Songfacts®:

• On "(I Was) Born to Cry" Dion's vocals are powerful and raw, conveying the emotional turmoil expressed in the lyrics. The song is a heartbreaker. Dion pours his pain over a bluesy guitar riff, singing about his loneliness and the state of the world. He even hints at financial struggles, adding to the overall sense of despair.
• Amid the darkness, a flicker of hope emerges.
  
  Well, I know someday
  And maybe soon
  That master will call
  And when he does
  I'll you something
  Ha ha, I won't cry at all
  
  The lyric references Dion's Catholic faith and the promise of eternal life when God will wipe every tear from our eyes. It foreshadows his later foray into contemporary Christian music in the 1980s.
• Dion was originally supposed to be on the plane that crashed and took Buddy Holly's life on February 3, 1959, but he opted out because of the cost. This close call with mortality influenced this song.
  
  "What was I writing about? Chuck Berry was writing about cars and schools and I was writing born to cry and lovers who wander and love came to me," Dion told Uncut magazine. "I was a rock and roll philosopher. I guess on some level I wanted to understand things. Especially after the plane crash with Buddy Holly. Why am I here? Why me? Where do you go when you die? That near miss made me ask I'd lot of questions and something like Born To Cry is about that."
• When Dio composed "Born To Cry," he wanted to write something that used the baritone sax. "I was so crazy that I went and got myself a kazoo because I didn't know how to play horn and our thought that made me sound like a sax player," he told Uncut. "Now I listen back to it and wonder what the hell I was thinking of. I could swear I sounded like King Curtis or Al Sears."
• Dion's singing was influenced by Jewish cantors. "In the Bronx there were Jewish neighborhoods to the east and west of us," he told Mojo magazine. "I was walking past the synagogue in Pelham Bay one day and heard this cantor. His name was Henry Rosenblatt. I walked in there because there were some ethereal kind of beautiful sounds. He brought me in the back and played me his father's records. His father was Yossele Rosenblatt, and he was in (1927 film) The Jazz Singer as the Jewish Caruso. I went home, and I wrote 'Born To Cry.'"