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1!!!'''These examples have their own pages:'''
2[[index]]
3* CreatorBreakdown/{{Eminem}}
4[[/index]]
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7* Music/BrianWilson:
8** ''Music/{{Smile|TheBeachBoys}}'', in both Music/TheBeachBoys and solo versions, is an incredible suite of music, but there's no way it could have been composed by someone with a stable mind. And the unstable mind prevented the Beach Boys version from being released as it was intended: once Music/TheBeatles' ''Music/SgtPeppersLonelyHeartsClubBand'' came out, Brian Wilson lost motivation. ''Smile'', which Wilson began working on in 1966, was finally released as a solo album in 2004.
9** Wilson's breakdown heavily affected the Beach Boys' music. After shelving ''Music/{{Smile|TheBeachBoys}}'', Wilson led the band to record the drastically stripped back and surreal ''Music/SmileySmile'' in its place, which was such a radical departure from their previous work, it alienated near all of their fans and confused critics (though now it's [[VindicatedByHistory been vindicated as a classic]]) The record flopped and The Beach Boys went from hip musical innovators to spending decades languishing in commercial failure. Brian's mental state only decreased more and more, leading to depression, auditory hallucinations which he still has today to and gaining massive amounts of weight. His feelings around the time are captured on the track 'Til' I Die' from ''Music/SurfsUp'' (arguably their darkest record). [[CreatorRecovery He got better]].
10* Music/AmyWinehouse wrote ''Music/BackToBlack'' after a period of depression, heavy drinking, and weight loss. Songs such as "Rehab", "Wake Up Alone" and "Love is a Losing Game" were written about real experiences during her breakup from Blake Fielder-Civil.
11* Music/GeorgeHarrison:
12** George wrote the song "Wah-Wah" as an open attack against fellow [[Music/TheBeatles Beatle]] Music/PaulMcCartney after a tense rehearsal where [=McCartney=] badgered Harrison into playing just so. A few years later, Harrison wrote "Sue You, Sue Me Blues" lamenting the post-Beatles lawsuits at the time.
13** Harrison's album ''Dark Horse'' was not only made shortly after Pattie Boyd left him for Music/EricClapton (he might have forgiven Clapton soon after, but he understandably didn't take things very well at the time) but Harrison's voice was shot after years of touring, leading some critics to nickname the album "Dark Hoarse". As a result, it's an uncharacteristically rough-sounding album, especially the bitter cover of Music/TheEverlyBrothers' "Bye Bye Love."
14** George recorded his final album, ''Brainwashed'', when he found out he was dying from cancer, and wasn't able to finish the whole album before his death; the finished product, which was released posthumously, had the blanks filled in by Dhani Harrison and Music/JeffLynne using guidelines George left behind. It is considered his best work since ''Music/AllThingsMustPass'' (itself a classic album).
15* Music/BobDylan, after marriage, babies, and motorcycle accident, marked time between ''Music/NashvilleSkyline'' and ''Music/{{Dylan}}''... until his divorce. ''Music/PlanetWaves'' marked a return to the 1966 tour live group, Music/TheBand, and a triumphal tour in 1974. When the divorce hit the press in '75, Dylan released ''Music/BloodOnTheTracks''. A word commonly applied to it is "haunting."
16** An interviewer told Dylan how much she "enjoyed" the album... poor choice of words. Bob immediately launched into a bitter denunciation of people "enjoying" other people's pain. Dylan's personal life has made it into some tracks since, but never so transparently as ''Music/BloodOnTheTracks''.
17*** Frustratingly, his ex-wife Sara successfully received a lion's share of the royalties from those songs, arguing in court that since Dylan wrote those songs about her, she deserved profits from them.
18** It has been claimed that ''Music/SelfPortrait'' -- a double album mostly of covers which did not receive a very favourable reception -- was intentionally recorded to be a complete 180-degree turn from Dylan's previous output (or even [[StylisticSuck intentionally sub-par]], depending on who you ask) so as to free Dylan from the 'voice of a generation' label -- not to mention the assorted hangers-on, parasites and fawning yesmen that insinuated themselves into his life as a result -- that Dylan was becoming increasingly bored, annoyed and claustrophobic with.
19** Similar to ''Self-Portrait'' (although not nearly as poorly-regarded), ''Music/NashvilleSkyline'' was an attempt by Dylan to actively cast off the 'voice of a generation' label; unlike most Breakdowns, however, and contrary to his previous political folk-rock stylings, ''Skyline'' is a warmer, gentler album of country ballads and mostly love songs like "Lay, Lady, Lay".
20** [[http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/ballad-plain-d "Ballad in Plain D"]] is straightforwardly about his breakup with Suze Rotolo (his early 60s girlfriend who posed with him on the cover of ''The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan''), placing the blame on her sister Carla. He later [[OldShame admitted that he felt bad about writing it]]. One critic compared listening to it to reading someone else's mail.
21* Adam Duritz of Music/CountingCrows embodies this trope. At one point, he was so depressed that he didn't leave his house for months.
22** Just listen to the Across a Wire version of Mr. Jones. The original? A song about wanting to be famous. The live version? A song about why you should ''never'' want to be famous.
23* Music/BrianEno was forced to listen to his environment after a car crash left him bedridden for a few months in 1975, which inspired a new quieter direction. 1978's ''Music/Ambient1MusicForAirports'' – one of the first ambient albums ever – was written to relieve anxious feelings about fatal airplane accidents. (Not so dark as it sounds, as certainly air travel is safer than cars!)
24* Music/BillyJoel. He has composed (but not performed) only an album (of classical music) since he broke up with Christie Brinkley and only released two songs since their 1994 breakup.
25** His last two albums, ''Storm Front'' and (especially) ''River of Dreams'', are (relatively) darker in tone, a product of his marital troubles and eventual breakup to Christie and to legal hassles with his ex-brother in law (of first wife Elizabeth Weber), who, as his manager, reportedly swindled Joel out of millions of dollars. ''The Nylon Curtain'' was a dark album reflecting on the political and economic climate of The80s, made in the wake of his divorce from Elizabeth and while recovering from a nasty motorcycle accident that damaged his hands.
26* Music/NickDrake's reclusiveness, not to mention his severe depression, were defining factors in the songs from ''Music/PinkMoon''.
27* Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes' difficulties with his wife following the birth of their daughter led to the difficult, [[TrueArtIsAngsty angsty]] 2007 albums ''Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?'' and ''Icons Abstract Thee'', where he invented the {{Alter Ego|Acting}} of Georgie Fruit, whom he now performs as and has let "write" the band's (even more difficult, slightly less angsty) two albums since.
28* Music/{{Evanescence}}'s songs "Hello" and "Like You" were inspired by the death of Amy Lee's sister when she was just a child. Evanescence is so far mostly Creator Breakdown of one sort or another. With the sole exception of "Good Enough", a happy-hopeful song.
29** "Good Enough" is happier and more hopeful than any of their other material, but the lyrics suggest that the singer is waiting for something to "pour real life down" on her, and destroy her happiness.
30** The other exception to their rule is "Secret Door" which is about "Following my love back through the same secret door" and is mostly happy harp playing, about a good dream Amy had.
31* Christian soft-rock artist Jana Alayra wrote "Every Minute That I Breathe" after her young daughter died in a car accident. Even on the CD version, she sounds like she's two steps away from weeping.
32* In 1972, Music/NeilYoung was experiencing fame from his ''Harvest'' album and his song "Heart of Gold". At around that time, his guitarist Danny Whitten took a fatal combination of Valium, which he was taking for severe knee arthritis, and alcohol while trying to overcome his heroin addiction (the subject of Young's song "The Needle and the Damage Done"); roadie Bruce Berry died from a heroin and cocaine overdose just a few months later. Young followed up the radio-friendly ''Harvest'' with what is known as "The Ditch Trilogy" (named after a remark Young made about averting fame by "heading for the ditch"): Three albums that shared a gloomy, pessimistic theme. The first album, ''Time Fades Away'', was a live album released in 1973 consisting of original tracks. The second album, ''On the Beach'' was a studio album, continuing the dark themes in the previous album (and being named after a book concerning nuclear war). The third album, ''Tonight's the Night'', was directly about the deaths of Whitten and Berry (with one of the songs written by Whitten). ''Tonight's the Night'' was recorded in 1973 after the death of Bruce Berry, but was shelved for two years. ''On the Beach'' was not released on CD until 2003; 'Time Fades Away'' wasn't released on CD until 2017.
33* It happened to [[Music/TheWho Pete Townshend]] THREE TIMES:
34** The first and most notable breakdown occurred during the production of his ambitious ''Lifehouse'' project, which was to be a massive concept album/film/audience participation project, made with the intention of creating the greatest event in music history. The story was set in a dystopian future in which the cities of Earth are so polluted that everyone has to stay inside, and that everyone is hooked up to a massive network that provides entertainment through what is essentially virtual reality. [[Film/TheMatrix (Sound familiar?)]] It was going to end with a Universal Chord of pure music being struck and everyone ascending to a higher plane of existence. It broke down because no one else seemed to understand the concept - especially not the other members of the band. The idea had to be scrapped, and a more "conventional" non-concept album was released based on some of the songs. The result of this "failure" was ''Music/WhosNext'', and is considered to be one of (if not ''the'') best album the Who ever released.
35** The second occurred after the release of ''Music/{{Quadrophenia}}'', which was not as popular or as well-received at the time as Townshend had hoped it would be. This, in conjunction with his drinking problem, caused him to take a brief break from songwriting before returning two years later with the stripped-down and alarmingly cynical ''The Who By Numbers''.
36** The third occurred after the death of Keith Moon in 1978 and the Who's breakup in 1982 after years running on autopilot. Townshend wrote the contemplative, abstract, synth-heavy solo album ''All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes''.
37* MC Chris, eventually, started to dislike the term "nerdcore" because it was too broad a term, and people were rapping about ''Franchise/{{Transformers}}'' and computers, not just the new movement. Eventually, he became more and more outspoken for various reasons, before finally lashing out in his blog against the media, then against other nerdcore artists, who he says stole all his glory, that the media only focuses on them, and how much they suck. He now no longer does nerdcore.
38* Music/RelientK's 6th album "Forget and Not Slow Down" was majorly influenced by Mathew Theisen's break-up with his fiancée. The tracks "Therapy", written about Matt's time in seclusion mid-break-up, and "This is the End" about wanting to reconcile with said fiancée, are probably the most obvious examples.
39* Skip Spence, who used to play drums in Music/JeffersonAirplane and guitar in the 1960s psychedelic rock band Moby Grape, is an interesting example of an artist whose Breakdown (very likely from drugs and the resultant mental problems) was displayed on a single album, the songs going from "finely crafted pop" to pure horror. He was later asked to contribute to the first ''[[Series/TheXFiles X-Files]]'' movie ''[[Film/TheXFilesFightTheFuture Fight the Future]]'', but the song, called "Land of the Sun", was rejected for being too nightmarish -- the writer's voice sounds like a slowed-down death rattle.
40* One of the best songs from Vicentico, the lead singer from the now-defunct Argentinian group Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, was written after his brother died.
41* Music/ToriAmos:
42** She wrote "Me and a Gun", which was based on a brutal rape experience.
43** Most of the album ''from the choirgirl hotel'' was written in the aftermath of a miscarriage, particularly the emotional "Playboy Mommy".
44** Tori wrote "Toast" after her brother died in a car crash.
45** The song "1000 Oceans" was written after her father-in-law died.
46** ''Boys for Pele'' was the result of her breakup with producer Eric Rosse.
47* Subverted by Music/{{Rancid}}. After guitarist Tim Armstrong's divorce they produced, not the expected angst-fest, but the rather upbeat album ''Indestructible'', which featured a tribute to ThePowerOfFriendship in the form of the song "Fall Back Down."
48** Although it also contained "Tropical London" which is about a guy's girlfriend leaving him, despite the fact that he cared for her and did everything he could.
49* After a friend's fatal drug overdose, Music/MinorThreat leader Ian [=McKaye=] wrote the anti-drug anthem "Straight Edge", which spawned the well-known UsefulNotes/StraightEdge movement, which was not only anti-drug, but also [[NoSexAllowed anti-promiscuity]], anti-alcohol, and sometimes, [[AnimalWrongsGroup anti-meat]]. That was not what Ian [[MisaimedFandom had in mind]] when he wrote the song.
50* By 1970, Music/SlyAndTheFamilyStone was on a nearly two-year hiatus that spawned a stopgap singles compilation. Previously, they played upbeat psychedelic funk and sang about unity and dismantling barriers, being also one of the few multiracial/multigendered bands of The60s. The band's successful breakout album, ''Stand!'', had big shoes to fill and the Family Stone was expected to release a follow-up as vibrant and passionate as ''Stand!'' Unfortunately, Sly Stone developed drug problems, and that, along with the turmoil of [[The70s Vietnam-era America]], was enough for Sly to build his own studio, play most of the instruments himself or with friends (as opposed to all the band members playing on ''Stand!''), and record most of his vocals while lying in bed. The resulting record, ''There's a Riot Goin' On'', was a dark and depressing record that was somewhat the opposite of ''Stand!''. The record would later be acclaimed as the band's masterpiece.
51* Singer/songwriter E, leader of the band Music/{{Eels}}, wrote hit album ''Electro-Shock Blues'' after the death of his mother from cancer and his sister's subsequent suicide. The first track contained poetry that his sister had written while in a mental hospital and included songs with titles like "Going to Your Funeral, Part 1" and "Cancer for the Cure". However, the album does end on a happy note, "P.S. You Rock My World", which closes with the line "Maybe it's time to live".
52** Even before ''Electro-Shock Blues'', there was "Not Ready Yet", which was about his sister (the same one much of ''Electro-Shock Blues'' itself was about) refusing to leave the house.
53* The shocking death of his five-year-old son led Music/EricClapton to retire from music for a while, then return with a very different sound to his repertoire. In particular, the song "Tears in Heaven" was written about his son.
54** Before that, Clapton (as part of Music/DerekAndTheDominos) recorded ''Music/LaylaAndOtherAssortedLoveSongs'', an album born of the pain that results from being in love with his best friend's wife. That friend was Music/GeorgeHarrison, by the way.
55** Not only that, but after the album, he got Pattie Boyd (the wife in question) to divorce Harrison and marry Clapton. Harrison attended Clapton's wedding and the two stayed the best of friends anyway and jokingly referred to themselves as "step-husbands"!
56* The Music/{{Queen|Band}} songs "These Are the Days of Our Lives", "I'm Going Slightly Mad", and "The Show Must Go On" were recorded not long before Music/FreddieMercury's death of AIDS -- all released on an album named ''Music/{{Innuendo}}''.
57** The entire ''Music/{{Innuendo}}'' album is widely considered to be Freddie saying his goodbyes. Two of the songs are farewells to his beloved cats.
58** "The Show Must Go On" was done in a very interesting way. While the other band members were ambivalent, doubting that Mercury could hit the high notes of the song in his condition, Freddie downed a measure of vodka, said "I'll [[PrecisionFStrike fucking]] do it, darling!" and nailed the vocal line in one take with no problems. [[DyingMomentOfAwesome Quite a note to go out on, really.]]
59*** It also bears mentioning that the song was written by Music/BrianMay, most likely his way of coping with his friend and workmate's inevitable death. Freddie is having a Creator Breakdown singing Brian's Creator Breakdown.
60*** For another Brian May Creator Breakdown, there's always "Too Much Love Will Kill You", which is a song about being in love with two people and being unable to choose, and also the pain of losing a loved one. It was performed for the first time at a tribute concert for Freddie Mercury shortly after his death. And contrary to popular belief, it was written about the breakup of May's marriage, not about Freddie.
61* Music/NickCave and the Bad Seeds' album ''The Boatman's Call'' - an unusually soft and touching album - came out shortly after Cave cleaned himself up of heroin.
62** Cave's side project, Grinderman, is pretty much his mid-life crisis set to music. The album has a song on it called "No Pussy Blues", which [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin tells you everything you need to know]].
63** Even more recently subverted in his song "More News From Nowhere", an affectionate and angst-free reminiscence about most of his ex-girlfriends.
64** During the recording of a new album, Cave tragically lost his 15-year-old son Arthur. The result led to ''Skeleton Tree'', which while not ''directly'' referencing his son's death, does contain themes of loss and death, going more than Cave was privately mourning his son's passing, but still focusing on those specific themes.
65* Emiliana Torrini's second album ''Fisherman's Woman'' was much darker than her first, mostly because her boyfriend had been killed in a car accident.
66* Philadelphia rapper Lil Uzi Vert hasn't had it easy out of the stage. Despite scoring charting hits with their mixtape ''Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World'', and landing a guest spot in Migos's chart-topping, meme-spawning "Bad and Boujee", they struggled with drug abuse and a turbulent relationship with their girlfriend, Brittany Byrd. Eventually they broke up with her, but it only made the situation even worse. This eventually culminated in the song "XO TOUR [=Llif3=]", where they detailed their trials and tribulations in love and addiction.
