his trademark guitars cascading in the song’s uniquely bittersweet melody, I knew I had to listen to it on repeat for hours after the film ended. Its lyrics are simple, yet tell a relatable story of yielding to emotions of love. The song contains four verses, one dedicated to each word in the album’s title. The sentences and structure of each verse are mirrored in all of the verses. He goes through the song, traipsing over plucky guitars and feigning the appearance of someone unaffected, content in emotional detachedness, and unable to love. He ends the song on the “lying” portion of the album’s title: “Lying never did nobody no good, no how, no how / So why am I lying now? / So why am I lying now? / So why am I lying now?” It almost feels like a plea to his audience. Why, if lying has caused nothing but pain, is he lying about these unshakeable, vulnerable feelings?
This is what makes Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying such a masterful work of art—Siffre’s ethos as a songwriter is one of upholding sincerity above all else, and his lyrics put the human emotional sphere on full display. Its beauty lies in not shying away from the emotions most view as shameful. The album is a message that serves as a love letter to all human emotion and experience.
edited by Campbell Conard.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.