Discover and Watch an All-Bass Arrangement of “Tears in Heaven”

Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” was written after a period of isolation and healing – he was in the midst of grieving for Stevie Ray Vaughan, his manager, and two roadies who were killed in a helicopter accident. To make things worse, his four-year-old son Conor died after falling from the window of the 53rd floor of a New York apartment.

He dealt with Conor’s death by writing “Tears in Heaven” with Will Jennings. “It was in the back of my head but it didn’t really have a reason for being until I was scoring this movie … then it sort of had a reason to be. And it is a little ambiguous because it could be taken to be about Conor but it also is meant to be part of the film,” Clapton said in a 1992 interview. He also shared in a conversation with Daphne Barak: “I almost subconsciously used music for myself as a healing agent, and lo and behold, it worked… I have got a great deal of happiness and a great deal of healing from music.”

Will Jennings disclosed in an interview with Songfacts that Clapton approached him and said, “Eric and I were engaged to write a song for a movie called Rush. We wrote a song called ‘Help Me Up’ for the end of the movie… then Eric saw another place in the movie for a song and he said to me, ‘I want to write a song about my boy.’ Eric had the first verse of the song written, which, to me, is all the song, but he wanted me to write the rest of the verse lines and the release (‘Time can bring you down, time can bend your knees…’), even though I told him that it was so personal he should write everything himself. He told me that he had admired the work I did with Steve Winwood and finally there was nothing else but do to as he requested, despite the sensitivity of the subject. This is a song so personal and so sad that it is unique in my experience of writing songs.”

Clapton was hesitant in releasing the song, but Rush’s director, Lil Zanuck, managed to win him over.  “Her argument was that it might in some way help somebody, and that got my vote,” Clapton said.

With that, watch this all-bass arrangement of “Tears in Heaven” by Youtuber Kinga Glyk!