67* Luke Haines of The Auteurs had gained commercial success with the band's first album, ''New Wave'', which was about the trials of showbiz, and minor commercial success with the second, ''Now I'm A Cowboy'', which was about rising from the middle classes into the upper classes. Then, while touring for the second album, he became so depressed that he intentionally broke both his ankles jumping off a high wall. While wheelchair-bound, he went on to write the grim ''After Murder Park''. The first single from the album - the unbelievably titled "Unsolved Child Murder" - was planned for release as a Christmas single, and was specifically chosen to proceed with the album's March release by several months, an unorthodox move. It was enough for The Auteurs' label to pull the single before its release. The label chose the nearest thing to a "commercial" song from the album, the noisy, angry "Light Aircraft on Fire" to be released in its place, but even that song was far too weird for even the alternative-loving British charts. Needless to say, The Auteurs never charted again, but Haines has remained well-loved by critics, and his other band, the dark pop trio Black Box Recorder, fared better chart-wise in their short life.
68* Daniel Johns of Music/{{Silverchair}} went through one of these when suffering from anorexia nervosa. During this time, he wrote and recorded songs for ''Neon Ballroom'', frequently considered their best album. Unlike its post-grunge predecessors, ''Neon Ballroom'' featured a full orchestra and an overall "art-ier" sound. "Ana's Song (Open Fire)" is the song that most blatantly deals with anorexia. Now take into consideration he was only 19 at the time.
69* Music/JohnLennon wrote quite a few of these in his time, both during and after Music/TheBeatles. However, because he was John Lennon, most of them are still great songs (and some of them among the best things he ever wrote):
70** "Norwegian Wood" from ''Music/RubberSoul'' is about a one-night stand that Lennon had, written in a way as to prevent his wife from finding out. Original lyric: "Isn't it good/Knowing she would."
71** "Cold Turkey" was clearly written by a man [[GoingColdTurkey going through withdrawal from a heroin addiction]], which Lennon was when he wrote and recorded the song.
72** "How Do You Sleep?" from ''Music/{{Imagine}}'' is a bitter polemic directed at former songwriting partner Music/PaulMcCartney, in which he derides pretty much everything [=McCartney=] had done up to that point as worthless crap. It was written in response to at least one perceived slight against him on [=McCartney=]'s album ''Ram.''
73*** Paul's response was "Dear Friend", a plea for reconciliation with Lennon: "Does it really mean so much to you?/Are you afraid, or is it true?". It doesn't really sound like any else he's recorded, being sparse, slow, and melancholy (and rather more mature than Lennon's spiteful attacks).
74** Pretty much every song on his first solo album, ''Music/JohnLennonPlasticOnoBand'', was written when he was going through primal scream therapy. The album was all about him addressing his personal issues--everything from his relationship with his dead mother to the break-up of the Beatles.
75** ''Walls and Bridges.'' Most of the songs on that album appear to deal with the bad patch in John's relationship with Music/YokoOno at the time--aka "the lost weekend." "Whatever Gets You through the Night" and "Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)" are dead giveaways.
76*** "Steel and Glass," also from ''Walls and Bridges'', is much like "How Do You Sleep?" only, this time, directed at former business manager Allen Klein, whom Lennon had just filed suit against.
77** Lennon has stated in interviews that the lyrics of "Help!" were more literal than most people assumed, as well as the seemingly over-the-top suicidal lyrics of "Yer Blues" (he explained that he made them over-the-top so he could dismiss it as a parody in case anybody worried about him being very depressed). This probably applies to lots of his other songs as well.
78** John in general by 1965–68 was burned out from fame, went through enormous WritersBlock, and was suffering from drug abuse, not helped by his efforts to destroy his ego via LSD. He felt ensnared by his early marriage of convenience to Cynthia and life in the countryside (unfortunately, his relationship with his first son Julian suffered from this), felt envious of his single, swinging bachelor songwriting partner Music/PaulMcCartney leading a more active lifestyle in the city, and via his crisis of confidence had loosened his input in the Beatles to see Paul take over. The untimely death of Beatles manager Brian Epstein in particular affected him, professionally and personally, and he felt too scared to branch out from the Beatles/pop star cocoon. It was not until he met Music/YokoOno that he began to gain more confidence (though he admitted that perhaps he heavily overcompensated for that towards the end of the band's career). His drug and alcohol abuse sadly ''did'' escalate up until the early 1970s, and again with his "lost weekend" period, though.
79*** This period arguably subverts the trope in a way, though; while he did write several songs during this time (including some examples of the trope), on the whole Lennon didn't produce all that much and just tended to retreat into laziness and depression. It was actually [=McCartney=], whose life on the whole was going quite well, who was the more productive and creative of the two during this time, to the extent that he was the driving force of most of the band's projects in the latter half of the sixties.
80** Music/PaulMcCartney also had quite a few songs come out of various breakdowns. Most well known are the songs "The Long and Winding Road" and "Let It Be". They were both written during the time the Beatles were breaking up. "The Long and Winding Road" is generally accepted to be about his relationship with John, lamenting the end of their friendship. In "Let It Be", you can hear how heartbroken Paul is about the whole ordeal just by listening to his vocals, and in the song, he is visited by his dead mother, who comes to tell him to just let it be. Other breakdowns could be considered after John's death, after the death of his first wife, and during his divorce from his second wife.
81** Part of ''Tug of War'', along with ''Pipes of Peace'', was written and recorded at around the same time period, in the shadow of the death of Music/JohnLennon, the breakup of Music/{{Wings}} (a result of an at-the-time breakdown of his friendship with Denny Laine), and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking Paul's 40th birthday arriving in 1982]]. Many of the songs are reflective and autobiographical, his Lennon tribute "Here Today" in particular.
82* "So Broken" by Music/{{Bjork}}. She wrote it after an incident with the ''very'' crazy fan Ricardo López, who, among other things, [[NightmareFuel sent her an acid bomb]] (that got intercepted, thank God) before taking his own life.
83** To some degree, much of ''Music/{{Homogenic}}'' was influenced by this incident. Recording was supposed to take place at her home in London, UK, but while initial sessions were recorded there, production shifted to Málaga, Spain, in order to maintain privacy from media interest surrounding the aforementioned crazy fan, and in turn brought about many personnel changes and stylistic influences.
84* Music/NineInchNails are known for this, to say the least. Trent Reznor started to write his first album with politically themed, socially conscious lyrics. That didn't sound genuine, so he went to his journal for lyrics. That's number one. Number two came when he was out touring and his record label was screwing him, trying to get him to record another ''Pretty Hate Machine''. He then wrote ''Broken'', a 30-minute chunk of death. After that, still not having worked through all of those issues, he wrote and recorded ''The Downward Spiral'', an album about a depressed, suicidal man who [[DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu kills God]] and [[spoiler:attempts to kill himself]]<. After that album was released, his psyche was wounded even further on tour, developing alcoholism, a cocaine addiction, and severe struggles with depression. A brief period of sobriety and subsequent relapse after the death of his grandmother informed ''The Fragile''. ''Seriously'' known for this.
85** Recent albums have shown a change for the better, however. While ''With Teeth'' isn't exactly happy, what with being an album about working through withdrawal and all, it's certainly lighter than ''The Fragile''. He finally got to write his socially conscious album with ''Year Zero'', then writing and recording 4 [=EPs=] and a full-length album with some friends in the following year.
86** When ''The Slip'' was released, the title in particular made some fans wonder if he hadn't relapsed.
87* Music/DirEnGrey's singer, Kyo, has... had some rough times. This can easily be noticed by the songs "Taiyou no ao", "Zakuro", "Amber", and "Mushi", to name a few. Taiyou no Ao (Which arguably is their happiest song in terms of tone) is about his girlfriend cheating on him '''with his best friend.''' Zakuro shares the same idea as Taiyou No Ao (cheating), but Zakuro has a deeper impact than Taiyou no Ao on the poor guy. He's very visibly [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEqdg_HQttg breaking down emotionally as he continues to sing.]] Amber also the same concept as the other two (cheating), but also expresses his wish to ''die''. Mushi is about the loss of something dear, and he's shown that. The band played it live because Kyo dedicated it to his friend who had recently died. According to people who saw it, he was unable to continue the song, because of how much pain he was in.
88* Music/PinkFloyd:
89** After the success of ''Music/TheDarkSideOfTheMoon'', ''Music/WishYouWereHere1975'' (a borderline case in itself, as it was born out of the band's inability to cope with their newfound fame), and ''Music/{{Animals|1977}}'', the audience size grew and the older atmosphere of intimacy disappeared. After the angry Music/RogerWaters spat on a rude audience member, Pink Floyd made the dark album ''Music/TheWall'', which depicts a jaded rock star's spectacular mental collapse after a lifetime of trauma and self-imposed social isolation.
90** After that, Roger Waters' breakdown escalated; a few years later, Pink Floyd released the even bleaker album ''Music/TheFinalCut'', in which Waters contemplated UsefulNotes/TheFalklandsWar and the death of his father in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII (which was previously an influence on the backstory for the main character in ''The Wall''). Waters left the band two years later.
91** After Waters' departure the rest of the band carried on without him. The first two albums they released during this period, ''Music/AMomentaryLapseOfReason'' and ''Music/TheDivisionBell'', were based heavily in the stress of the Waters/Gilmour rivalry and Gilmour's divorce and remarriage.
92** Pink Floyd seem to be addicted to this trope. The original frontman, Music/SydBarrett, recorded two solo albums after he split with the band. The records released give some sense of the difficulty of recording someone in the middle of a breakdown, often with long gaps where Barrett sat staring into space before remembering where he was. It's difficult listening; all the more so because the music itself isn't bad.
93* As private as they were, Music/LedZeppelin has quite a few of these. Most well known is "All My Love", which was written by Robert Plant after his son Karac died of a stomach infection.
94** Plant made a statement to the effect that his son's death was the result of the band having recorded "In My Time of Dying".
95** The change in the band's music after ''Music/PhysicalGraffiti'' is due to arguably very literal incarnation of this trope--by this time Jimmy Page had so wasted himself on heroin that John Paul Jones took over as the driving creative force.
96** The quartet chose their iconic name after Keith Moon of Music/TheWho told Page that his new band "would go down like a lead balloon." Apparently, they took that as a challenge.
97* Music/JoniMitchell: her album ''Music/CourtAndSpark'' is a series of musical pen-portraits of damaged and emotionally paralysed women; the sex-addict, the alcoholic, the prostitute (''Raised on Robbery''), the music company executive (''Free Man In Paris''). Opinion is divided into how much of a crisis Mitchell was having at the time.
98* Music/{{Sting}}'s third solo album, ''The Soul Cages'', was written as a way to get past an almost four-year-long writer's block following the sudden death of his parents.
99* Music/{{Blur}}'s album ''13'' is a reaction to lead singer Damon Albarn's painful breakup with his long-time girlfriend Justine Frischman, singer of the band Elastica.
100** "Sweet Song" was written whilst Damon had been looking at a photo of [[HeterosexualLifePartners Graham Coxon]] after the latter had left the band.
101* As Music/KurtCobain felt increasingly guilty of his newfound fame and spiraling deeper into his heroin addiction, his band Music/{{Nirvana}} followed up their landmark ''Music/{{Nevermind|Album}}'' album with ''Music/InUtero'', a darker, less-accessible album that contained the lyric [[HarsherInHindsight "look on the bright side it's suicide"]]. Kurt Cobain also included the sarcastic lyric "my favorite inside source" in "Rape Me" as a result of an associate being interviewed, as an anonymous inside source, for Vanity Fair's infamous article on his wife Courtney Love's pregnancy.
102** Music/{{REM}}'s Michael Stipe tried to get Cobain to do a project with him, mainly hoping that getting him away from UsefulNotes/{{Seattle}} would help him shake his depression. Cobain committed suicide not long before they were supposed to meet. After Cobain's death, Stipe wrote the song "Let Me In" about his regrets that he couldn't help him, and included it on ''Music/{{Monster|REM Album}}'', an album that critiqued mainstream celebrity culture and all the pressures that come with it.
103* The Music/ManicStreetPreachers album ''The Holy Bible'' is almost entirely about Richey Edwards' various problems that led to him [[NeverFoundTheBody going missing (presumed dead)]] after it was released. Their next album, ''Everything Must Go'', deals with some of their reaction to his disappearance as well as featuring some of the last lyrics he wrote, and one of their newest albums, ''Journal for Plague Lovers'' (made up of songs found in Richey's diary), features one track which is practically his suicide note and another about his time in a mental health institute.
104** It's probably worth noting that the "suicide note" song was sung by Richey's best friend, the bassist Nicky Wire. He is an awful singer, but the sheer amount of emotion in it makes the song a beautiful TearJerker.
105** ''The Holy Bible'' is filled with lyrics speaking of sorrow and disgust at both the human condition and at oneself. Multiple songs are semi-autobiographical, speaking about SelfHarm, eating disorders, {{Dystopia}}, societal breakdown, and suffering. Even the lead singer James Dean Bradfield looked at the lyrics and said "How do you expect me to write music to this, you crazy fucker?" He would later remark that the album was not one you'd play often. Even 20 years after its release, the album is still just as harrowing as it was when it came out in 1994.
106** "Enola/Alone" from ''Everything Must Go'' was written after Nicky Wire had been looking at his wedding photographs and reflecting on how he had since lost two guests to whom he had been very close: Richey, and their manager Philip Hall, whose early death from cancer had played a role in Richey's breakdown.
107* Music/AlanisMorissette started as a sort-of pop princess, but her breakout hit years later, "You Oughta Know" (and it would seem at least one other song on the album, ''Music/JaggedLittlePill'', and apparently "Hands Clean" from ''Under Rug Swept'') was inspired by an old boyfriend, who dumped her for another woman. People are still wondering who ''that'' man was. (Dave Coulier of ''Series/FullHouse'' is considered the consensus choice, and he has admitted that at least some of the lyrics hit close to home. Yes, the host of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Control_(TV_series) Out Of Control]] dated, then broke up with, one of the kids from ''Series/YouCantDoThatOnTelevision''. Feel that, Canadian Gen-Xers? That's your childhood, howling in pain.)
108** As Music/TheArrogantWorms wrote:
109--->"Music/AlanisMorissette, she's our latest pride and joy\
110She used to sing about high school dances and chasing after boys\
111Now she is fed up and as angry as can be\
112She's got one hand in her pocket, and the other's on guard for thee"
113*** Morissette attributes her experimentation with blunt, emotionally transparent lyrics and grittier instrumentation in ''Jagged Little Pill'' to an incident in Los Angeles when she was robbed at knifepoint. The ordeal left her with intense anxiety and frequent panic attacks. Glen Ballard, a songwriter and producer she met in LA (who would go on to produce ''Music/JaggedLittlePill'') encouraged her to channel her strong emotions into her songwriting when therapy and hospitalization did not help.
114* Music/CarlySimon's song "You're So Vain" also was written after a really nasty break-up. In her case, it's said the man was Creator/WarrenBeatty; [[WordOfGod Simon says that she is never going to tell.]] (Although ''The Telegraph'' obituary of William Donaldson raises the possibility that it was him since almost everything in the song fits him.)
115** Not entirely: At one point, Carly Simon put up the honor of telling one person who the song was about in a charity auction. The winner was sworn to secrecy, but was allowed to give one clue: The person who the song was about's name had the letter "e" in it -- meaning Donaldson was not the person.)
116*** However, his full name was Charl'''e'''s William Donaldson
117** Then again, the lyrics of the song make it pretty hard to let anyone say "This song is about me!" without looking like a fool.
118---> "You're so vain\
119You probably think this song is about you\
120You're so vain\
121I'll bet you think this song is about you\
122Don't you? Don't you?"
123*** Another rumoured subject of the song is Music/{{The Rolling Stones|Band}} frontman Mick Jagger...who sings backup vocals on the chorus from the second time onward. That could mean it's not him, or it could mean that it ''is'' him and he's in on the joke.
124** In 2010, Carly Simon said a David is involved -- but not record producer David Geffen.
125*** Which isn't a particularly helpful bit of WordOfGod considering that Geffen is [[IncompatibleOrientation gay]].
126*** Although he didn't come out until the late 1980s and had had relationships with women during the 1970s. So yeah...
127* Just about every note on the two Music/JoyDivision albums is a serious autobiographical downer from Ian Curtis. And "Love Will Tear Us Apart" wasn't even on those albums.
128** "Twenty Four Hours" followed by "The Eternal" (on Side B of ''Music/{{Closer}}'', the band's last studio album proper) seem like suicide notes set to music, but they're hardly the only ones Ian wrote and performed.
129** The demo to "In a Lonely Place", which on all pre-2011 copies suspiciously cuts out just before the "hangman" verse in the Music/NewOrder version, is this trope distilled to purity.
