Every singer hopes a song will move somebody. In 1985, Billy Ocean’s ballad “Suddenly” moved a stranger so completely that she burst into tears in the middle of a party — and that small, mortifying, human moment became a number one record in its own right. “There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)” is pop’s most elegant meta-song: a sad song about sad songs, about the way a melody can ambush you with a person you were trying to forget. Written by Ocean with producers Wayne Brathwaite and Barry Eastmond, it reached number one in the United States in the summer of 1986, topping the pop, R&B and adult contemporary charts simultaneously — and it proved its own thesis every time it was played.
The Party Where “Suddenly” Did Its Damage
The story comes from Barry Eastmond himself, who told it to Fred Bronson for The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. A friend of Eastmond’s wife had recently broken up with a long-term boyfriend. She was rebuilding her life, and attended a party thrown by her new boyfriend — the kind of evening designed to announce that the past was over. Then somebody played “Suddenly”, Ocean’s tender ballad from the year before. The song had belonged to her old relationship, and hearing it in that room, in front of that audience, was more than she could bear. She broke down in tears.
Eastmond recognised the moment for what it was: not just an embarrassment, but a universal experience perfectly shaped for a song. Everybody has a record that belongs to somebody they no longer speak to. Everybody has been ambushed by it — in a supermarket, a taxi, a friend’s kitchen. He and his collaborators took the scenario almost exactly as it happened and built “There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)” around it: a singer watching the person he loves hear their song in someone else’s arms, knowing there is nothing he can do but let the music finish what it started. The parenthetical promise of the title — to make you cry — is not a threat. It is simply what sad songs are for.
The Love Zone Team at Work
The song was a product of the partnership that had rebuilt Ocean’s career. After “Caribbean Queen” relaunched him in 1984, Ocean settled into a creative team with Brathwaite and Eastmond, who wrote and produced across his mid-eighties albums. All three men share the writing credit on “There’ll Be Sad Songs”, and Brathwaite and Eastmond produced it, as they did the whole of Love Zone, Ocean’s sixth studio album.
At four minutes and fifty-five seconds, the record is a model of adult-contemporary soul: a slow, spacious ballad built around Ocean’s warm, unhurried vocal, with the arrangement leaving long silences for the lyric to land in. Where “Caribbean Queen” had been all momentum, this was all ache. The contrast was deliberate and commercially astute — Ocean’s imperial phase rested on alternating the dancefloor records with ballads, “Suddenly” having already shown how far the slow songs could travel. “There’ll Be Sad Songs” was, in a sense, “Suddenly” reflecting on its own effect: the sequel written by the man who had watched what the original could do to a room.
The song sits at the end of side one of Love Zone, closing the album’s first half, and it is surrounded by the trio’s handwriting: nearly every track on the album was written by Brathwaite, Eastmond and Ocean together, and the record was cut at Battery Studios in London during 1985 and 1986. This was not a singer renting fashionable producers by the week. It was a settled creative household, and “There’ll Be Sad Songs” — sparked by a story Eastmond carried home from his own family’s life — shows how personal the material inside that household could be. The polish was corporate; the sentiment, unusually, was not.
One Week at Number One, on Three Charts at Once
Released on 22 January 1986, with “If I Should Lose You” on the B-side, the single arrived ahead of the Love Zone album, which followed on 6 May. It climbed through the spring and, for the week beginning 5 July 1986, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 — Ocean’s second American number one, between “Caribbean Queen” in 1984 and “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” in 1988. It held the top spot for one week, and in the same summer it also topped Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts, a clean sweep of the three audiences Ocean had spent a decade cultivating. It finished 1986 at number sixteen on the Hot 100’s year-end chart, and the song went on to win the American Music Award for Favorite Pop/Rock Song.
The trade papers told the same story from every angle. The single also reached number one on the Cash Box Top 100, and its staying power showed in the year-end tallies: number six for the year on Billboard‘s adult contemporary chart, number eight on the R&B chart, and number four on the Cash Box year-end pop list. A one-week number one can be a flash; “There’ll Be Sad Songs” was instead a slow, season-long presence, the kind of record that radio programmers kept in rotation from spring through Christmas precisely because it fitted every format that would have it.
The success travelled, though with a curious transatlantic split. In Canada the single matched its American performance, topping both the RPM Top Singles and Adult Contemporary charts. It reached number three in New Zealand, number seven on the European Hot 100, number eight in the Netherlands and number ten in Australia. In Britain, however, it peaked at number twelve — respectable, but the one major market where the ballad did not quite break through, in the very season when Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going”, from the same album, was sitting at number one. British listeners, it seemed, preferred their Ocean upbeat that year; American listeners wanted the tears.
The ballad also anchored the biggest album of Ocean’s career. Love Zone became his highest-charting record on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching number two in Britain and number six on the Billboard 200, while topping the American R&B albums chart and earning a double-platinum certification in the United States. The album brought Ocean a Grammy nomination for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, and he won two American Music Awards that season. Reviewing the album, People magazine captured its whole strategy in one line, noting that the moods Ocean created were “so richly romantic they shouldn’t be inflicted on the brokenhearted” — a joke that “There’ll Be Sad Songs”, a record literally about a song ambushing the brokenhearted, turned into a mission statement.
The Woman Who Walks Past
The song’s music video understood the lyric’s cruelty precisely. Towards the end of the clip, Ocean sees a woman coming towards him; he opens himself up, ready to embrace her — and she walks straight past him, leaving him standing there, devastated. It is a small, brutal piece of staging that captures exactly what the song is about: the moment you realise the song, and the person, no longer belong to you. An alternative video simply showed Ocean performing the song live in concert in 1986, letting the ballad do its work without illustration.
Critical opinion has divided along predictable lines. Celebrated in its day as the crown of Ocean’s ballad craft, the song was later treated more coolly by some reassessments — Tom Breihan, writing about it in Stereogum’s The Number Ones column, heard the hallmarks of mid-eighties adult-contemporary soul, immaculately made and deliberately inoffensive. Both judgements can be true at once. “There’ll Be Sad Songs” was engineered for the broadest possible audience, and its craft is precisely in how completely it disappears into its own emotion: nothing in the record calls attention to itself except the ache.
Within the Love Zone campaign, the single did the quiet work between the fireworks. It was the album’s second single, following the soundtrack juggernaut of “When the Going Gets Tough”, and it held Ocean’s chart presence through the spring while the album gathered momentum; the title track and “Love Is Forever” followed it into the American charts later in 1986. Sequenced as the closing track of the album’s first side, it was the emotional centre of a record otherwise built on momentum — the still point that made the hits around it sound even bigger.
Proof of Its Own Premise
There is a pleasing circularity to the song’s legacy. A stranger cried at a party because a Billy Ocean ballad reminded her of a lost love; the songwriter turned her tears into another Billy Ocean ballad; and that ballad then spent four decades doing to other listeners exactly what “Suddenly” had done to her. As the middle panel of Ocean’s trio of American number ones, “There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)” is the quietest and the strangest — the one that is not really about love at all, but about what songs do to the people who carry them around. There will always be sad songs. Ocean just made sure one of them explained why.