The Story Behind The Song: CMAT’s feminism, fiction, and freedom on ‘When A Good Man Cries’

Posted On January 11, 2026January 11, 2026

Something about reducing the human condition to a puddle of tears is common to the country canon. We should really check if they’re all OK. But with CMAT at the helm, the emotions are only going to keep flowing.

‘When A Good Man Cries’, as the second full track on her latest album Euro-Country, is the absolute cornerstone that displays everything the singer wants to be. You can call her a pop star all you want, but the reality is that country music ebbs through her every pore, and that is the only version of an archetype she will ever define herself as. 

So, the sonic stall of the country canon has been well and truly laid out, but it doesn’t mean that the road ahead is completely without bumps. Indeed, the entire genesis of the song rests on anything but letting oneself off the hook, and instead zooms in with microscopic intensity on the flaws of the human heart and where we ought to haul ourselves up.

It’s a brutal sentiment to pair with what is otherwise a jaunting little lilt of a track, but it was this multi-facetedness that CMAT was most keen to channel through the song to prove that she was far more than a simple one-trick pony. “That’s one of the most successful bits of the album,” she said during an interview with Apple Music. “I needed to go full country immediately, so everyone knew what the record was.”

It was this country bomb, mirroring the often forlorn and sometimes biting wrath of an icon of the genre like Johnny Cash, that truly left no holes barred when it came to picking apart the personality faults which CMAT felt she wanted to leave wide out in the open on ‘When A Good Man Cries’.

“This is me going in on myself because I made an ex-partner cry. He hadn’t done anything wrong. There’s this thing in third-wave feminism, which is, I feel, now outdated, where women should be like men. Making a man cry is turning a trope on its head,” she later explained.

It’s hardly wokeness run riot, but it’s still an almost revolutionary provocation of an entrenched ideal which many would have an easier time leaving in perfect peace. Feminism and all its waves are something which has now been taken as gospel for generations, but what happens when we wake up to the reality of it not serving society anymore? What happens when we actually hold the actions it encourages to account?

The answer seems to be some kind of ill-fitting search for repentance. “I repeat ‘Kyrie Eleison’ [‘Lord have mercy’] over and over again at the end, which is a reference to my favourite song of all time, ‘The Donor’ by Judee Sill, in which she’s begging God for another chance to become a good person,” CMAT added.

Throwing around this head-spinning weight with a slew of literary references, from Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, makes the impression of a sharply intelligent mind whose acerbic thoughts have not yet found their full place in the world.

That’s a lot to carry for a track that will be wrongly mistaken by many as a pop chalice, but it proves the depth of the country canon burrows much further than just the tropes of cowboy hats and horse-riding lassos. This is a mark of a star rising, a woman rebelling, and a brain questioning society’s archetypes all in one song.

If you need anything that proves the force that CMAT is becoming, then you need not look any further than that. She can indulge in humour and pop culture references all she likes by calling herself the “Dunboyne Diana”, but underneath is a mind swirling with feminism, fiction, and the conflicted fight for freedom all in her midst.

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