130* Music/GloriaEstefan's song "Coming Out of the Dark" was about her struggles with her rehab from the wreck that nearly left her paralyzed from the neck down.
131* Music/TeddyPendergrass' "In My Time" was a reflection of his life after the car crash that left him a paraplegic.
132* Let us not forget Music/NoDoubt's ''Tragic Kingdom''; many of its songs deal with Gwen Stefani's break-up with Tony Kanal, the band's bassist.
133** Heck, Stefani worked this shtick for quite a while. ND's following three albums all largely deal with her insecurities about future relationships, or lack thereof.
134** Let's also not forget that the "Don't Speak" video partly focused on the annoyance that Kanal, Dumont, and Young felt about being overshadowed by Stefani.
135* This happened to Music/TypeONegative twice: First was 1999's ''World Coming Down'', which came after having gone LighterAndSofter for the last two albums - they even refused to perform anything from that album live because it reminded frontman Peter Steele of the worst part of his life; the second one was made after him being imprisoned for narcotics possession and going through rehab, in a display of the band's trademark sardonic sense of humour it was called ''Dead Again'', a title that ended up rather [[HarsherInHindsight sadly ironic]] after Peter Steele died of heart failure.
136* Australian singer Music/{{Sia}} wrote the song "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6PGrub3jUc Breathe Me]]" after the death of her boyfriend, and much of her albums ''Colour The Small One'' and ''Healing Is Difficult'' were inspired by the same. The introspective song was used as the final musical track to be played in the HBO series ''Series/SixFeetUnder''.
137** She also wrote Chandelier about alcoholism that was brought on by a sexual assault.
138* The Music/CrowdedHouse album ''Time on Earth'' was written in tribute to drummer Paul Hester, who had recently committed suicide.
139* Parodied in the Music/TheBeautifulSouth song "Song For Whoever", in which a songwriter gleefully describes how the songs he writes based on the various relationships he's had with his girlfriends -- good or bad -- bring in piles of cash for him ("Deep, so deep / The number one I hope reap / Depends upon the tears you weep / So cry, lover, cry!").
140* [[http://bethkinderman.com/redeemer.html Redeemer]] and [[http://bethkinderman.com/fuse.htm Fuse]] by Beth Kinderman, not quite a breakdown, but she was definitely angry at someone.
141* Parodied by Music/WeirdAlYankovic in the song "Since You've Been Gone". The entire song is about how horrible his life has been since the break-up, but ends with the line "I feel almost as bad as I did when you were still here".
142** And a straight example by him: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r41U_T7pQjQ "One More Minute"]], which features lyrics such as "''I'd rather spend eternity eating shards of broken glass / than spend one more minute with you''". The video includes Al ripping up a picture that allegedly shows his most recent ex-girlfriend at the time. He admitted in the liner notes to his boxed set, ''Permanent Record'', that it was written to get over a bad break-up.
143* Parodied in the song "Ohne Dich (Without You") by the German ACappella band Wise Guys, in which the singer details all his attempts to destroy himself and has the refrain end in "Because life is beautiful... without you".
144* The mournful singing by The Drifters that made "Under the Boardwalk" a soul classic was completely genuine: the night before the band was scheduled to record the song, singer Rudy Lewis died from a fatal heroin overdose. They still had to go back to the studio and record the next day, so they quickly hired former Drifters vocalist Johnny Moore to replace the deceased Lewis.
145* After most of her band died in a plane crash, Music/RebaMcEntire recorded an album appropriately titled ''For My Broken Heart'' to work through her grief.
146* After losing his infamous lawsuit against Mike Joyce over Music/TheSmiths royalties, Music/{{Morrissey}} recorded the song "Sorrow Will Come In the End," bemoaning the lawsuit. The song was cut from the UK release of ''Maladjusted'' for fear of legal action. That lawsuit, and not the supposed rift between Morrissey and guitarist Music/JohnnyMarr, is perhaps the main reason why a Smiths reunion is highly unlikely.
147* Music/JohnnyCash had a few of these. "Ring of Fire"', his most successful song, is about the songwriter's feelings about Cash himself. "Chicken In Black" is a pretty straightforward shot at [[ExecutiveMeddling his recording label]] of the time. Many people view his cover of "Hurt" as feelings towards his life as a whole as he neared the end.
148* Music/{{Beck|Musician}}'s ''Music/SeaChange'' was written in response to a break-up, and boy, does it ever show.
149** The style--unusually straightforward, for Beck--owes a lot to Music/NickDrake. Particularly noticeable on "Round the Bend" (which may have been intended as a ShoutOut). But if you're going to write a stripped-down album of sad songs, you might as well borrow from the best.
150* Music/GustavMahler's Sixth Symphony is called the 'Tragic' because it is the only one of his symphonies to end on a downer mood. It was written at a pretty difficult time in his life: his wife Alma had cheated on him (for the first time), his eldest daughter had died, his health problems were getting worse (eventually leading to a diagnosis of heart disease), and he was catching a lot of flak from the Viennese newspapers for being Jewish. So, yeah.
151* Music/PyotrIlyichTchaikovsky is another. Having run away from Antonina Miliukova, a crazy wife he only married to prove his (non-existent) heterosexuality, he had a nervous breakdown due to said crazy wife, and been sentenced to suicide (!) by a jury of his peers at his alma mater in censure of his homosexual activity, the last movement of his last (6th) symphony is... well, a little bit of a downer.
152** And there's another theory that he purposely drank or swam in cholera-infected water because he was distraught that the object of his affection did not return his attention. Or that it was a bid to get his attention, and backfired when he actually contracted cholera. Point being, he was a very depressed man.
153* Much of Music/FranzSchubert's early music has a sunny, cheerful disposition. By the end of his prematurely short life, following the failure of his operas and his contraction of syphilis, he was composing things like ''Winterreise''.
154* Music/HectorBerlioz's then-unrequited love for actress Harriet Smithson led him to write ''Symphonie fantastique.'' In it, the AuthorAvatar smokes a whole lot of opium and has quite an interesting dream. In the third movement, the protagonist finds himself in the countryside; eventually his beloved's theme is heard in the distance but never answered to. In the next movement, he finds himself being lead to the gibbet, for he appears to have killed the beloved in a fit of rage. But wait, her theme is heard in the crowd! Too late; his head is cut off and bounces away, followed by the exultations of the crowd. In the final movement, he's in Hell.
155** It gets better in the end - the actress heard the symphony and ended up marrying him.
156** But it wasn't a happy marriage. Oh, well.
157* Czech composer Bedrich Smetana wrote his most famous symphonic work ("Ma Vlast"), the string quartet ''From My Life'', and three operas after he went deaf (the finale of the string quartet features a sustained high E in the first violin to represent the ringing in Smetana's ears as his hearing deteriorated). At the same time, he was dealing with his own declining health and an increasingly loveless marriage.
158** Earlier, he wrote his Piano Trio in G minor after the deaths of his two young daughters.
159* Norwegian composer Creator/EivindGroven had a serious breakdown after the death of his brother, a fellow performer on the HardangerFiddle. The result was a great work based on a story on TheBlackDeath, in six movements, with choir and orchestra. Probably something of the most haunting music he ever wrote. He chose a text from a book written after another CreatorBreakdown, by the way. Creator/IngeborgReflingHagen had to cope with the loss of her life's greatest love.
160* Music/{{Skillet}}'s song "Open Wounds" is based on frontman John Cooper's angry relationship with his father after his mother died of cancer. They later made up, however.
161* Music/{{Metallica}}'s 2003 album ''St. Anger'', suffered from major Creator Breakdown during its production, as shown in the documentary ''Some Kind of Monster''.
162** Though they have stopped playing the songs, the entire band agrees that ''St. Anger'' was a way to exorcise their inner demons and keep the band going. Lars once said, "Without ''St. Anger'' there would be no ''Death Magnetic''."
163** Their fourth album, ''Music/AndJusticeForAll,'' is possibly their most aggressive. It was their first album after original bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a bus accident; his replacement, Music/JasonNewsted, [[NobodyLovesTheBassist was pretty much mixed out of the album altogether.]]
164** "Fade to Black", from 1984's ''Music/RideTheLightning'', was written after the band's equipment was stolen in UsefulNotes/{{Boston}}, including James Hetfield's prized Marshall amplifier.
165* Music/JamesTaylor's "Fire and Rain" was initially the focus of a rumor that it was written in response to his band's secretly arranging for Taylor's girlfriend to visit him on tour, only for her plane to crash, based on the lines "Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you" and "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground." In fact, Suzanne was his friend from rehab, who committed suicide shortly after his release. The song still qualifies.
166** It was also inspired by the breakup of his band, The Flying Machine.
167* Carlo Gesualdo's style and subject matter for his madrigals changed drastically after he caught his wife and her lover in the act and brutally murdered both of them.
168* Mike Portnoy of Music/DreamTheater has a habit of this. His first song for Dream Theater, "A Change of Seasons", dealt with the cycle of life in relation to the death of his mother. "The Mirror" off of ''Awake'' was about how alcoholism was slowly ruining his life. "Burning My Soul" and "Just Let Me Breathe" from the album ''Falling into Infinity'' were rants about the music industry loaded with {{Take That}}s against his band's current and former producers, Kurt Cobain, MTV, and others. Then he started writing a now completed series of songs about his experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. The AA series spanned nearly seven years and five songs starting with "The Glass Prison" from Dream Theater's 2002 album ''Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence'' and concluding with "The Shattered Fortress" from their 2009 album ''Black Clouds and Silver Linings''. All albums from 2002 to 2009 had one part of the series. From ''Train of Thought'' (2003) was "This Dying Soul", followed up by "The Root of All Evil" from ''Octavarium'' (2005) and "Repentance" from ''Systematic Chaos'' (2007). Each of the five songs were broken down into two to three sections named after each step of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Honor Thy Father" off of ''Train of Thought'' is a big Take That to his stepfather. For ''Octavarium'' he wrote "Never Enough", where he vented about nagging, ungrateful fans. The song "The Best of Times" from ''Black Clouds and Silver Linings'' was a tribute to his real father Howard who sadly passed away before the aforementioned album was completed. Someone needs a hug...
169** The single most productive CreatorBreakdown event was probably original keyboardist Kevin Moore's decision to leave the band and start a solo career, which inspired not only Moore's lyrics in "6:00" and "Space-Dye Vest", but a bitter response from Portnoy in the unreleased "Raise the Knife".
170** Singer James [=LaBrie=] provided a few examples of this as well; "Disappear" and "Vacant" are both written by him, the former inspired by observing young lovers and imagining their actions if/when one passes on, the latter about his daughter mysteriously falling into a coma death. Along with "Space-Dye Vest", they're three of the most depressing, and downright creepy, songs the band has produced.
171* Because TrueArtIsAngsty, and because he ''tries'' to be optimistic, Music/PaulMcCartney is most likely to produce critically accepted work when he's in the middle of a personal crisis. His most critically accepted solo album, Music/{{Wings}}' ''Music/BandOnTheRun,'' was recorded during [[TroubledProduction a disastrous trip to Nigeria]]: CreativeDifferences left the band with only three members; it was the rainy season; the studio was barely usable at first; and he and Linda got careless, tried to walk to their lodgings on their own, and then got mugged at knifepoint. Near the end, he passed out from what may have been a heart attack...
172** ''Run Devil Run'', the album [=McCartney=] recorded as a response to Linda's death, got some of the best reviews of his solo career.
173** ''Chaos and Creation in the Backyard'', also widely critically acclaimed, was written during the midst of the break-up of his marriage to and bitter divorce from Heather Mills. It's not a happy album.
174* Music/MarvinGaye's 1978 double LP ''Here, My Dear'' was famous for its themes of lost love and estrangement, and was widely panned by critics and fans upon its initial release for being too bleak and uncommercial compared with his previous work. It is commonly believed that it was either suggested by Gaye's lawyer or mandated as part of the divorce settlement that he use half the royalties from his next album to pay her alimony and that Gaye originally intended to make an intentionally bad album to spite her, but after working on some of the songs he had a change of heart and decided to make a serious, confessional effort at chronicling his feelings about the breakup instead. The part about her alimony being dependant on the success of the album and him consequently deciding to make a bad album to spite her [[http://www.snopes.com/music/hidden/heredear.asp isn't true]], but the songs are unquestionably about the turmoil in his life around the period. Gaye did admit that, since it was likely that any money he earned from the record would go towards alimony anyway (although it was never a condition of the divorce), he initially didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for the project for understandable reasons but decided that he owed it to his listeners and himself make an honest effort.
175** There is an element of spite in the title, however; Gaye did comment that since he would have to pay alimony to his ex-wife through the album regardless of how it sold, he would consequently make an album filled with things that she wouldn't want anyone to hear.
176* Music/KanyeWest DEFINES this trope:
177** ''808s and Heartbreak'' is the result of his mother's death as well as an obviously bitter breakup with his fiancée, that mostly features him singing instead of rapping.
178** ''Music/MyBeautifulDarkTwistedFantasy'' is largely centered around him feeling as though the world made him out to be a monster at the tail of 2009 plus breaking up with Amber Rose.
179** ''Music/{{Yeezus}}'' is an exploration of the themes and life challenges that brought him to the point of melding his signature sound with a new one. "Blood on the Leaves", specifically, has him recount his failed relationships, using the backing beat from Nina Simone's cover of "Strange Fruit" (itself a song referencing lynching). Likewise, "New Slaves" is his rant against people who've become addicted to commercialism and fakeness.
180** ''Ye'' treaded in this again following the multiple public breakdowns and long-term hospitalization he experienced between 2016 to 2018. The album returns to a stripped-back sound and introspective demeanor similar to ''[=808s=]'', with a more existential tone focused on his own mental health in light of his UsefulNotes/BipolarDisorder diagnosis. The album was also said to have been hastily rewritten and re-recorded within the last few weeks before release, primarily as a result of Kanye ending up in yet another public controversy about his political comments (stating in an interview with TMZ that "slavery was a choice") -- the song "Wouldn't Leave" directly references the incident and the subsequent turmoil he and then-wife Kim Kardashian experienced, fearing they were about to "lose it all".
181** ''Jesus Is King'' is a sudden turn towards born-again Christianity that was in part the result of his struggling mental health and rumored drug addiction. Ye felt that he was not able to be as creative as he wanted on medication and stopped taking it, putting his faith in God to keep him sane, and engaged in controlling behavior during the making of the album (such as requiring contributors to refrain from swearing or extra-marital sex).
182** ''Donda'' once again hearkens back to the death of his mother that inspired ''[=808s=]'', mixed in with his new mentalities of his born-again Christianity. Several lyrics, and especially the song "Lord I Need You", also allude to Kanye's then-recent divorce from Creator/KimKardashian. Its sequel, ''Donda 2'', continues along these themes, along with threatening songs about Kim's new boyfriend Creator/PeteDavidson, fury about the way the press was treating him due to his behavior, and elements of Ye's new ConspiracyKitchenSink beliefs.
183* Giuseppe Verdi's {{opera}} ''Theatre/LaTraviata'' was influenced by what he endured from society while having an affair with the soprano who most inspired him artistically. Verdi also went through CreatorBreakdown earlier after the failure of ''Un giorno di regno'' because his wife and children had passed at the time.
184* Music/LilyAllen's second album, ''It's Not Me, It's You'' has a darker, more serious tone to it than her cheery alternative/ska/pop debut ''Alright Still''. This could well be inspired by her recent personal tragedies, most notable of which are her suffering a miscarriage, her relationship with the child's father (Ed Simons of Music/TheChemicalBrothers) ending, and the death of her grandmother.
185* Music/EmilieAutumn's song "Gothic Lolita" from the album ''Opheliac'' is about a girl angrily saying the man who molested her as a child should be "killed by an army of little girls", and was at least in part inspired by her being abused by a teacher as a child (Emilie herself admitted the song was hard to record). Quite a few of her other songs on that album seem to refer either to that event or some nasty breakup, although "Gothic Lolita" is the only one that's been confirmed.
186** The entire darker tone of ''Opheliac'' in comparison to ''Enchant'' is due to a creator break down after she had been put into a mental institution at some point in between the making of the two albums and also was what caused her to write her semi-autobiographical book, ''The Asylum (For Wayward Victorian girls)''.
187** The Opheliac album was done to stop her from hurting herself again and ended up being one of the best things to happen to her.
188* Although one may be tempted to put nearly all of Music/{{Korn}}'s work here due to the fact that most of the songs are about Jonathan Davis's life in some way, probably the truest case of Creator Breakdown (where the song becomes more intensely personal than it was ''intended'' to be) is in the song "Daddy", where the singer literally does break down and starts yelling and crying during the final minutes of the song as the rest of the band plays on uncomfortably. While some of this was undoubtedly embellished in final production (including a motherly voice that appears later on), it seems to be mostly real. Like many of the musical examples on this page, this song is considered by many fans to be quite powerful due to its intense emotional vulnerability.
