GOOSEBUMPS & TEARDROPS

In the week spanning the 26^th WhatOnStage Awards and the 98^th Academy Awards, and with the Dramatis Personae for the 50^th Olivier Awards hot off the press, we roll out the red carpet for the two most highly sought after prizes in the arts and entertainment cosmos…

I have a confession Y’all.  I never really got Country and Western. Okay, the (much) younger me chuckled along to Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue and the Statler Brothers’ You Can’t Have Your Kate and Edith Too, but the more serious stuff left me cold.

Later, during my very short (think Mayfly-short) stint as a lyricist, I would be given a new song to write every week, and always in a different genre. Punk, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Romantic Ballard, you name it and my twenty-one-year-old-self would mould its little grey cells to the task like a lexical contortionist …but I had to draw the line somewhere:

“I can’t write this.”

“Why the Hell not?”

“It’s… Country and ****ing Western.”

“Just do it, Dave.”

So I did, under protest, and pouting like a lassoed steer at branding time. And guess what? It turned out to be one of the finest songs I had ever written.

Who knew?

Flashforward a few decades, and I’m regularly attending one or two grass-root venues every week. And almost every week there is at least one Country and Western or ‘Americana’ act on the bill. Now don’t get me wrong, these are some supremely talented musicians turning in great songs with astonishingly powerful performances… but I still didn’t get it.

Until…

Now I’m pretty darn sure y’all must have done this at one time or another. You take a week’s free subscription to a streaming channel, because there’s one series you really want to catch (but not enough to actually pay for it) and then, after you’ve guzzled it down in one sitting, you take a gander on what else they have on offer. And that’s when I fell in love with, of all things, Nashville.

The series, which ran from October 2012 to July 2018, attracted its fair share of mixed critical reviews; Season One scored 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, while also receiving accusations of being “endlessly soapy” and a “Dallas with Country.”

But here’s the thang.

What the critics didn’t seem to realize was that the creative teams had, either consciously or otherwise, produced a kind of TV Musical.  And at a total viewing time of around three days and seventeen hours it is even longer than Les Mis. Every one of the 124 episodes is structured around songs, but unlike stage and big screen musicals, where characters break into song (or Dennis Potter’s fabulous BBC series Pennies From Heaven come to that) the major characters in Nashville are defined by their ability to write songs. And, to this end, they all need to exploit their personal and professional relationships, and any ensuing emotional turmoil, as fuel for their careers. Of course, Nashville is a piece of fiction, and this creative cannibalism might be a might over-stated in the series, but let’s not forget that Taylor Swift, the undisputed Queen of the Break-Up Hit Single, begged, pleaded and finally cajoled her parents to move to Nashville when she was just fourteen years old.

This week around 60,000 people will be filling London’s O2 for the annual Country to Country (‘C2C’) Festival, the largest of its kind in Europe.  

And, as I'm writing this during International Women’s Week, I will run the risk of a spoiler (or Twain) by revealing that the plot of Nashville follows the lives of three incredibly strong female characters (although some might argue that there are six or seven in total).  Which is hardly surprising given that the series was created by Callie Khouri, who won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Thelma and Louise. What I won’t do, however, is give away the series’ equivalent of Musical Theatre’s eleventh hour number, the final, climactic number which occurs before the actual finale.

But I will admit that it actually made me cry. 

In fact, I’ll have to pause for a second here to de-mist my eyeballs as I write… 

It also produced the Holy Grail of (almost) all of us daily ploughing our furrows in The Business of Pleasure …emotional piloerection (aka goosebumps).

I shouldn’t be really be surprised by my reaction.  After all, I have studied these emotional phenomena closely for over half a century. But back in 2017 a team of German researchers conducted an experiment* on twenty-five students to try and understand the linkage between goosebumps and tears, and even paid the Lucky Schwein €25 each for taking part!

