Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton: what the song really means

What happened

Eric Clapton's son Conor died on March 20, 1991, after falling from a 53rd floor window at a New York apartment. (Wikipedia)

That is all this piece will say about it. The rest is about the song, which is a different thing from the loss, and the only part of any of it that became public property.

Writing it

After isolating himself for a period, Clapton began working again. He was scoring the film Rush, and he wrote for its soundtrack with the American lyricist Will Jennings. Clapton wrote the words of the opening verse and asked Jennings to complete the rest.

Jennings did not want to. He thought a song that personal belonged to the man whose song it was, and said so, before agreeing to finish it. He later described it as "so personal and so sad that it is unique in my experience of writing songs."

Clapton's own account of what the song is about was more careful than the story it later carried.

It could be taken to be about Conor but it also is meant to be part of the film.

Two things at once, then: a private subject and a commission with a deadline. He never claimed it was only the first. (Wikipedia)

What it became

The single came out on December 18, 1991, on the Rush soundtrack. It became Clapton's best selling single in the United States, reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the Cash Box Top 100, and sold more than 2.8 million copies there. It charted in the top ten in more than twenty countries.

In January 1992 he played it on an acoustic guitar in front of an audience at Bray Studios in Berkshire, for MTV Unplugged, and that recording went on to the Unplugged album. At the Grammy Awards in 1993 the song won Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. (Wikipedia)

So the most private thing he had written turned into the thing he was most widely known for, and he then had to sing it most nights.

Why he stopped, and why he returned

In 2004 Clapton stopped performing it, and stopped performing "My Father's Eyes" as well. The reason he gave was about the performance rather than the song.

I didn't feel the loss anymore, which is so much a part of performing those songs.

He has also said the two songs may simply have needed a rest. Either way, the feeling the performance drew on was no longer in the room, and he stopped rather than go through the motions of it.

Neither song stayed retired. Both came back into his regular setlists: "My Father's Eyes" has been performed as recently as 2013, and "Tears in Heaven" in 2022. (Wikipedia)

The version of this story that gets repeated stops in 2004, with a man who put a song down for good. He did not. The return is the more interesting half.

What a remembrance song is for

It is tempting to think that a song written in grief has to be carried forever, and that setting it down is a kind of forgetting. This one suggests something plainer. A song can belong to one season rather than to the whole of a life, and picking it up again years later, at a different distance, is its own thing rather than a correction.

He wrote it when the loss was the loudest thing in the room. He stopped when it was not. He plays it again now. None of those three cancels the others.

That is worth knowing if a song for someone who has died is ever something you think about. It does not have to do everything, and it does not have to suit every year that comes after. It can be for now.

If that is something you want one day, it will keep.