189** Some may argue that the two songs on Korn's [[SelfTitledAlbum self-titled]] eighth album that insult their former guitarist Brian "Head" Welch -- who abruptly quit the band, converted to evangelical Christianity, and talked a bit of trash about them himself before eventually calming down -- are a decidedly more negative case of CreatorBreakdown.
190** And on the other manipulator, you have "Pretty," a song based on an actual case Davis dealt with while working in a coroner's office. For sensitivity's sake: [[spoiler:It's about a toddler who was raped and killed by her father.]] It's one of their best songs... but apparently, Davis still can't perform it live.
191* Music/MileyCyrus wrote "7 Things" after a breakup with [[Music/JonasBrothers Nick Jonas]], during a period where she wept nonstop for a month about said breakup and dyed her hair black as revenge. She even wore his diabetes tag in the video. Also, her song "Bottom of the Ocean" [[MundaneMadeAwesome was written about the death of her goldfish]].
192** WordOfGod says "Can't Be Tamed", the song as well as much of the album, concerns getting rid of relationships and situations that might hold you back. "Bottom Of The Ocean" uses the goldfish as a metaphor for getting over losses by letting go, by "burying" your grief deep in your heart where no one will find them and moving on.
193** "I Miss You", from her first solo album, ''Meet Miley Cyrus'', is a tribute to Cyrus' grandfather, Ron Cyrus, who Miley was very close to, and who would pass away in 2006.
194** ''Breakout'', her second album and first after ''Series/HannahMontana'', is filled with her pain over the break-up with the aforementioned Jonas Brother. ''Can't Be Tamed'' is rather upbeat in comparison!
195** "Wrecking Ball", if you can get past the silly cheesecake video the studio demanded she make to cash in on her controversial image at the time, is actually a damned good break-up pain anthem. Fan speculation runs rampant as to exactly who it's about, but if you watch the director's cut of the video that just focuses on a close-up of her face, she visibly breaks down crying partway through the song, upset enough to screw up her lip-synching, which actually just makes the emotion of the visual that much more powerful and leaves you wondering just who hurt her THAT badly. Watch it [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YICuUtkjlg here]].
196*** Though she didn't actually write the song so it's more of the performance.
197* The entirety of Music/TheMountainGoats album ''The Sunset Tree'', written solely by John Darnielle, can be considered an example of CreatorBreakdown. The album is about dealing with his grief after his abusive step-father passed away. The songs are a narrative weaving in and out of his life, during the abuse and the after-effects. Including some songs explicitly dealing with incidents of the abuse. There's drug and alcohol abuse once he's a teenager, UsefulNotes/{{suicide}}, mental illness, and general instability. Finally, there's the song "Pale Green Things" dealing with his learning of his death.
198* Music/TheSmashingPumpkins' "Today" was written while lead singer Billy Corgan was seriously contemplating suicide. Much, if not all, of ''Music/SiameseDream'''s guitar parts (lead ''and'' bass), the album "Today "is featured on, was recorded by Corgan himself; the stress of his perfectionist attitude melded with the pressure he felt to create a top-selling album and is a major reason for the tumult in the band's relations with each other (not to mention then-drummer Jimmy Chamberlin's tendency to disappear for days while scoring) during those days. Creator/VirginRecords wasn't especially thrilled by the times, either (''Siamese Dream'' was finally released to the order of something like $250K over-budget).
199* Nearly all of Scott Weiland's career involved CreatorBreakdown of some sort. With all the albums he did except for Music/StoneTemplePilots' ''Core'' and Velvet Revolver's ''Libertad'', he was battling drug addiction or going through marital problems. And ''Libertad'' was written after his brother's death, so it isn't free of CreatorBreakdown either.
200* Music/AliceInChains. Full-stop. Everything after ''Facelift'' was written as a result of either Layne Staley's heroin addiction or Music/JerryCantrell's severe depression and alcoholism.
201* Anthony Kiedis of the Music/RedHotChiliPeppers wrote the lyrics to "Under the Bridge", easily one of his best songs, about how he was realizing that his sobriety was making him feel distanced from his bandmates, and in disgust over some of the things he had done in the past to get drugs (it's named "Under the Bridge" for a reason). He has also written songs about Hillel Slovak's death from a heroin overdose and absence from Kiedis's life, including the songs "Knock Me Down" and "My Lovely Man".
202** For that matter, the album ''One Hot Minute'' is lyrically very negative and has moments of being heavier musically as well. The band haven't played any songs from the album live since Dave Navarro left, due to John Frusciante not having listened to it, as well as Kiedis feeling uncomfortable revisiting this period.
203*** Music/JohnFrusciante's albums ''Niandra Lades And Usually Just A T-Shirt'' and ''Smile From The Streets You Hold'' were released whilst he was in the throes of heroin addiction. Not all the songs were recorded then, but those that were really show. He openly admitted to releasing ''Smile...'' for drug money and has not reissued the album since. Contrary to most creator breakdowns he doesn't regret his past.
204* Music/FleetwoodMac's ''Music/{{Rumours}}'' was written while everyone in the band was breaking up with everyone else.
205** "Go Your Own Way", in particular, is pretty much the whole band writing {{take that}}s to each other. And let's not even start on the live version of "Silver Springs".
206** Fleetwood Mac's original frontman, Peter Green, started out playing melancholic but polite British blues. A few years later, his last songs with the band were paranoid horror shows about God and Satan being out to get him, after which he grew his fingernails, gave away all his guitars, refused to accept any more royalty checks, and went to work as a ''gravedigger.''
207** Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac's second solo album ''Go Insane'' is more or less the embodiment of this trope. He has admitted as much telling ''Musician'' magazine in 1984 that he guessed he was not a well boy.
208* Much of Music/{{Supertramp}}'s work can be interpreted as Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson taking shots at each other.
209* Inverted by Music/SarahMcLachlan, who started writing happier music after the birth of her daughter; most obvious in the case of ''Afterglow''.
210** Another amusing fact about Sarah [=McLachlan=] is that her music is cited as stopping a suicidal case of CreatorBreakdown in Darryl "D.M.C" [=McDaniels=] of Music/RunDMC. As noted, Sarah's music up until her return from babymaking isn't exactly the music you'd think of listening to when depressed. Case in point? The song "Angel" whose beauty struck a chord with him. It was written in reaction to several famous cases of heroin overdose. It's just one of those bizarre things that make up RealityIsUnrealistic.
211* Because Music/EltonJohn typically writes melodies around already-composed lyrics by Bernie Taupin, his albums tend to reflect Taupin's mood at the time rather than his own, and sometimes the contrast between the two is quite notable. (Although LyricalDissonance ''is'' a favorite device of his, too.)
212** In 1976, Elton was at his commercial and creative peak while Taupin was struggling with creative exhaustion and a failed marriage; thus Elton's album of that period, ''Blue Moves'', was the bleakest, gloomiest record he ever made.
213*** Elton ''was'' burned out from the road, suffering from often suicidal bouts with depression, in the middle of the substance abuse problems, and about to reveal his sexuality to the readers of ''Magazine/RollingStone'' magazine, leading to a drop in sales and [[ContractualPurity a hit on his image in Middle America]].
214** In 1988, Elton was struggling with substance abuse problems, a lawsuit against the tabloid media in England over unfounded rumors, and a failed marriage of his own, as well as the realization that he was not bisexual at all, he was just plain gay; however, because Taupin was in a good place, Elton's album ''Reg Strikes Back'' was a considerably upbeat and happy work.
215** "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore" is a rather sombre reflection over Elton's life and career, including some rather cynical takes on his musical output and his drug use.
216** ''Made In England'' from 1995 also shows this contrast: Bernie wrote the lyrics in between hospital visits as he held vigil over his father, who was dying of cancer at the time (hence the mentioning of his father and "cancer sleeps" in the album's first single, "Believe"). Many of the lyrics he penned for the album were reflective and often confessional or defiant, apart from a few exceptions. Elton, meanwhile, though prone to his share of tantrums as seen in the ''Tantrums & Tiaras'' biography, was on a personal upswing in many ways, having recovered from substance abuse, promiscuity, and bulimia five years before, found his true love in boyfriend David Furnish, and won a Best Song Oscar for "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" from ''WesternAnimation/TheLionKing1994''.
217* Music/MatthewGood's album ''Hospital Music'' is a fine example of this trope. He wrote it in the aftermath of not only the messy divorce of his cheating, gold-digging wife; but a string of hospital visits (thus the name) which resulted in two revelations: 1. That he was killing himself with the excessive amount of pills he was taking, 2. That he was [[{{Idiosyncrazy}} bipolar]]. It could be said that with the latter revelation, his career from ''Audio of Being'' onward was a long stretch of this trope.
218* Music/ThePolyphonicSpree's very ''existence'' is the result of frontman Tim [=DeLaughter=]'s desire to do something positive after the death of Wes Berggren, the guitarist for his previous band, Tripping Daisy. Most of the surviving Tripping Daisy members are in the Spree, too.
219* Rapper Royce Da 5'9's ''Death Is Certain'' album was recorded during a period of depression following a falling out with Music/{{Eminem}} and a decline in commercial success after his deal with Creator/ColumbiaRecords fell through.
220* Music/BruceSpringsteen hit a depression somewhere in 1981-1982. He sat in an empty house, recorded the demo tapes of what was to become The E Street Band's next album on just guitar, harmonica, and vocals, and then desperately tried to rearrange the songs for the band. When that didn't work, it was suggested to just release the demo as an album. The result, ''Music/{{Nebraska}}'', is one of the bleakest albums of the decade. And one of the best as well.
221** A few years later, his album ''Tunnel of Love'' was so bleak on the subject of love and relationships that a lot of critics speculated that Springsteen's marriage might be in trouble. A few weeks after the album was released, he announced he was getting divorced.
222** "The Last Carnival" is a beautiful and melancholy song that Springsteen wrote after E Street Band member Danny Federici died of cancer.
223* Music/SteelyDan partially went through this during the recording of their seventh album ''Gaucho''. This is because of the series of events that plagued Walter Becker (one half of the duo):
224** First, he was going through a crippling heroin addiction
225** His girlfriend (also addicted to heroin) then ''died'' of an overdose in his Manhattan apartment.
226** Her parents then sued Becker for $17.5 million dollars in a wrongful death suit, claiming he exposed her to the drug and influenced her into addiction.
227** To add literal injury to insult, Becker was hit by a cab while crossing the street, severely injuring him and resulting in additional delays to the completion of the album.
228** The stressful recording of the album (which released in 1980) affected both Walter Becker and Donald Fagen so much that they called it quits and officially dissolved the band the following year, not reuniting for another 12 years when they began touring again, while they didn't record another album until twenty years later, in 2000.
229* The song "Art of Life" by Music/XJapan was composed by drummer/pianist/bandleader [[Music/YoshikiHayashi Yoshiki]] as he recovered from a physical and mental breakdown referred to as "neurocirculatory asthenia" attributed to his intensity in performance and his emotional pain.
230** "Without You" is a song written to late guitarist hide by Yoshiki, and "Jade," the band's newest song, is rumored to either be the same or to be the "other half" of the conversation began by "Without You," being hide talking back to Yoshiki.
231* Underground rapper Cage built his career out of breakdowns. His 2005 album, ''Hell's Winter'', focused mostly on him finally coming to proper terms with his issues.
232* Japanese pop superstar Music/AyumiHamasaki owes part of her success to writing all of her lyrics herself, something uncommon in the Japanese star system, and you could say she has built her career around a CreatorBreakdown. With some exceptions, the main themes of her music are how her father [[ParentalAbandonment abandoned her when she was a little child]] and she mostly can't remember him, her mother had several jobs in order to support them and thus they barely saw each other and had an aloof and cold relationship, and she was discriminated against and bullied during her childhood and teens for this unwholesome background (for [[ValuesDissonance Japanese standards of the time]]). If her lyrics are something to go by, this made her into a lonely and borderline depressive person permanently starved for affection because of her extremely poor people skills. And in her ''happy'' love songs, she has a marked tendency to bring up death. This, of course, is mainly [[LyricalDissonance set to aggressively cheerful pop and pop-rock melodies]], with perfunctory techno remixes.
233** Special note goes to the year when a good friend died (possibly by suicide), she lost all remaining hearing in her left ear, and she broke up with her boyfriend of 8 years. The subsequent album, ''GUILTY'', is notably dark (even for Ayu) and focuses on death themes. The album is dedicated to the friend that died, and the final song is written about her.
234* Music/{{Nightwish|Band}}'s evolution as a band nicely exhibits this. While their earlier albums do contain darker songs, these are usually balanced out with lighter, fantasy-oriented material. However, their fourth album contained songs that were nearly all about depression, death, escape, and unrequited love/obsession. In the documentary End of Innocence, the band members remark on this and how it was such a departure from their earlier material. The band's keyboardist, who writes most of their songs, acknowledges that it stemmed from going through a very dark period of his life and dealing with a love affair gone wrong. The next album continued the theme of despair. Their sixth album, after firing their lead singer and replacing her, is also their angriest (and most transparently about her and her husband).
235** Speaking of which, in Tarja's solo album ''My Winter Storm'', there are a couple of poorly disguised {{Take That}}s at Nightwish, with Had Enough (almost certainly a resentful song about her sacking) being the most transparent.
236** ''The Poet and The Pendulum'' is apparently about Tuomas' (the keyboardist) struggle with depression.
237* Rather present in Music/KeithUrban's work. His second American album, ''Golden Road'', was released after he got out of rehab. It was considered much stronger than his previous album, and lyrics like "It sure feels good to finally feel the way I do" (from lead-off single "Somebody Like You") show a happier man. ''Be Here'' and ''Love, Pain & The Whole Crazy Thing'' showed a mostly positive Urban, although tracks like "Tonight I Wanna Cry" (where he addresses his drinking problem head-on) showed the demons creeping back in. After going ''back'' into rehab and then marrying Nicole Kidman, his next albums have returned to happy, often up-tempo songs about being in love.
238** The final song on ''Golden Road'', "You're Not My God", is Urban directly addressing his demons and overcoming them ("You almost had me six feet down but I'm still breathing air"). Then, after a length of silence, the number breaks into another ditty titled "One Chord Song", which is more upbeat and carefree, possibly symbolizing Urban trying to focus on the happier things.
239* CountryMusic singer Music/GaryAllan lost his wife to suicide in 2005. While Allan's previous albums always had a variety of upbeat love songs, ranging from "Right Where I Need to Be" to "Nothing On but the Radio," his next album, ''Tough All Over'', is almost entirely devoid of any sort of happiness. The first single from this album was a cover of Vertical Horizon's "Best I Ever Had." Other songs from the album include "Life Ain't Always Beautiful," "I Just Got Back From Hell," and the blatantly auto-biographical and aptly-titled "Putting My Misery On Display." He cut off ''Tough All Over'' after only two singles because he wanted to move on, but given that the next albums in the series are ''Living Hard'', ''Get Off on the Pain'', and ''Set You Free'', it seems that maybe hasn't moved on after all...
240* Music/{{Radiohead}} seem to have mastered this:
241** [[Music/TheBends "My Iron Lung"]] was written to express discomfort at the overblown success of [[Music/PabloHoney "Creep"]].
242** The ''Music/KidA and Music/{{Amnesiac}}'' duology was influenced by Thom Yorke's writers' block and a nervous breakdown from the stress that the smash success of ''Music/OKComputer'' brought, both of which contributed to the rather disjointed feel of the albums. He resorted to [[WordSaladLyrics pulling random words out of a hat at one point.]]
243** ''Music/AMoonShapedPool'' was influenced by the death of producer Nigel Godrich's father and Yorke's separation from his partner Rachel Owen. In a ''Magazine/RollingStone'' interview, Yorke stated that "There was a lot of difficult stuff going on at the time, and it was a tough time for us as people. It was a miracle that that record got made at all."
244* Music/{{Starflyer 59}}'s second album, ''Gold'' was written in the aftermath of several dissolved friendships, and the departure of the rest of the band forced Jason Martin to record almost everything by himself. Add to this Jason's own high expectations for himself, and the result was a barely-averted nervous breakdown and an album that sounds like a soundtrack of the same. Fans initially hated the album, then they inexplicably warmed up to it and declared it Starflyer's best album ever.
245* A sub-genre of black metal has emerged in recent years called [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin suicidal/depressive]] BlackMetal, practiced by artists such as Xasthur, Shining, and countless others, which (in theory at least; see the entry on emo and alternative rock at the top of this folder) absolutely ''runs'' on this trope.
