Because sad dance anthems have been the way of summer ever since Reich & Bleich remixed Lana Del Rey in 2012, Ava Max continues the tradition with her quelle tristesse but I’ll make it hot-inspired single, “EveryTime I Cry.” Although the song was released in June, Max’s new video for it has resuscitated its chances for 2021 memorability. On the heels of Heaven & Hell’s last release, “My Head & My Heart,” this one is a standalone likely to appear on whatever her sophomore album will be called.
No stranger to writing songs about crying, the track is not only a “Rain on Me” knockoff, but something of a “companion piece” to her song, “Salt,” which declares, “I’m all out of salt, I’m not gonna cry/Won’t give you what you want/‘Cause I look way too good tonight/I’m all out of salt, tears are running dry.” Speaking of that “dryness,” the “EveryTime I Cry” video takes place against a desert wasteland that’s been compared to the tableau of TLC’s “Unpretty” and Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever.” The arid landscape is meant to mirror how Max is able to restore strength to the environment (a metaphor for her own mind and body) the more tears she cries. This, naturally, adheres to the chorus, “Every time I cry, I get a little bit stronger.” Or so we must tell ourselves as a means to normalize the waterworks (or what some might call “feeling our feelings”). Even though Britney Spears’ lyric, “Every time I try to fly I fall” is probably more accurate.
Looking like Lady Gaga as usual (try as she might to differentiate with her “signature” haircut), it’s no wonder she should also come up with her own “roundabout” version of “Rain on Me.” And in its own way, the single follows the tradition of an “anthem” of strength like Britney’s “Stronger.” The visual nods to TLC (apparently more influential on a girl growing up in Wisconsin than we imagined) continue as Max’s tears form surrealistic shapes (think: Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures) before an entire body of water appears for Max to confidently wade in like this is now the “Waterfalls” video. And don’t forget the shape-mutating element that appears in said video as well. While it might apply to the trio themselves borrowing from the metamorphosing aesthetic of The Secret World of Alex Mack, here it is the tear drop shapes that shift and transmogrify.
In another scene, Max stands behind a dew drop (or is it teardrop?)-drenched spider web gazing at a butterfly atop her finger. And yes, tired as that metaphor may be, the butterfly is the ultimate symbol of change and transformation. In this case, that alteration is going from someone “weak” who cries all the time to someone strong who uses their tears to learn and grow. Or, in Ariana Grande’s case, claim there are “no tears left to cry” because she’s just too “strong” (a.k.a. numb) after crying so many. Speaking of the latter, it was only to be expected that she, too, should appear as a vocalist on “Rain on Me,” what with her experience in the study of overly active tear ducts. It was on this 2020 hit that Gaga and Grande were essentially saying the same thing Max is reiterating in 2021.
While Max goads the tears to keep coming, she sings, “When the voices get loud, I’m turnin’ them down/Feel good in my body forever and ever/When the tears start to fall, I’m catchin’ them all/And I know the future is better, ‘cause/Every time I cry, I get a little bit stronger.”
Similarly, in urging the rain (the symbol of “facial waterworks”) to “do its worst” (one imagines Jennifer Love-Hewitt screaming, “What are you waiting for?!” in this sense), Grande sings, “I can feel it on my skin/It’s coming down on me/Teardrops on my face/Water like misery/Let it wash away my sins/It’s coming down on me/Let it wash away,” before Gaga joins in for the chorus, “I’d rather be dry, but at least I’m alive/Rain on me, rain, rain.” Once again, Britney said all of this in 2000 without needing to wield a cliché metaphor (though there was rain involved in the “Stronger” video).
As “nature starts healing” thanks to her tears growing plants and trees (one in which she sits perched atop in between languishing in the water and standing on a giant lily pad), she keeps mucking about in these various lush environments to underscore that there is a kind of alchemy at play when you’re able to turn sadness into strength—an art women have mastered over centuries of oppression and being treated like shit by the men they, for whatever reason, are still programmed to lust after.
Co-directed with Charlotte Rutherford (who also helped Charli XCX with her own surreal visuals in “Claws”), the video concludes in a somewhat dubious way. We can either believe Max was having a delirious fantasy as she dies in the desert of her melancholy and loneliness, or we can believe it’s simply a way to emphasize that every time a girl finds herself in the Desert of Sadness, to remember that her saline symphony can turn the beat around to recreate a more positive, habitable terrain. Or we can just assume Max cried so many tears that the desert ambiance came again because, like Ari, she had none left to cry.
