You Raise Me Up, the song made famous by Josh Groban in 2004, is still a classic to return to, alongside the many Italian songs that lend themselves to a an earnestness we have lost.
I’ve spent many years contemplating my passion for his work when I was in high school: it unlocked what I’ve come to call my “Italian soul” — a place where heart-bursting joy and intensity was allowed to take flight. I’ve also contemplated my subsequent abandonment of it in embarrassment, and then the unabashed revisiting of it in recent years. I often joke now about how I’ve finally accepted I love the melodrama that seems to fit naturally with Italian classical crossover, and perhaps some southern European cultures more generally.
But I’ve realized something else, too. In an age of fearful irony, where earnest love of people and passions seems cringe-worthy, maybe melodrama isn’t actually melodrama. Maybe it’s just honest humanity. Maybe we have just been calibrated toward coldness, and so any warmth feels like an uncontrolled fire rather than a warm hearth.
I still have the awareness of being a bit “cringe-worthy” in listening to Josh Groban, particularly in the English songs where there is less distance between the forthright emotion of the language than in Italian or Spanish. But I am growing to understand that what we have lost in our culture—loving deeply and without shame, for example, or expressing ourselves with passion and real engagement, with our whole chests behind it—s what we most need, and one antidote is Groban’s work. Written by (name), You Raise Me Up speaks to our need for both the divine and human support that life demands:
You raise me up so I can stand on mountains
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas
I am strong when I am on your shoulders
You raise me up to more than I can be
It’s a long song, only using one verse, extended instrumentals, and a dramatic swelling repeating of the chorus. Brought together masterfully by producer David Foster, with whom I have always dreamed of working, the song proceeds through several key changes, punctuated by a beautiful violin riff on the verse melody, and then the powerful Gospel chorus near the end.
I remember lying on my bed just allowing the power of these simple, unpretentious words and exquisite music placed around such a rich voice to wash over me.
The online world is full of biting commentary. It’s characterized by shallow mockery and very little that is authentic.
This is also increasingly more the case in the tonality of our pop songs, with fewer and fewer artists being willing to speak about the hopes and dreams of real love. In extreme cases, the songs themselves are becoming bludgeons to beat perceived offenders, rather than expressions of real human experience.
Today, in 2026 at the writing of this and certainly beyond, Groban’s You Raise Me Up remains an important classic for a reason.
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