246** It's worth noting that much of the inspiration for this subgenre comes from Per Yngve Ohlin, AKA [[MeaningfulName Dead.]] Dead was bullied frequently as a child, and that, along with a skating accident making him temporarily dead, made his entire career one large breakdown. When Dead joined Music/{{Mayhem}}, the band gained a lot of attention for Dead's onstage acts of self-mutilation and even suicide attempts. It didn't help that guitarist Euronymous actively encouraged the breakdown, bullying Dead in hopes that it would drive him to even more extreme performances. Ultimately, Dead offed himself in 1991 [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill by hacking up his wrists with a hunting knife and shooting himself in the head with a 12-gauge.]] Photos of his body were taken by Euronymous and were used as the cover to the 1995 bootleg LP ''Dawn of the Black Hearts'', a holy grail for S/DBM bands.
247* Music/MaliceMizer departed from their previous romantic aesthetic and launched headlong into a gothic sense of style after their drummer, Kami, dying of an aneurysm just after the lead singer, Music/{{Gackt}}, left the group without warning. Their music also managed to get ''even darker than before'', culminating in their album ''Bara no Seidou''.
248** ''Beast of Blood'', which was released on the one-year anniversary of Kami's death, in addition to being one of the darkest songs Malice Mizer has ever composed, contains a hidden track called ''Bara no Souretsu'' (Funeral of Roses), which was composed by the late drummer.
249** The last song released before the group went on indefinite hiatus, ''Garnet'', is Klaha (the vocalist) speaking to a traveler, telling them to keep searching until they find the place where they truly belong. Following the hiatus, each member of the band (except the bassist) went on to form his own independent music project.
250* Music/DavidBowie's tenth album, ''Music/StationToStation'', was created while he was in the middle of a massive cocaine addiction -- so bad that he's stated he remembers practically nothing of the recording process. It's also considered one of his best albums. A couple of songs from the classic "Berlin Trilogy" (''[[Music/LowDavidBowieAlbum Low]]'', ''[[Music/HeroesDavidBowieAlbum "Heroes"]]'', and ''Music/{{Lodger}}''), such as "Beauty and the Beast" and "Always Crashing in the Same Car", have been interpreted as being about his struggles to clean himself up during that time period. Prior to his recovery, he weighed as little as eighty pounds and reportedly engaged in a variety of bizarre practices such as refrigerating his urine because [[GovernmentConspiracy he thought the government would steal it.]]
251** His final album, ''Music/BlackstarAlbum'', was produced after he was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2014 and spent much of the following year recording this album as a reflection of what was then the very real possibility of his death; the cancer would be declared terminal in November 2015, with Bowie meeting the inevitable just two days after the album's release in January 2016. The whole record is Bowie's most personal since ''Music/{{Low|DavidBowieAlbum}}'' nearly 40 years prior, being an extended musing on his amplified awareness of his own mortality and his uncertainty at the time regarding whether or not he would live (he wouldn't), and his feelings of uncertainty and desire to tie up as many loose ends as possible is very much apparent.
252* Andy Partridge claims to have written "Your Dictionary" (''S-L-A-P / Is that how you spell kiss in your dictionary / C-O-L-D / Pronounced as care / S-H-I-T / Is that how you spelt me in your dictionary / Four-eyed fool / You led 'round everywhere?''), which appears on the Music/{{XTC}} album ''Apple Venus'', in spite of himself:
253-->I tried and tried NOT to write a divorce song, I really did, you have to believe me. The last thing I wanted was to come over as a grieved cattle bum crying into his beer in the bar of heartbreak motel. Or even worse, as Music/PhilCollins. I mean, divorce is so... middle-aged and crap...Trouble was, the internal stale steam kept building, the pus kept expanding inside my head. I needed a safety valve, maybe if I just put all the hurt in one song.
254** Music/{{XTC}}'s "I Bought Myself a Liarbird" was such a blatant attack on their former manager that they faced legal action over it, and part of the settlement was that the band couldn't talk about the song publicly.
255* Speaking of Music/PhilCollins and his divorce: he recorded his first solo album ''Music/FaceValue'' while breaking up with his first wife. His feelings of anger and sorrow are reflected in the album, particularly in the song "In The Air Tonight", and tend to show up as a recurring theme in the songs he writes (Collins has had two subsequent marriages and divorces).
256** One of the best examples from this era is "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVFku0P7qTA I Don't Care Anymore]]" about his first wife and their divorce. BewareTheNiceOnes indeed.
257** There were {{foreshadowing}}s of Collins' breakdown in "Misunderstanding", which was released a year before ''Face Value''. In that song, Collins was starting to wonder why his first wife was unusually absent and not returning his calls.
258* Music/SayAnything DEFINES this trope. Partly justified, because Max Bemis (the lead singer/songwriter) has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
259** Remember that time he thought that he was being followed by cameras and ended up going to a restaurant and spitting in [[WhatTheHellHero some lady's soup]]?
260--> Max: I self-medicate with drugs and alcohol to treat my extreme social anxiety.
261** And then came the self-titled album, which was recorded after he got married to the lead singer of Eisley and more or less converted to Christianity. It's arguably their best and definitely their catchiest and most positive. The songs go from being full of Wangst to full of irony and much cheerier self-deprecation. Even "Death for My Birthday" ends on an upbeat note. Say Anything may be one of the only bands that improved after finding God.
262* Music/{{Voltaire}}'s album ''Boo Hoo'' was written after he and a girlfriend of his (for about 12 years) broke up. The album is mainly comprised of songs about breakups and other stories of bad relationships.
263* In spite of being a rather private person, Siouxsie Sioux of Music/SiouxsieAndTheBanshees has been working out her issues in song since she began writing them. [[http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858565342/ "Make Up to Break Up,"]] the earliest Banshees song with which she's credited, is quite obviously about her use of cosmetics to hide her perceived facial flaws. As the band was crumbling 20 years later, she wrote [[http://www.vamp.org/Siouxsie/Lyrics/song-rapture.html#3 "Stargazer"]] and [[http://www.vamp.org/Siouxsie/Lyrics/song-rapture.html#9 "Forever,"]] the latter of which is a melancholy tune that starkly contrasts the love songs [[http://www.vamp.org/Siouxsie/Lyrics/song-rapture.html#1 "O Baby"]] and [[http://www.vamp.org/Siouxsie/Lyrics/song-rapture.html#7 "The Lonely One."]] After Sioux and Severin decided to disband the Banshees, [[http://www.vamp.org/Siouxsie/Lyrics/song-newskin.html "New Skin"]] was written.
264** Siouxsie's solo debut, ''Mantaray,'' is practically defined by this trope, as it deals with starting one's life over at 50 post-divorce and without the musical support system she'd had for so many years. The first two songs written, [[http://www.lyricsmania.com/lyrics/siouxsie_lyrics_38717/mantaray_lyrics_69734/into_a_swan_lyrics_675793.html "Into A Swan"]] and [[http://www.lyricsmania.com/lyrics/siouxsie_lyrics_38717/mantaray_lyrics_69734/loveless_lyrics_675796.html "Loveless,"]] were supposedly written with the intent of selling them to another artist (Sugababes were referenced in at least one article), but they're so personal one can't help but wonder why.
265* A number of Music/VelvetUnderground's songs dealt with Music/LouReed's heroin addiction, most notably [[http://www.lyricsdepot.com/velvet-underground/waiting-for-the-man.html "Waiting for the Man"]] and [[http://www.lyricsdepot.com/velvet-underground/heroin.html "Heroin."]]
266** Reed and Music/JohnCale mourned Creator/AndyWarhol in ''Songs for Drella''.
267** In his solo career, Lou Reed didn't like the fact that the glammy, Music/DavidBowie-produced ''Music/{{Transformer}}'' was received so much better than the raw, emotional ''Music/{{Berlin}}''. When he rewrote glitzed-out versions the songs from ''Music/{{Berlin}}'' and some of the VU songs, including the famously inaccessible ''Music/WhiteLightWhiteHeat'', and wound up with hits, and wrote a new album in the vein of ''Music/{{Transformer}}'', and ''that'' was a hit, he ''really'' lost it and put out the radio-unfriendly instrumental double-LP ''Music/MetalMachineMusic'', which the record company nearly put out with a label reading "CONTAINS NO MUSIC."
268** Reed actually said that, despite writing songs about it, he didn't use heroin that much in The60s or The70s, although this may be a case of historical revisionism on his part; he is on record as having preferred amphetamines, about which he wrote the song "White Light/White Heat", among others. In any case, Reed was horrified when people would tell him they [[MisaimedFandom shot up to "Heroin"]], which would contribute to his being hesitant to play the song despite it being one of his best-known numbers.
269* Music/JohnCale had a lot of ups and downs psychologically in the seventies. ''Fear'' started showing his mental side, and ''Helen of Troy'' in 1975 had a photo of him in a straitjacket on the front cover. By the time he recorded ''Sabotage'' in 1979, he was heavily addicted to alcohol, cocaine, and heroin (and amphetamines) and he degenerated into madness in his live performances of the '80s (which he later described as being 'shambolic'). But he cleaned up and did ''Fragments'' in '91.
270* Music/MikeOldfield apparently wrote one of the more serene parts of side B of ''Music/TubularBells'' to try and give his head a quiet place to be. Most of his earlier work (up to ''Incantations'') was also composed on a background of unsorted personal demons, and his autobiography makes it quite clear where and how the gears shifted. Though he was basically a happier man: ''My music had been turbocharged, it was nuclear powered because of my paranoia, but now my inspiration had gone.'' (''Changeling'', Oldfield, Virgin Books 2007).
271* Les Claypool from Music/{{Primus}} has said that the reason the album ''Pork Soda'' was so much darker than the earlier albums was because the band had just gotten off a long tour, and they were all in a bad mood.
272* Music/MarilynManson's 2007 album ''Eat Me, Drink Me'' was written when the bandleader Marilyn Manson was going through a period of severe depression. In an odd twist, however, ''Eat Me, Drink Me'' is actually lighter and more mainstream than the band's usual output. The album expresses the themes of his depression largely brought on from his divorce and the latter half of the album shifting towards a more romantic side, written towards his girlfriend, who then left him, resulting in yet another period of depression and the 2009 album ''The High End of Low''.
273** To be honest, though, much like his mentor, Trent Reznor, all of Manson's work has been one really long breakdown. It could be traced back to when he [[TheWoobie witnessed his grandfather in his basement (you do not want to know), was molested by a neighbor kid who was three years older than him, his dog was murdered by the kid and he was deathly afraid of the end of the world and Hell due to his Christian school]]. ''Music/PortraitOfAnAmericanFamily'' already shows his disgust with society and his drug problems. ''Music/SmellsLikeChildren'' was forced on him by the producers, and it shows. ''Music/AntichristSuperstar'' was one part his life, one part Twiggy's life, one part drugs (they co-wrote almost all of it, and were either high or days without sleep while writing it, on purpose). ''Music/MechanicalAnimals'' was him trying to break away from Trent's influence, and was influenced by him getting less addicted to drugs and beginning to feel emotions for the first time in about a decade and trying to cope with it. ''Music/HolyWoodInTheShadowOfTheValleyOfDeath'' was written a little bit after Columbine, which really affected him emotionally, and caused a split between him and his closest friend, bandmate, and occasional sexual partner Twiggy Ramirez that caused Twiggy to leave until 2008 or 2009. ''The Golden Age of Grotesque'' was written after Manson had finished his last three albums and lost his best friend, so he was searching for something new. ''Eat Me, Drink Me'' was not only the aforementioned problems but also his dream of a film about Lewis Carroll, one of his idols, starring, written and directed by him, had just been shut down. ''The High End of Low'' is one part him falling apart once more, but it is also him healing. The last track ''15'' was written on his birthday and was recovering from his depression that spawned ''Into The Fire'' (written that Christmas). Also, he had just gotten Twiggy back, which was pretty much like a double amputee regaining his limbs, as well as getting superpowers. ''Born Villain'' is the first time he's written an album while pretty much not deeply depressed [=and/or=] suicidal, which explains the experimental sound of it.
274* Music/DefLeppard's "White Lightning" is about guitarist Steve Clark's death from an overdose of booze and prescription drugs.
275** SLANG features songs called "All I Want Is Everything" (WordOfGod states it's about a man dying of AIDS) and "Where Does Love Go When It Dies". Joe Elliott and Phil Collen were going through a divorce at the time, Rick Allen and Joe Elliott were both charged with domestic abuse, Rick Savage was diagnosed with Bell's palsy and his father died the day before recording sessions began...
276* Melissa Etheridge's song ''This Is Not Goodbye'' was written and recorded after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
277* In a weird twist on the trope, Music/{{Jewel}}'s hit song "You Were Meant For Me" was written by her ex-boyfriend, Steve Poltz of ''The Rugburns'', to deal with ''his'' grief over ''her'' breaking up with him. Apparently, there weren't ''too'' many hard feelings in the wake of the breakup -- Poltz appears as Jewel's love interest in the music video.
278* Australian band The Whitlams have had a turbulent history, including the suicides of two of the three original members. Some of their songs reflect this, including [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8cirkULmyU Charlie No. 3]], written a fortnight after the death of Stevie Plunder, and ''The Curse Stops Here'', following [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZIF5i8XQmI Andy Lewis's death]].
279* Music/{{Slipknot}}'s 'Snuff', from their All Hope is Gone album, is one of their slowest, ballad-ish songs, and it was inspired by one of singer Corey Taylor's failed romances. He only talked about the matter once, and said something along the lines of 'I thought she felt the same way and she really let me down'. 'It goes from a sad 'I still press your letters to my lips/and cherish them in parts of me that savor every kiss' to a pissed off 'You couldn't hate enough to love/ Is that supposed to be enough?'. The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXEKuttVRIo&feature=fvst short film]] which Corey stars illustrates this.
280** Also, their album ''.5: The Gray Chapter'' was their first released after the death of founding bassist Paul Gray, and a great deal of the lyrics on the album reflect the feelings of anger, grief, and guilt the band collectively felt in the aftermath.
281* Singer/Songwriter Music/PatrickWolf fell victim to this trope, but things got better: he suffered from a horrible break-up during his tour for ''The Magic Position''. He first quit music altogether, then decided otherwise and was set to write a double album of woe entitled "Battle", and then - in his words - "fell rather spectacularly in love". What did this mean for his breakdown album? It was split in two, with the first album reflecting his 'woe' period. Said album can only be described as 'Happy Emo' - what should be 40 minutes of self-pity based on the lyrics, but is actually quite uplifting and otherwise not fitting to a breakdown album. The second album, ''Lupercalia'', is bright and beautiful and everything you'd expect from someone so in love and so happy.
282* After pop singer Music/{{Rihanna}} was assaulted by her then-boyfriend Chris Brown, she released ''Rated R'', a pretty dark (for pop at least) album with songs patterned after themes commonly found in R-rated films. The lead single was "Russian Roulette", a song about jumping into a potentially dangerous relationship.
283** Chris Brown had a few songs about the incident on his album ''Graffiti,'' specifically "Crawl," which is about trying to rebuild trust in a broken relationship.
284* It's clear ''something'' happened to the songwriter of Del Amitri in the writing of "Change Everything". Every single song is about unrequited love or a disastrous affair, and most are about the former resulting in the latter.
285* Music/{{Usher}}'s ''Raymond Vs. Raymond'' was inspired both by his acrimonious divorce (heard most noticeably in the song "Papers") and his feeling that he'd lost his spot as a musical sex symbol.
286** His album ''Confessions'' was about his break-up with Chilli from Music/{{TLC}} (though he claims that neither of those albums are about his personal life).
287* ''Songs Not To Get Married To'' and ''Last Stop: Crappytown'' are about [[IAmTheBand James Dewees of Reggie & The Full Effect]] and two life-altering experiences. The first album is about his divorce from his wife Megan, and the second is about his experiences in rehab. The first album listed is perhaps his strongest work because while he's depressed about his divorce (It's clear he still loves his now ex-wife), he still makes good to throw in at least a couple joke tracks like his three previous albums, and the songs have some of his best songwriting. The latter, however, is confusing and somewhat of a mess, and far heavier than anything he had released before.
288* Music/KellyClarkson's song "Behind These Hazel Eyes" off her ''Breakaway'' album was originally written about a person staying true to herself in the world of showbiz. After Kelly's boyfriend at the time David Hodges (formerly of Music/{{Evanescence}}) left her to marry an ex-girlfriend Kelly changed it into a bitter breakup song. The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svxP2LjBg_4 video of the song]] reflects Kelly's anger at her boyfriend's nuptials. "Never Again" a song from her third album ''My December'' also is about the same ex-boyfriend.
289** And "Because of You" was about the breakup of her parents.
290* Music/ChristinaAguilera's songs "Oh Mother" (off ''Back To Basics''), and "I'm OK" (off ''Stripped'') talk about her abuse as a very young child.
291* Music/BigStar's first two albums were tuneful PowerPop. Their infamous third album ''Third/Sister Lovers'' was a lot more bleak and noncommercial specifically because Alex Chilton was tired of their albums getting [[ScrewedByTheNetwork screwed by the label]] and [[CriticalDissonance selling poorly despite many positive reviews]].