‘…Several weeks before the testing, each participant provided a set of three to six emotionally powerful film scenes which contained peaking moments of emotional arousal and had repeatedly moved him or her to tears in the past. This resulted in a total stimulus pool of 137 different clips (several identical excerpts were chosen by multiple participants). The average clip length was 249 seconds; the lengths ranged between 53 and 666s. Most of the films from which the excerpts were taken were produced in the US (80.28%), followed by the UK (16.90%), Germany (14.08%) and France (9.86%); note that because of co-productions such as Germany/France these percentages do not add up to 100. The production years ranged from 1941 (Citizen Kane) to 2012 (Les Misérables). All clips from non-German films were shown in dubbed German version…’

(Personally, I’d just have made them watch the ‘Carousel’ scene in Mad Men to save time)

‘…The overlap and close alliance of piloerection and lacrimation involves a complex underlying of physiological orchestration. After all, these responses are governed by two antagonistic divisions of the ANS, (Autonomic Nervous System) which is generally concerned with regulation of fundamental bodily functions related to the activation of organs and tissues. Whereas the pilomotor reflex of the arrector pili muscles (around the hair follicles), which causes body hair to erect, is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) the release of the lacrimal secretion from the lacrimal glands, in contrast, is modulated by the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The core functions of these two divisions of the SNS have classically been associated with the mobilisation of energy in demanding situations (the SNS) and regeneration in the absence of environmental stressors (the PNS). This has led researchers to assume that emotional lacrimation should bring about recovery and suppression of sympathetic activity. Our present findings, however, point in the opposite direction, since we observed increased sympathetic activity (as reflected by the skin conductance and heart rate data) in periods of tears and no apparent effect of order (with tears always following goosebumps). Our results show that emotional tears, although governed by parasympathetic activation, can be accompanied by maximal sympathetic arousal when they overlap with emotional goosebumps.’

In other words, and of huge significance to The Business of Pleasure, when people cry from strong emotion, the body system that normally calms us down is involved. But if crying happens at the same time as goosebumps from emotion, the body can also be highly excited and aroused.  So calming and excitement can occur together.’

‘...We conclude that the elicitation of feelings of being moved could have a therapeutic value for people with low empathic capacities as well as in educational contexts.  Classic cultural ideals as propagated by Schiller, Goethe, Lessing and many other humanists typically include these transformative effects on the personality of readers, viewers, and listeners as the core function of emotionally moving arts altogether. Future research will have to assess the effectiveness of artworks and media products that are deeply moving in enhancing a person’s long-term capacity for empathy and the cognitive ability to adopt another person’s perspective.’

Thus ends the main body of the German research paper.  And while I can’t hazard a guess at the total transformative effect of Nashville, the ‘Country and Western Dallas,’ let’s not forget that the illegal screening of Dallas itself made a significant contribution to the transformation of one major European country.  What country was it, now..?  Oh yes, Germany. 

As far as I know, the person standing head and shoulders above the German (and many would argue the global) pantheon of The Business of Pleasure Gods and Goddesses never wrote Country and Western per se, although he was partial to folk songs and fiddle-playing.

And when Beethoven adapted some lyrics by his compatriot, the afore mentioned Friedrich Schiller, for a little number celebrating the empathic power of euphoria, they probably accounted for more emotiona piloerection and lacrimation than Lennon and McCartney and Rice and Lloyd Webber combined:

Joy, beautiful spark of Divinity,

Daughter of Elysium,

We enter drunk with fire,

Heavenly One, they sanctuary!

The magic power reunites

All that custom has divided;

All men become brothers,

Under the sway of thy gentle wings

DT

12^th March 2026

*Tears Falling on Goosebumps: Co-occurrence of Emotional Lacrimation and Emotional Piloerection Indicates a Psychophysiological Climax in Emotional Arousal. Eugen Wassiliwizky, Thomas Jacobsen, Jan Heinrich, Manuel Schneiderbauer, Winifred Menninghaus Frontiers in Psychology, 7 February 2017.