Eric Clapton – Tears In Heaven

The Song He Never Wanted Anyone To Hear

On the morning of March 20, 1991, Eric Clapton was at a New York hotel getting ready to pick up his four-year-old son Conor for lunch and a trip to Central Park Zoo. The phone rang. It was Conor’s mother, Lory Del Santo, hysterical. A housekeeper had left a window open on the 53rd floor of the apartment where they were staying, and Conor was gone. “I felt like I had walked into someone else’s life,” Clapton told journalist Sue Lawley in 1992. He would spend the next nine months largely alone, shuttling between England and Antigua, carrying a grief almost too heavy to describe.

When “Tears in Heaven” was finally released on March 28, 1992, it reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 — held off the top spot, of all things, by Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.” It spent 14 weeks on the UK Singles Chart, peaked at number five, and charted in the top ten in more than twenty countries. At the 1993 Grammy Awards, Clapton was nominated nine times and won six — three of them for this song alone: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

The song was never supposed to exist publicly at all. While scoring the 1991 crime film Rush, Clapton and co-writer Will Jennings — the lyricist behind Steve Winwood’s greatest hits and later “My Heart Will Go On” — had already delivered one original vocal track. Then Clapton spotted another moment in the film where a song could fit, and told Jennings quietly: “I want to write a song about my boy.” He had the first verse already written. Jennings, instinctively feeling the subject was too personal to be touched by an outsider, initially resisted. He eventually agreed — and later called it “a song so personal and so sad that it is unique in my experience of writing songs.” It was only Rush director Lili Zanuck who convinced Clapton to release it at all. Her argument, as Clapton recalled, was simple: “It might in some way help someone.” That got his vote.

The recording was deliberately stripped bare. Producer Russ Titelman kept the arrangement minimal — Clapton’s acoustic guitar at the centre, everything else secondary. The simplicity was intentional: the lyrics had to carry the full weight without interference. Clapton also wrote “The Circus Left Town” and “Signe” during the same period of mourning, but it was “Tears in Heaven” that found its definitive moment on January 16, 1992, filmed at Bray Studios in Berkshire for his celebrated MTV Unplugged special. That acoustic version became the one millions came to know.

The Unplugged album, released in August 1992, swept the Grammys alongside the single and became one of the best-selling live albums in history. Clapton had named his 1986 album August after the month Conor was born. His son had also been the reason he got sober — determined that the boy would never form a picture of the man he once was.

In 2004, Clapton quietly retired “Tears in Heaven” from his live set. Touring Japan the previous winter, he had discovered he could no longer connect to the feelings that made the song live. He was clear-eyed about what that meant: “I didn’t feel the loss anymore. My life is different now.” It was, in its own way, the healthiest thing he could have said — proof that the grief had, finally, moved somewhere else.

Clapton described the song’s enduring power to Mojo in 2005 with characteristic simplicity: “It asked a very pertinent question. It’s asking for help. It works for people.” A song he never intended for public ears, written in the darkest months of his life, ended up helping millions of strangers through their own losses. That alone would be enough of a legacy — even without the six Grammys.