292* A great deal of Music/WarrenZevon's songs are reflecting things that were personal to him. They still work out brilliantly on most occasions because they're well-written and emotive, and of course, he somewhat mocked the whole idea in a handful of songs due to his sense of humour.
293** His songs get a lot more personal on his final album ''The Wind'' since he wrote and recorded it when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. There's still some of his humor in there, especially in the lyrics of "Disorder in the House", but it's a lot bleaker. When he recorded "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" for the album, everyone else in the studio was supposedly reduced to tears.
294* [[Music/{{Pink}} P!nk's]] ''Funhouse'' album was produced after her separation from Carey Hart. Subject songs include "Please Don't Leave Me", "It's All Your Fault", and the title track, which involves [[KillItWithFire burning down]] their former "fun house" that is now "full of [[MonsterClown evil clowns]]". In a funny subversion, Hart appeared in the video for "So What", the lead single from that album, which helped lead to them reconciling. They've since had a child together and P!nk's next album, fittingly enough, was entitled ''The Truth About Love.''
295* In probably a creepier occasion of this trope, the band Music/{{Slint}} suffered from this during the recording of ''Music/{{Spiderland}}''. The album's recording process was freakishly stressful, with the band being given only four days to record and having to pull constant all-nighters subsiding on nothing but energy drinks. Combined with the [[ThePerfectionist perfectionist]] nature of producer Brian Paulson, the intensity of ''Spiderland''[='s=] breakneck production reportedly led two of the band members-- who were in perfect physical and mental condition prior to recording-- to be institutionalized for a few weeks. The effects that the hellish production of ''Spiderland'' had on the band is quite visible throughout the album, which is littered with guitars that shift between low droning and loud screeching and mumbling spoken-word lyrics that more often than not convey some pretty horrifying themes and imagery.
296* Music/ArcadeFire recorded ''Funeral'' just after the deaths of two of the members' grandparents.
297* One can't help but feel sorry for Jason Pierce of Music/{{Spiritualized}}. It's happened not once, not twice, but THREE times since the band's existence:
298** It happened on the first album ''Laser Guided Melodies'' in 1992 just after Jason Pierce's previous band Music/{{Spacemen 3}} broke up due to a feud between Pierce and Peter Kember. However, the album itself is comparatively light on the depressive breakdown and musically upbeat, sounding more excited about the new beginning than mopey.
299** It happened during the recording of the third album, ''Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space'' when Jason's girlfriend at the time and keyboardist Kate Radley had an affair with Richard Ashcroft, the lead singer for Music/TheVerve (who she later married). This caused Jason to start heavy drug abuse and write more complex arrangements (as if they weren't complex and spacey enough as it is), while still balancing the depressive tendencies with upbeat material.
300** Then it happened again during the recording of the latest album ''Songs in A & E''. Pierce's weak immune system caused him to get a really bad case of pneumonia. It took him 3 years to recover and was on the brink of death while recording. Luckily he survived, but it doesn't help that Jason literally watched some of his fellow patients die in the hospital that he stayed in. OUCH!
301*** And to make it worse, some of the bleaker tracks were recorded before he got pneumonia.
302* Music/NeutralMilkHotel's Jeff Magnum had a famous breakdown with his obsession over Anne Frank during the recording of ''In The Aeroplane Over The Sea''. While the album is considered a classic, the fact that you can feel Magnum's obsession getting stronger and stronger throughout each track. Apparently after the album, he just got worse. This may have been one of the reasons why they ended up splitting.
303** The breakdown is often thought to have been caused by Neutral Milk Hotel's rising fame (and Mangum's difficulty coping with that) too, though.
304** Then again, there's a strong undercurrent of emotional turmoil in most of Mangum's music. "Three Peaches", for example, is about a friend's suicide attempt (she succeeded the second time), while "Sailing Through" is... harrowing.
305* Music/JeffBuckley was also pretty famous for this, often writing songs just after major breakups and what may have been bipolar lows.
306* Music/RufusWainwright recorded ''All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu'' while his mother was dying of cancer. His previous albums, known for lush full orchestrations, are not anywhere near as depressing as this. All it is is Rufus singing with piano, nothing more. Somehow the result is a TearJerker.
307* Subversion: The notoriously difficult band Music/{{Current 93}} released an album, ''Sleep Has His House'', after the death of David Tibet's father. It's downright calming, down to the twenty-four-minute-long ambient drone song.
308** DoubleSubversion: Said song is [[TearJerker probably the saddest song that they've ever written]], as well as the only break from the release's peculiar air of DissonantSerenity. Two straighter examples appear in ''Imperium'' (1987) and the collaboration with Nurse With Wound ''Bright Yellow Moon'' (2001). Both were written in the aftermath of horrific illnesses - one neurological, [[http://brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/discog/udor8.php?site=nww one visceral]] - and both are far more introspective and morose than their predecessors.
309* A lot of the work by Music/MyChemicalRomance comes from this, one of the most spine-chilling and eerie examples being the song "Sleep," which was written by Gerard Way during a time of experiencing vivid night terrors. The song even opens with and is interspersed with creaky, erratically sped-up and slowed-down recordings where he speaks into a dictaphone and describes his visions. "Helena" is another example, being written after he lost his grandmother.
310* After his girlfriend left him to join a cult, then being haunted by nightmares of her drowning, Nevermore's main songwriter and vocalist Warrel Dane wrote ''Dreaming Neon Black'', with some of his best lyrical and vocal work. It's bleak, heartwrenching, and considered one of their best albums.
311* By the time 1986 rolled around, Jeff Lynne realized that he was growing disillusioned with Music/ElectricLightOrchestra and wanted to pursue other projects. The result was the album ''Balance of Power'', which was filled with [[LyricalDissonance upbeat-sounding songs about awful relationships]], which were metaphors for Jeff's thoughts on the band. Shortly after the album was released, ELO disbanded.
312* Music/PandaBear (aka Noah Lennox) recorded the very mournful sounding album "Young Prayer" while his father was dying in a hospital. He later wrote "Brother Sport" which was used on Music/AnimalCollective's ''Merriweather Post Pavilion'' for his brother after their father died, but is much more light in tone.
313* The cynical air of Music/JethroTull's ''Minstrel in the Gallery'' is often thought to be related to main songwriter Ian Anderson's recent divorce.
314** Even moreso this is their following album, ''Too Old to Rock and Roll: Too Young to Die''. While ''Minstrel'' is considered an underrated classic, ''Too Old'' is considered by many fans to be Tull's weakest "good period" album, partly due to being a little ''too'' bitter and mean-spirited.
315* Anna-Varney Cantodea has made her entire career out of this trope. Most of her songs are both depressing and/or profound and autobiographical.
316* Music/TaylorSwift admitted that all her self-written songs were inspired by real-life experiences, saying that "If you listen to my albums, it's like reading my diary". Then tag the fact that a lot of her songs were about relationships with people (both friendly and romantic) with whom she parted ways... Three particular instances stand out, mostly because all three of them are one long breakdown for the entire albums and not just particular songs:
317** ''Music/{{Reputation}}'' is primarily about an extremely stressful period in her career when she felt her reputation (some of it accurate, or at least based in truth, some of it not) was overshadowing her work and who she truly is. It also has some influences from her sexual assault trial and her extremely public blowup with Kanye West which caused a lot of the public to turn against her, the latter of which became HarsherInHindsight when, in 2020, new footage surfaced that revealed she had been more truthful about what exactly went down. She's said in interviews writing the album was therapeutic for her — fittingly, her next album ''Music/{{Lover}}'' is pure CreatorRecovery.
318** Her very next two albums after ''Music/{{Lover}}'', ''Music/Folklore2020'' and ''Music/Evermore2020'' were written back-to-back throughout the quarantine of the COVID-19 Pandemic, which undoubtedly influence the extreme darkness in the albums compare to her body of works, with multiple songs mentioning or heavily implying death, loss, grief, mental health deterioration, and/or abuse, on top of lacking the typical happy endings permeate her usual works.
319** While promoting ''[[Music/Red2012 Red]] (Taylor's Version)'', she revealed that she was going through a very hard time in her life when creating and promoting the original, to the point of having to hide in the bathroom and cry in between interviews, while still trying to put on a happy face for the cameras. The album itself covers a very painful breakup, "Forever Winter" express her immense guilt and sadness at not noticing someone close to her struggled so much with mental health issues (widely speculated to be about Jeff Lang and why many fans thought it wasn't included in the original track list because it was too painful for her) and the ten-minute version of "All Too Well" hints at her struggles with an eating disorder (something she only publicly acknowledged for her documentary Miss Americana in 2020). She admitted it was a relief to be able to make the album over again when she was in a much better place emotionally.
320** ''Music/{{Midnights}}'' is explicitly about the "sleepless nights" that she experienced. The album is filled to the brim with BreakUpSong and touches on self-loathing, sexism, loneliness, and loss of innocence. And is much HarsherInHindsight when she announced her break up with her long term boyfriend Creator/JoeAlwyn causing revaluation and the realization that a lot of the "happy love songs" were quite depressing under the surface.
321* Music/{{Wire}}, in spite of their generally detached approach to lyrics, are not immune to this. At all. The periods from the sessions for ''154'' through ''Document And Eyewitness'' (1979-1980) and from their first reformation through ''The Ideal Copy'' (1984-1987) both exhibit this in ''spades'', with the latter perhaps taking the cake for sheer volume of misfortune and misery (Graham Lewis' ugly break-up, Colin Newman's divorce ''and'' hepatitis).
322** [[TearJerker And this is ignoring "Ticking Mouth".]] [[NarmCharm And, of course, "Torch It!".]]
323* Pam Tillis's ''All of This Love'' was a considerably downbeat album compared to her previous works. It includes the last song she wrote with Bob [=DiPiero=], whom she would later divorce: "It's Lonely Out There", which expresses both parties' feelings about each other.
324* This is obvious in the works of songwriter Dennis Linde. After years of happy, almost obsessive love songs (e.g. "Burning Love" by Music/ElvisPresley, "I'm Gonna Get You" by Eddy Raven, etc.) his material starts turning dark with "The Scene of the Crime" by Jo-El Sonnier (which compares a brokenhearted man to a murder victim) and "Night Is Fallin' in My Heart" by J. P. Pennington (comparing a broken heart to an endless night), the latter of which was CoveredUp by Music/DiamondRio. With a few exceptions such as the comedic character sketches "John Deere Green" by Music/JoeDiffie and "Bubba Shot the Jukebox" by Music/MarkChesnutt, the darkness continued. Music/SammyKershaw's "Queen of My Double Wide Trailer" has the narrator take back his woman from an unsavory man named Earl, and "Hook, Line, and Sinker" and "Cast Iron Heart" both by Blackhawk show similar themes of downbeat brokenhearted men. After a very TakeThat-ish song to corporate Nashville in Music/JoeDiffie's "Down in a Ditch", almost no Linde songs were recorded until the Music/DixieChicks cut "Goodbye Earl", a rather nasty revenge song that kills off the same Earl from "Queen of My Double Wide Trailer". Once again, no other Linde songs appeared anywhere until Music/AlanJackson recorded "Talkin' Song Repair Blues", another TakeThat to Nashville.
325* The Music/DixieChicks had a ''massive'' creator breakdown in 2003 when they decided to mock the UsefulNotes/GeorgeWBush Administration at a London concert. The result was the band being hated by nearly every country music fan who supported the war and suddenly loved by everyone else. This affected the music on the Chicks' 2006 follow-up to be ''much'' darker than fans were expecting.
326* Devin Townsend wrote the album "Infinity" while his breakdown was in full swing, after recording his past two albums on a continuous basis; recording the heavy, proggy "Ocean Machine" during the day and the balls-out and furious industrial metal classic "City" at night. Immediately afterwards, the combination of his overworking and drug use caused him to have a nervous breakdown. He decided to commit himself to a mental hospital for a few days, though he was soon discharged. Immediately afterwards he recorded the album, which is probably the most multitracked and "out-there" effort that he has recorded, with some influences from musical theatre.
327** After the birth of his first child, Townsend was burnt out from touring. As a way to clear his head, he worked on a solo album - solo meaning "playing ''every'' instrument on the record." The result was ZiltoidTheOmniscient.
328* Music/ThreeEleven is usually known for their positive, upbeat lyrics. However, 1999's ''Soundsystem'' includes songs (particularly "Flowing") with lyrics reflecting the self-doubt and lack of direction that singer Nick Hexum was dealing with at the time.
329* Music/LadyGaga's second album ''The Fame Monster'' was written due to her fears she began to face on her way to fame. Some notable tracks would be "Speechless" and "Dance In The Dark". "Speechless" was written when her father needed heart surgery to save his life but refused to get it (he had had a heart condition all his life). She said it was her plea to her father to have the surgery. She also performed it recently in dedication to her grandfather who had just died. It is notable that her live performances of this song are extremely emotional (with her even becoming teary-eyed). "Dance In The Dark" is about the insecurities she faces every day.
330** Similarly, "911" off of ''Chromatica'' is about Gaga's use of olanzapine following a psychotic break.
331* Music/BatForLashes's second album Two Suns was heavily inspired by her move to New York for her boyfriend at the time. She developed an alternate persona named Pearl who was her direct foil. The sadness and alienation Natasha felt during her time in New York is reflected on many of the tracks. The song Siren Song in particular is the most emotional track on the album with Pearl lamenting that she cannot love another person without using them. The album itself uses the theme of duality.
332* Music/KylieMinogue is normally known for extremely upbeat songs but her ballad 'Flower' was written after she was recovering from cancer. No More Rain is also about her return to the stage. Cosmic is a personal ballad of her feelings at the time.
333** Impossible Princess would count as this too as it's extremely personal and intimate compared to the rest of her other work.
334* Matchbox 20's song "3 A.M". was all about Rob Thomas dealing with his mother's bout with cancer.
335* "Back on the Chain Gang" deals with Chrissie Hynde's feelings over two founding Music/{{Pretenders}} members having overdosed a year apart from each other. Notably, Selena's Spanish-language version changes the title (to "Fotos y Recuerdas", "Photographs and Memories"), and dispenses with the song's angrier aspects.
336* Eddie Money's song "No Control" is about his near-death from an overdose.
337* Several songs on ''beautifulgarbage'' seem to reflect [[Music/{{Garbage}} Shirley Manson's]] recently having gone through a divorce. Notably, "Till the Day I Die" details the disintegration of the relationship, while "Cup of Coffee" deals with the aftermath.
338* Music/JimiHendrix's former girlfriend Monika Dannemann wrote the lyrics for Music/{{Scorpions|Band}}' "We'll Burn the Sky", about being distraught over a deceased love.
339* A lot of the songs on soul songstress Phyllis Hyman's last album, "I refuse to be lonely", deal with overcoming depression, which she was struggling with for many years. It is her most personal album, featuring six songs co-written by her - more songs than she had written during her entire career. She died of suicide four months before the album's release.
340* Ween, a band known for the sense of humor they incorporate into their music, created the album ''Quebec'' while Gene Ween (the singer) was battling with substance abuse while going through a divorce. It shows. This album is nowhere near lighthearted, and most of the musical and lyrical wackiness that Ween is known for is absent.
341* Music/{{Adele}}'s 2008 debut album ''19'' was inspired after she went through a devastating breakup with a boyfriend who caused her to become a heavy drinker. While little information has been revealed as to what anguish the ex-boyfriend caused, she revealed in 2011 that he contacted her shortly after she became famous to demand a cut of the profits from the album. Many of the songs on ''19'' seemingly reflect this relationship, as they are focused on resentment upon an unseen person.
342** Her second album ''21'' is largely full of songs about the breakdown of a relationship. The song "Someone Like You" describes her finding out that the man in question has married someone else since their relationship ended.
343* Music/ScreaminJayHawkins was discovered while having an alcohol and love-induced breakdown on a club stage, singing "I Put A Spell On You." When he tried to record it in a studio, the person who originally loved the song said it wasn't sounding angsty enough. Jay had him bring in a case of liquor, got completely smashed, and recorded the album version that you can hear today (including the sex sounds at the end, which pretty much ensured it wouldn't get aired on the radio). Funnily enough, the woman he was singing about heard the song and did date the artist.
344* Subverted by Mike Skinner of English rap group The Streets, who wrote "Never Went To Church" in response to the death of his father. It's a pure TearJerker, but it ends on an ultimately optimistic note about remembering the good times and moving onwards.
345** The album it's taken from, ''The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living'' is about Skinner's drug addiction. Even though songs like "When You Wasn't Famous" are somewhat light-hearted, the opening track "Prangin' Out" is pretty harrowing.
346* After the success of Music/{{Pulp}}'s ''Different Class'', frontman Jarvis Cocker developed a cocaine addiction and suffered a nervous breakdown while recording their follow-up ''This Is Hardcore''. The result is a much darker sound, with lyrics focusing on said breakdown, drugs, and fame.
