With its distinct riff and Lou Reed-esque monologue, “Crying” is the start of a two song combo appearing towards the end of Oddments. The song is about a broken relationship with its narrator seemingly trying to move on, warning the girl he was once with that she’s destined to break another heart.
“Crying” is the oldest song to appear on the album. According to Stu in the liner notes from the 2018 reissue of Oddments, “Cooky wrote ‘Crying’ when he was 16 and the two of us used to play it in our old band.” That band was Revolver & Sun, a rock band composed of Stu Mackenzie, Cook Craig, Fraser A. Gorman and Monty Hartnett, which took inspiration from the Beatles and the 13th Floor Elevators. While a majority of the band’s songs are now long gone, a demo for “Crying” uploaded on May 15th, 2009 was found on their Triple J Unearthed page. This version has a faster pace but contains the structure and lyrics of the Gizzard rendition. This demo was also added to Pipe-Eye’s MySpace page at some point. While the song wouldn’t be released until Oddments, its title was put on the back of an early DIY shirt from the band in 2012. The person modeling it is Monty Hartnett, who would reprise his role on drums for the Oddments recording of “Crying” as one of the very few people outside the band to play on a King Gizzard track. An early version of the track list shows the song at a total of four minutes and eighteen seconds. While this version may include “Pipe-Dream” as part of it, adding the track lengths only gets us to three minutes and fifty seven seconds. It’s unclear what the remaining seconds are. “Crying” was released on March 7th, 2014.
The earliest reported performance was on 2014-03-26 at The Old Bar in Naarm. Two other appearances have also been reported but the only confirmed performance was on 2014-06-14 at Warsaw in Brooklyn while opening for The Dead Milkmen. This performance would appear in the documentary BOOTLEG HOLIDAY FROM HELL.