347* Much of Music/PaulSimon's output in the 1980s was influenced by his separation and eventual divorce from Creator/CarrieFisher. She said she was particularly hurt by lyrics like "My heart is allergic to the woman I love."
348* Music/DeltaGoodrem's ''Mistaken Identity'' album was inspired by her cancer ordeal and relationship upheaval in 2003 and 2004, and is, among fans, considered her best work. She did it in about 6 months with a vision behind it: the sad circumstances and awareness of her own mortality in the middle of 2003.
349* Music/TheVeronicas have a track called "In Another Life" which is about a very personal situation to Jess (a long-term relationship came to a complicated end), so when she's heard crying on the track it's real, not faked.
350** "Cold" is Lisa's song about an abusive relationship she had with a guy who she recently broke up with. She does the SpokenWordInMusic parts of this song, similar to the way Jess did the verses in "In Another Life".
351* Music/{{Marillion}}: Dare we mention gloomy existentialist Scottish rockers ''Music/{{Marillion}}'', who married great musical competence with some of the most depressing Scottish themes of death, wholesale slaughter, and destruction since Culloden, Margaret Thatcher, and Literature/{{Trainspotting}}? ''Script For A Jester's Tear'', an ocean of self-pitying Goth depression, kick-started it. Then there was ''Misplaced Childhood'', a long elegy for a dead love affair. Things got no better with subsequent albums. ''Clutching At Straws'' was autobiographical, charting the descent of lead singer Derek "Fish" Dick into alcohol-related complications. At one point a lugubrious Scottish doctor does a voice-over with "If you maintain this lifestyle, you will not reach thirty". This was not fictional. "Fish" really was drinking himself to death at the time.
352* Music/LaurynHill's debut album, ''Music/TheMiseducationOfLaurynHill'' discusses motherhood, her time in Music/TheFugees, and her relationship with Wyclef Jean. Many of the songs, in fact, were suspected to be direct attacks on Wyclef Jean and Pras, such as "Lost Ones," "Superstar," "Ex-Factor" and "Forgive Them Father". "To Zion" discusses her first pregnancy and how people told her to have an abortion so that she wouldn't ruin her career, but she believed that her family should come first in her life.
353* Music/{{Space}} suffered a communal CreatorBreakdown in 1997. Jamie Murphy had a nervous breakdown. Tommy Scott lost his voice for two months and was stalked by a crazed fan in America. Franny Griffiths had various health problems. Yorkie's mother died. [[PoorCommunicationKills Poor communication nearly broke up the band]] whilst touring Asia. Andy Parle, the [[TheQuietOne quiet one]] of the band, grew increasingly unhappy and left at the end of the year because he couldn't cope with the pressures of fame and constant touring. ''Tin Planet'' and 'Avenging Angels', the latter about the deaths of the band's loved ones, were the result.
354* David Draiman, the vocalist for the metal/rock band Music/{{Disturbed}} cites this as the reason behind the single "Inside The Fire" from the album ''Indestructible''. When he was in his teens an obsessive ex-girlfriend killed herself over him and he was having recurring nightmares about it. "Inside The Fire" was his 'catharsis'. Incidentally, it's also one of their most popular songs ''ever'' and has earned Draiman himself near godlike respect from the band's fans.
355* Music/BritneySpears and her WhatCouldHaveBeen album "The Original Doll" would have been an example of this trope if it had been released. She has clearly had some very significant problems and they were spoken of in the Mona Lisa (Demo) and her sample of the song Rebellion. The release of this could have averted the breakdown she had. She often mentioned a lack of trust in her family and those close to her outside of her fledgling family.
356** She personally went through a personal breakdown and had deep emotional/trust issues from late 2006 to early 2008. She mostly averts this with her releases and tries to keep a separation between her music and her personal feelings/lives/creations.
357** Her cancelled album "Shock Your Mind" was supposed to be this too. Till her recording company stepped in for the first time to "adjust" the idea behind the album to her SelfTitledAlbum "Britney".
358** Let's not forget about "Lucky". Released in 2000, the song tells the story of a girl who is a worldwide superstar, but feels lonely and as if no one understands her. The song also never offers a resolution to the issue, ending with the lyrics "Why do these tears come at night?". Could it be that Britney was trying to tell us something? Or could it be that she was just worried about what might happen (and what ultimately DID happen) if she let all the negativity get to her? Either way, given her very public breakdown in 2007, the song is a bit too prophetic for comfort.
359* Music/FlorenceAndTheMachine's albums "Lungs" and "Ceremonials" both have come from the lead singer breaking up with the same person twice. Right before the start of recording of each album. This explains some of the morbidity in these works and the lack of a real love song in the albums so far.
360** "No Light, No Light" and "Hurricane Drunk" are songs that deal with the direct issues of and the circumstances following the breakups.
361* Eddie Vedder of Music/PearlJam had a strange version of this. After Kurt Cobain died, he basically took all the press that Kurt was getting before he AteHisGun in the face like a ton of bricks. The result of this sudden media attention and almost ire at times, due to his activism and out-spoken-ness, was ''Vitalogy''. An album that was a complete subversion of what they had been making at the time, non-commercial and almost anti-radio at times. It's safe to say that the already broken Vedder, was on the verge of being completely shattered due to the media weight - and afterwards even tried to alienate the fanbase by refusing to work with Ticketmaster and following it up with even less commercial albums such as ''No Code'' (though they have since returned to more straightforward rock).
362** He and the rest of the band also suffered from this after a tragedy at the 2000 Roskilde Festival, where nine fans were trampled to death during Pearl Jam's concert. The band even considered breaking up, and a few songs in the following album ''Riot Act'' deal with this, such as "I Am Mine", "Love Boat Captain" ("lost nine friends we'll never know, two years ago today"[[note]]in concerts Vedder likes to change for the number of years passed since 2000[[/note]]) and "Arc", which is Eddie moaning nine times.
363* Much of Music/DiamandaGalas' work is dedicated to people with AIDS, especially her 1980s "Masque Of The Red Death" cycle. This is mostly in part to her brother being diagnosed with AIDS early in the epidemic's appearance (he died in 1986 before the cycle could be completed). Her album "The Singer" features a picture of her hands, which are tattooed with the words "We Are All HIV+." Her album "Vena Cava" is told from the point of view of someone losing their mind while dying from the disease.
364* Music/BarenakedLadies wrote the song "Brian Wilson," from their first album, about someone going through such a breakdown and comparing it to the one Brian Wilson of Music/TheBeachBoys went through. They name-checked several major influences and signs of Wilson's breakdown in the song (including the album ''Music/SmileySmile'' and his one-time psychiatrist Dr. Landy). In a meta turn, years later, Brian Wilson did a cover of "Brian Wilson" (a clip of which is available on his live album ''Live At The Roxy Theatre'').
365* Music/VanessaAmorosi has two, "Somewhere In The Real World" about breaking up with a guy who didn't want what she wanted, and parts of "Hazardous" are about a guy who cheated on her. (Sleep With That, Blow Me Away)
366* Creator/MichaelNesmith (formerly of Music/TheMonkees) has several. "The Naked Persimmon (The Only Thing I Believe Is True)" and "Hollywood" both chronicle his negative experiences in show business. "Nine Times Blue" is supposedly an apology song to his then-wife, Phyllis (Nesmith had not only cheated on her but had fathered a son with his long-time mistress, Nurit Wilde).
367* From her second album "A Little More Personal(Raw) Lindsay Lohan has "Confessions Of A Broken Heart (Daughter To Father) which was about her parents' divorce and her deep resentment towards her father over his abusive attitude towards her.
368* Music/AvengedSevenfold's ''Nightmare'' was virtually complete at the time that James "The Rev" Sullivan died in late 2009; all the music was written, it just needed to be recorded and mixed. While the music remained largely untouched, most of the lyrics were rewritten to reflect on his passing.
369* Mark Kozelek of Music/SunKilMoon and Music/RedHousePainters has had several creator breakdowns throughout his musical career. It'd be easier to chronicle the three releases where he ''didn't'' suffer this trope. This would be on ''Ghosts Of The Lost Highway'', ''Music/SongsForABlueGuitar'', and ''Old Ramon''. Whenever he's not depressed, Kozelek's music sounds very laid-back and more rock-oriented. Depress him and you get either extremely slow depressing songs with sinister-sounding atmospheres or you get very dark sounding borderline nightmare fuel traditional folk.
370** During the recording of the early demo tapes through ''Rollercoaster''/''Bridge'' sessions, Kozelek was struggling with massive mental depression, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts.
371** Kozelek cited the death of a one-time muse of his as the inspiration for the stark sounds appearing on ''April''.
372* Music/{{Sparklehorse}}'s Mark Linkous suffered from this more than any man should have to, nearly dying of drug overdose and then, many years later, ''actually'' [[DrivenToSuicide dying due to suicide]].
373* Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine wrote an album called ''Rock Bottom'' after a series of troubles in his life - but insists that a drunken accident at a house party in 1973 that left him paralysed from the waist down didn't influence the music at all.
374* Music/{{Kerli}}'s album ''Love is Dead'' was made while she was coming out of a depression. Her singles from the following EP ''Utopia'' [[NewSoundAlbum are noted to be much happier]].
375* The songs on the second Music/{{Weezer}} album, ''Music/{{Pinkerton}}'', are about lead singer Rivers Cuomo's various troubles after the release of his first album, such as his guilty feelings as a result of using his rock star status to take advantage of women.
376** After the initially negative reception of ''Pinkerton'', Rivers apparently locked himself in his home and painted all his walls black. Rather than releasing another emotional album to express Rivers' feelings, the next album to be released was the, for the most part sterile, ''Green Album''.
377* Jamey Johnson released his debut album on BNA Records in 2005, but due to a corporate restructuring, the label dropped him after only two singles, the second of which got no promotion and failed to chart. After a divorce, he became a ReclusiveArtist and developed a drug and alcohol addiction, even though Music/TraceAdkins, Music/JoeNichols, and Music/GeorgeStrait had all recorded some of his songs. Once he cleaned himself up, he moved to Creator/MercuryRecords and began recording albums that have received extremely high critical acclaim for their "outlaw" influences.
378* When they're not political, Music/{{Ministry}} songs are likely some sort of breakdown from singer Al Jourgensen. His heroin addiction inspired the songs "Just One Fix," "Step," and "Piss," as well as a cover of Music/AmyWinehouse's "Rehab." Their song "Ghouldiggers" is one long AuthorTract about the music industry.
379* Music/XUSBand went through two of these:
380** The band's 1982 album ''Under The Big Black Sun'' was at least somewhat influenced by the death of Exene Cervenka's sister Mirielle in a car accident: While it doesn't ''sound'' much darker than a typical X album, "Riding With Mary", "Come Back To Me", and the title track all directly dealt with losing a loved one. Even the one CoverVersion, Al Dubin and Joe Burke's "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" (a Tin Pin Alley song the band got from Music/{{Leadbelly}}), is pretty mournful lyrically.
381** Three years later, Cervenka and singer/bassist John Doe divorced. Meanwhile, Billy Zoom decided to leave the band, but stuck around for one more album, ''Ain't Love Grand.'' With lyrics about breakups and lost love and a slick, radio-friendly production, this album is considered a misstep by fans and the group themselves. Cervenka herself has admitted, "We shouldn't have made a record that year."
382** Thankfully, this story has a fairly happy ending: Doe and Cervenka remain friends, Zoom rejoined in 1998, and the band continues to play live and release the occasional new album.
383* Music/BoBurnham has had a few, especially jarring since Bo is usually a ''comedy'' artist.
384** "Art is Dead," placed smack-dab in the middle of a roaringly funny and vulgar special, is a very genuine reflection of his misgivings about fame and wealth. He even acknowledges it before he starts singing, warning, "This next song honestly isn't funny at all, but it helps me sleep at night."
385--->''I must be psychotic, I must be demented, to think that I'm worthy of all this attention, of all of this money you worked really hard for. I slept in late while you worked at the drug store. My drug's attention, I am an addict, but I get paid to indulge in my habit.''
386** His 2021 special ''INSIDE''' was written and filmed during quarantine for the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic, discussing his anxities about the pandemic, his future, and the state of the world in general. The special has a narrative of SanitySlippage, ending with Bo crossing the DespairEventHorizon.
387--->''Am I going crazy? Would I even know? Am I right back where I started fourteen years ago? Wanna guess the ending? If it ever does...''
388* Faith Assembly's appropriately named ''Descent into Madness'', his [[DarkerAndEdgier darkest and most depressing album]] yet, was written while Mark was struggling with various physical, mental, economic, and social adversities.
389* The Music/FallOutBoy album "From Under the Cork Tree" featured lyrics that were written right before and right after bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz's suicide attempt. "7 Minutes (Atavan Halen)" is the only song explicitly stated to be about the attempt, but some hints of it also show up in the other songs, like the entirety of the song "Dance, Dance", and "I Slept with Someone from Fall Out Boy and All I Got was This Stupid Song Written About Me", which opens with the line: "I found the cure to growing older." (the cure to growing older is dying young)
390* Music/BlackSabbath started experiencing breakdowns in the mid-'70s. The first one was their drug abuse, grueling schedule, and general managerial issues resulting in Tony Iommi getting writer's block. The first song he managed to write was "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," which deals with ideas of being lied to, abandoned and betrayed and wanting to see those people burn and not caring if you live or die. The second big breakdown was when they recorded their next album, ''Sabotage''. During the recording, the band was dealing with mountains of legal issues due to being conned by their management. The album has a very aggressive sound and the closing song, "The Writ," is essentially Ozzy raging against their former management with a minimalist backing track.
391* The image on the trope's page is a parody of Music/PhilOchs' 1969 album ''Rehearsals for Retirement''. Ochs was a leftist SingerSongwriter famous for his protest songs, and he was deeply depressed by the events of 1968 (the assassinations of UsefulNotes/MartinLutherKingJr and UsefulNotes/RobertFKennedy, the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the election of UsefulNotes/RichardNixon). The album depicts Ochs' own tombstone, which stated that he died in "Chicago, Illinois, 1968"
392* ''The Great Southern Trendkill'' by Music/{{Pantera}} was recorded during a time of tension within the band. Frontman Philip Anselmo had started distancing himself from his bandmates and was using heroin to deal with his chronic back pain. The tension between Anselmo and the rest of the band was so bad that he recorded in a separate studio from them. The result is the darkest, hardest album in the band's discography, swinging between rage (War Nerve, Sandlasted Skin, 10's, the title track), despair (Floods, Suicide Note Pt. 1), and a combination of the two (Suicide Note Pt. 2).
393* Music/KellyRowland's song "Dirty Laundry" discusses, among other things, her feelings towards her former bandmate Music/{{Beyonce}} during their time in Music/DestinysChild.
394* The best-known and probably the most controversial single The Boomtown Rats ever released, "I Don't Like Mondays", was written a few days after [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Ann_Spencer Brenda Ann Spencer]] shot several people at a San Diego school and claimed she did so because [[TitleDrop she didn't like Mondays]]. Lead singer Bob Geldof was being interviewed for US television when the report came into the studio and he ended up with a front-row seat as events unfolded. He wrote the song as a way to put his uncomprehending horror and revulsion into words.
395* The tone of portions of Music/AshleyTisdale's ''Guilty Pleasure'' album, while still being ''musically'' upbeat and catchy [[IdolSinger teen pop]], is filled with [[BreakupSong breakup songs]] like "It's Alright, It's OK" and "Me Without You", confessional songs like "What If" and topical, [[{{Angst}} angsty]] songs like "How Do You Love Someone?", reflecting Ashley's then-recent breakup with dancer boyfriend Jared Murillo. Many other songs, interestingly enough, show a (relatively) playfully HotterAndSexier side to her ("Hair"; "Crank It Up").
396* Patrick Cowley's third and final album, ''Mind Warp'', was produced while he was dying of AIDS, and its [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin title]] and content reflect his increasingly distorted perception of reality.
397* The Music/FairportConvention album ''Liege and Lief'' was recorded while the band was still reeling from a road traffic accident involving the band's van, which killed original drummer Martin Lamble and injured several of the other members. One of the few self-penned songs on the album is "Crazy Man Michael", which is surely co-writer Richard Thompson allegorically working through his feelings of responsibility for the death, in the accident, of his girlfriend. (Richard had tried to take over steering when the van driver was falling asleep at the wheel, but he ended up sending the vehicle off the road.)
398* Music/ElvisPresley tended to record mostly country weepies during his final years, with several biographies blaming his divorce from Priscilla, and his fading health, for the change in tone.
399* Music/BadReligion frontman Greg Graffin reflects this on his first solo studio album ''American Lesion'', having dealt with his first divorce and losing long-time best friend Brett Gurewitz over contractual disputes. As such, the lyrical content is much less snarky, metaphor-oriented like Bad Religion, and more fragile and direct.
400* Creator/EmilyOsment [[WordOfGod mentioned in interviews around the time of its release]] that the breakup songs on her 2009 EP ''All The Right Wrongs'' were inspired by a rocky relationship she had prior to recording the album (though "Average Girl" was written as a joke song).
401* Music/{{Rush|Band}} went through a really harsh period of creator breakdown in the late 1990s when drummer and lyricist Neil Peart's wife and daughter died suddenly. The band broke up and Peart spent some time working through his grief by taking a motorcycle journey across North America. Years passed, and Peart returned to his lifelong buddies and former bandmates to get the band back together. Their return album, ''Vapor Trails,'' is almost absurdly darker than what they were putting out before the band broke up, peppered not only with extensive meditations on Peart's own sadness but dark-toned musings about the end of the world and the legacy of the September 11th terrorist attacks. This set the tone for the band through their next two studio albums, ''Snakes and Arrows'' and ''Music/ClockworkAngels,'' both of which are strongly influenced by a kind of fatalistic existentialism and militant atheism driven by cynicism about the modern world. Critics generally agree that ''Vapor Trails'' was a little rough (especially the mix) as the band is finding their footing again after over half a decade of being broken up, but ''Snakes and Arrows'' is better and ''Clockwork Angels'' is even better still, signaling that the boys are back on form.
402* A good chunk of Music/JacksonBrowne's ''The Pretender'' was him working through the suicide of his first wife, Phyllis.
403* Music/DaveGrohl recorded the Music/FooFighters' [[Music/FooFightersAlbum debut album]] by himself as a way of coping with Music/{{Nirvana}} bandmate Music/KurtCobain's death. Follow-up ''The Colour and the Shape'', done duringfollowing a divorce, has more introspective lyrics and a few going into straight-up heartbreak.
404* Music/SherylCrow's ''The Globe Sessions'' is an intensely personal and introspective album written while she was suffering from severe depression and the aftermath of a catastrophically imploded relationship. "My Favorite Mistake" about a philandering ex-boyfriend (rumoured to be Music/EricClapton) is a prime example.
405-->''Did you know, could you tell, You were the only one...\
406That I ever loved.\
407Now everything's so wrong.\
408Did you see me walking by?\
409Did it ever make you cry?\
410You're my favorite mistake...''
411* [[Music/QueensOfTheStoneAge Josh Homme]] Josh went through this during the time between ''Era Vulgaris'' and ''...Like Clockwork''. In 2010, [[HeroicRROD years of overwork]] lead to him needing knee surgery. The exact circumstances of what happened next aren't really clear:
412** According to some sources, Josh's [[NightmareFuel heart stopped on the operating table]] [[GoneHorriblyWrong from complications from anaesthetic]], and was only brought back after several minutes of being functionally dead.
413** According to others, Josh contracted the antibiotic resistant 'superbug' MRSA from his surgery, choked on a breathing tube while sick, then suffered heart failure and had to be revived with a [[UsefulNotes/{{Defibrillators}} defribrillator]].
414** Either way, it's clear that he suffered a traumatising NearDeathExperience, which then served to heavily influence the lyrics and tone of ''...Like Clockwork''.
415** ''Lullabies to Paralyze'' was this, as well. The album's darker and moodier tone was the result of Josh's frustration with Nick Oliveri.
416** Happened again after Josh and his wife Brody Dalle divorced in 2019. His anguish and loneliness really show in the songs he performed in his bathroom at the start of the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic.
417* Music/PeterGabriel's 1992 album, ''Music/{{Us}}'' was something of a ConceptAlbum exploring communication and relationships between people. In the six years between ''Music/{{So}}'' and ''Us'', he had divorced his first wife Jill Moore, entered a relationship with and broke up with actress Rosanna Arquette, and saw his relationship with his eldest daughter Anna-Marie deteriorate (though they would reconcile later on). The belated follow-up album, 2002's ''Up'', dealt with death and mortality; Peter's father died during the making of the album, and he was haunted by the experience of not being able to communicate with his daughters who were living in New York City during the attacks on 9/11.
418* Virtually all of Lord Mantis's output can best be summed up as "Charlie Fell is a goddamn wreck". He's been very, very open about his serious drug problems and even admitted that music has been the only thing that has kept him from going off the deep end and winding up dead or in prison; that, coupled with no small amount of sexual confusion, has all showed up very prominently in his music, which is basically a CreatorBreakdown spanning an entire career that manifests as venomous self-loathing and seething misanthropy.
419* Music/GarthBrooks' fictional alter ego Chris Gaines, from ''Music/InTheLifeOfChrisGaines'', had a few of these in his career. His debut solo album ''Straight Jacket'' was released following the death of a band member from his former band Crush. ''Fornucopia'' came about following the death of his father from cancer. And ''Apostle'' came about from having survived an automobile accident and going through reconstructive surgery.
420* Music/ImagineDragons frontman Dan Reynolds admittedly experienced depression while writing the songs for ''Smoke + Mirrors'', which shows in the tracks' disillusioned and apologetic tones.
421* [[Music/ThreeDaysGrace Adam Gontier]] went through a bad painkiller addiction that became the basis of most of the lyrics on ''One-X''.
422* Back in 1969, Music/DoryPrevin went through a humiliating divorce after her husband left her for Creator/MiaFarrow, and ended up so depressed that she was institutionalized and underwent electroconvulsive therapy. Afterwards, she began writing more introspective songs. Her debut album ''On My Way to Where'' was a loose ConceptAlbum about her breakdown, climaxing with the scathing "[[TheVillainSucksSong Beware of Young Girls]]", which was aimed squarely at Farrow.
423* Music/{{Badfinger}}'s 1975 album ''Head First'' was written in the shadow of the peak of band's legal and financial crises, a result of corrupt management and legal entanglements with their then-label, Creator/WarnerBrosRecords; the album had been [[ScrewedByTheLawyers shelved until 2000]] as $100,000 was found missing from a Badfinger escrow account. The band had already seen guitarist Joey Molland leave (to be replaced by keyboardist/vocalist Bob Jackson), and three of the album's songs dealt with their money/management woes quite blatantly. Not long after, vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Pete Ham [[DrivenToSuicide would hang himself]] in his basement, effectively putting an end to the band until 1979's ''Airwaves'' album.
424* ''Dig Deep'' from {{Djent}} band from After the Burial has shades of this, as a combination of extreme stress, drug usage, longstanding emotional problems, and general frustration caused Justin Lowe to have a very public psychotic breakdown in June of 2015 when he made a lengthy, rambling, and largely incoherent post on Facebook about how he had left the band due to a supposed conspiracy between his bandmates, Sumerian Records, and most of his friends and family to ruin him. He was in the care of his family but apparently managed to run away; his unoccupied car was found in a parking lot on the Minnesota side of the St. Croix River, and on July 21, 2015, a hiker found a body that was later identified to be his, serving as a heartbreaking conclusion to a very sad saga.
425* Music/TheB52s. In 1985, guitarist Ricky Wilson was dying from AIDS and decided to confide it to Keith Strickland and no one else. Late that year, he died. Wilson's sister Cindy didn't find out he had AIDS until about three days before he died. Let's say that no one took Ricky's death well...
426* {{Trance}} producer RAM's first full-length artist album "Forever Love", and its lead single "[=RAMelia=]: Tribute to Amelia" (a [[{{Tearjerker}} truly heartwrenching]] GriefSong), was made with (in his own words) the whirlwind of emotions he went through when his beloved wife Amelia passed away.
427* The sudden death of bassist Jimmy Fernandez from a brain tumor resulted in The God Machine's second-most acclaimed album, ''One Last Laugh in a Place of Dying''. The band were already broken up by the time the album was released thanks to Fernandez's sudden death. Lead singer Robin Proper-Sheppard later formed the {{slowcore}} band Sophia as a way of coping with Fernandez's death, which continues to release music to this day.
428* Fran Healy of Music/{{Travis}} dealt with depression during the making of the album ''12 Memories'', which is a lot DarkerAndEdgier than any of their previous albums.
429* Dede Fortin of the Quebec band Les Colocs was suffering from bipolar disorder while also dealing with a former bandmate's AIDS-related death (Tassez-vous de d'la), break-ups and the result of the 1995 Quebec referendum wrote Dehors Novembre (1998), which was very dark compared to the previous upbeat sound they use to have. Eventually committed suicide via seppuku in 2000.
430* Hong Kong lyricist Albert Leung admitted to struggling with anxiety disorder around 2000, having uncharacteristic fights with his mother and losing his temper; he wrote "Shall We Talk" to express his feelings about parental relationships. And despite this, he reached his peak of his famous prolificacy in the early 2000s, writing 216 songs in 2000 alone.
431* Phil Elverum of solo project Mount Eerie had a nasty one after the death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, in 2016. His following project, ''A Crow Looked at Me'', was recorded in a very short amount of time following the event, vividly and intimately depicting his thoughts of mortality and sadness during the preamble and aftermath of her passing. [[TrueArtIsAngsty The album was widely praised by critics as an artistic experience]], but many of them also expressed discomfort at doing so due to just how visceral and deeply personal it is, [[https://drownedinsound.com/releases/19863/reviews/4150889 one review]] comparing the listening experience to an "act of morbid voyeurism."
432* Funeral Doom Metal band Music/BellWitch suffered one in 2016 when drummer Adrian Guerra passed away. Despite having left the band in 2015, vocalist/bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer/vocalist Jesse Shreibman were left shaken and heartbroken due to Guerra's contribution to the band's sound and instrumentation. The result was their own InMemoriam eighty-three minute EpicRocking opus ''Mirror Reaper'', which just screams their agony over Guerra's death and ''even featured Guerra's vocals'', which were unused vocal tracks he had recorded for the last album he contributed to the band (it being ''Four Phantoms'').
433* Music/{{CHVRCHES}}'s song "Under The Tide" may seem like just another breakup song, but when you realize it's actually about watching a terminally ill friend fade...
434* A lot of the comments on videos for [[Music/{{Enya}} "I May Not Awaken"]] tend to be speculation on whether Enya was struggling with her mental health when she wrote it. No official word on this, though.
435* "Ms. Jackson" by Music/OutKast was inspired by Andre 3000's then-recent breakup with Music/ErykahBadu who he also fathered a child with. The "Ms. Jackson" mentioned is Badu's mother.
436* Earl Sweatshirt's depression has been a constant theme in his music, but it came to a head in 2018 with the self-produced ''Some Rap Songs'', an album featuring a much muddier, choppier, and more soulful sound than his previous projects (similar to ''Music/{{Madvillainy}}'' or ''Music/{{Donuts}}'' but slower and much more dour than either), with Earl delving deeper into his depression than ever, speaking on substance abuse, his departure from [[Music/{{OFWGKTA}} Odd Future]], his relationship with his friends, and loneliness and isolation. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NoWhrIll90 "Peanut"]], the penultimate track, was recorded after and is about the death of his father, and is perhaps the darkest track on the album.
437* Post-Metal band We Lost the Sea lost their vocalist Chris Tropsy [[DrivenToSuicide to suicide]] in 2013, causing the band to shift to an instrumental post-rock style. Despite the loss of their friend, the band decided to make their album ''Departure Songs'', which in essence is ''RousseauWasRight: The Album'', focusing on tragic events but showcasing heavy amounts of bravery of those involved[[note]]Examples such as Lawrence Oates of the ill-fated ''Terra Nova'' expedition, the Chernobyl divers, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Shaw_(diver) the titular David Shaw]], and the Challenger team.[[/note]], arguably a parallel to how Tropsy was a positive influence on them despite his passing. It also became their most acclaimed album due to the raw power and emotion in the music, also adding it's SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic for PostRock.
438* While a small one, Neige of blackgaze darling Music/{{Alcest}} endured this: Following the tragic Paris shootings of 2015 that left several dead during a concert, Neige himself couldn't bring himself to write a purely happy record after making the LighterAndSofter ''Shelter''. The result ended up becoming a brutal but still Alcest-sounding album called ''Kodama'', inspired and being a semi-retelling of ''Anime/PrincessMononoke''. Fans even noted the parallels between Neige writing a dark album during a tumultuous time to Creator/HayaoMiyazaki creating ''Mononoke'' during the Falkland Wars.
439* The darker and more existential tone of Music/KeroKeroBonito's album ''Time 'n' Place'' was largely inspired by several unpleasant events that hit the band in 2017 - namely, the death of several loved ones, and the lead singer finding out her childhood home was demolished.
440* After Dan Auerbach got divorced, Music/TheBlackKeys recorded the slower and moody NewSoundAlbum ''Turn Blue'', which opens right away with the heartbroken "Weight of Love".
441* In 2018, Moriah Pereira, better known as Music/{{Poppy}}, was embroiled in a highly-publicized lawsuit from Music/MarsArgo (Brittany Sheets), who claimed that the Poppy project had been plagiarized by Titanic Sinclair -- Poppy's then-director and Mars' former collaborative partner -- in a long string of psychological and emotional abuse from Sinclair. While the suit was settled privately, and Poppy publicly denounced these allegations at first, this ended up causing a shift in her creative musical output, with several songs from her next few albums (such as "Hard Feelings" and "Anything Like Me") transparently referencing the fiasco and [[OldShame showing her remorse over her compliance with it and Sinclair]]. After months of gradually removing Sinclair's director credits from newer works, this trajectory concluded in late 2019 with Poppy publicly severing ties with him, not only redacting her previous accusations towards Argo but claiming that she too was a victim of similar acts of psychological abuse from him.
442* Music/CharliXCX chose to produce her fourth album, ''how i'm feeling now'', not long after lockdowns from the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic took a stranglehold on the world, with much of the lyrical content hinging around her physical and mental isolation from her loved ones and usual life of partying.
443* Thomas Andrew Dorsey wrote "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" while grieving deeply; his wife Nettie [[DeathByChildbirth had died giving birth to their son]], who also died shortly afterwards.
444* Music/FKATwigs' album ''MAGDALENE'' is rumored to be about her breakup with Creator/RobertPattinson. The song "Cellophane" specifically is thought to be about the struggles she had with having a relationship with such a public figure.
445* Music/IPrevail: as explained in the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhMt7kvgzRM&ab_channel=IPrevailBand video]] for "Hurricane", their sophomore album appropriatly titled "Trauma" was heavily inspired by the band's series of hardships after their rise to fame.
446* After the overdose and death of their ex-girlfriend Angel, Australian electronica musician Music/{{Sewerslvt}} offcially retired from music, but not before releasing one final album, "We had good times together, don't forget that" ''[sic]'' dedicated to Angel, and all but completely removed their presence from the internet at large.
447* Music/MeganTheeStallion ''Traumazine'' was released in an extremely difficult circumstances in her life; with songs detailing her reaction to the death of her grandmother and mother as well as the legal battles against her label and rapper Tory Lanez who was alleged (and later found guilty) to have shot her.
448* Why Ryo Kinoshita left Music/CrystalLake. A combination of the COVID-2019 Pandemic sweeping the world and mental health issues cause Ryo to be diagnosed with Adjustment Disorder led him to stepping down from Crystal Lake in 2021. [[https://youtu.be/OxYCjH105VA Ryo and Yosh explain more in this interview with Nik Nocturnal here.]]
449* Music/{{Zucchero}}: The 1992 album ''Miserere'', and in particular the song of the same name that was part of it, were conceived as Zucchero's way of expressing how his personal life struggled due to his divorce from his first wife.
450* Music/{{Qbomb}}: Part of the story in ''HYPERPUNK''. Following his bad response to his band's controversy, the protagonist is convinced that "everything he makes is shit" and wants to go insane. Someone convinces him that his sanity is actually helpful, so he realizes that ''nothing'' he makes will ever actually work. Cue a MadnessMantra of "I still SUCK!"
451* Music/FinArgus's 2022 song "Exposure" is an AuthorTract about how SocialMediaIsBad, he hates the need to have an active social media presence in order for his work to be known, and how he doesn't want to post everything about his life online even though he feels pressured to.
452* Music/WillWood's ''"In case I make it,"'' is a 16-track album of sorrowful songs about cute animals dying, how he hates being famous, substance abuse, the regrets he's had in his life, and a bit of SocialMediaIsBad. He went on an indefinite hiatus shortly after its release.
453-->''"And write a fucking song about it! 'Cause it has to be all about Will's fucking drama! God damn it!"''
454* Kristin Hayter of Music/LinguaIgnota fame based most of her music on her various instances of enduring trauma throughout her life, primarily regarding domestic abuse, retaliatory violence, and the despair of survivorship. ''Sinner Get Ready'' in particular was made during a nearly-two-year relationship with Alexis S.F. Marshall, who she has accused of extensive emotional and sexual abuse which nearly drove her to suicide. In the end of 2022, Hayter announced her retirement of the Lingua Ignota project specifically because she found it unhealthy to continue invoking and reliving her trauma, especially in performing it, [[CreatorRecovery leading her to pursue doing music in a less emotionally destructive manner]] as Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter.

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