Death Of A Child / Music

• The Decemberists song "The Rake's Song," where the entire point of the song is a rake who never wanted children, murders his kids after his fourth child was stillborn and the mother died in childbirth.
  • Another stillborn child is the ghostly eponymous narrator of "Leslie Anne Levine."
• Played for Drama in quite a number of Cormorant songs, including children being shot or drowning themselves. Even when one of the few times where they play this trope straight, said child ends up crossing the Despair Event Horizon.
• Reboot, sung by Hatsune Miku, Megurine Luka, and the fanmade Samune Zimi. The song is sweet and happy at first, until Zimi's character is hit by a truck and killed. It gets worse when her spirit is accidentally recalled from the afterlife by her friends, who blame each other for the death, but she gets a happy ending when her friends make up and she is reborn.
  • Also, as infamous in the Vocaloid fandom, 14-year-old Rin and Len Kagamine tend to be killed off a lot. Especially Len, at least seemingly. Them being the youngest among the Crypton Vocaloids (the most used series of Vocaloids), their deaths are definitely meant to invoke this.
• Ryan Dan's song "Tears of an Angel" is a poignant tribute to their four-year-old niece, who died of leukemia while they were recording their 2007 album.
• In 1993, Meat Loaf had a song titled "Objects In The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are". The first verse is about his childhood friendship with a boy named Kenny (no, not that one) and his early death. The music video shows he died when he took a plane for a joyride and crashed.
• "Runaway Love" by Ludacris has one of the abused girls befriending a girl presumed to be her age (ten). Her friend gets shot by a stray bullet and, without her only friend around anymore, she runs away.
• It's heavily implied that the titular Melissa from the Evelyn Evelyn song "Sandy Fishnets" was murdered on her 13th birthday after she grew too old to be in a part of the child prostitution ring.
• Gustav Mahler's song cycle "Kindertotenlieder" (meaning "Songs on the Death of Children"), based on a series of poems by Friedrich Rückert, is a series of reflections on the grief that follows losing a child. (As you might guess, Mahler was bit of a Germanic Depressive.)
• The titular person in the Grief Song "Lucy" by Skillet is an aborted baby. The singer regrets the decision.
• "Jeannie's Afraid Of the Dark," a Tearjerker duet by Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton that was a country hit in 1969 (as the flip side to their top 5 hit "We'll Get Ahead Someday"). The titular character is a little girl who is terminally ill and, as might be implied by the title, afraid of the dark. After her death, her parents are comforted by placing an eternal flame nearby, perhaps seeing her as the candle-bearer and light-holder at the Gates of Heaven.
• "Teddy Bear's Last Ride," a 1976 country single by Diana Williams, was one of several follow-up songs to the massively popular "Teddy Bear" by Red Sovine. This one, however, does not have a happy ending for the little boy, a paraplegic who was part of a spur-of-the-moment wish fulfillment series of truck rides. ^note (His own father had died in an accident when his truck jackknifed on an interstate highway during a blizzard.) Told from the point-of-view from Teddy Bear's mother's friend, a caretaker for the little boy, "Teddy Bear's Last Ride" suggests that the boy's paraplegia is part of a terminal health condition, one that eventually kills him. The song's ending has a group of truck drivers attending the boy's funeral, with one of the semitrailer trucks serving as the hearse. A complete inversion of the trope, from "Teddy Bear's Last Ride," occurs in Sovine's own follow-up, "Little Joe," where Teddy Bear is recovered from his illnesses and is a key character in this tale of reuniting a dog with his master.
• On the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's album Beethoven's Last Night, the Devil is trying to get Beethoven to surrender his last and greatest composition. Beethoven successfully rejects all of his other lures and tricks, so the Devil resorts to selecting a homeless child on the street outside of Beethoven's home and explains that he will torture her until she dies. Unable to accept this, Beethoven reluctantly agrees to the Devil's terms.
• Tupac Shakur's "Brenda's Got A Baby" is about a twelve year old girl who gets pregnant. Eventually, she runs away, turns to prostitution, and gets killed.
• Martina McBride's "Concrete Angel" is about a little girl who is abused by her mother. She's ultimately beaten to death. In the music video, the boy who befriends the girl is revealed to be an angel. At the end of the video, the two run off with a group of other ghostly children.
• Jason Michael Carroll's top-5 country hit from early 2007 "Alyssa Lies," a lament about how bureaucracy at the school and his own failure to report suspected child abuse resulted in the death of the title character, a 7-year-old girl who constantly lied about her injuries, even as it was clear that they were the result of abuse.
• "Wildside" by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch tells several tragic stories of people whose lives ended because they chose to explore the darker side of America...except the last one had no choice. She was a thirteen year old girl named Tiffany who was visiting family for the summer when a police chase came too close. During the resulting shootout, Tiffany was hit by a stray bullet and killed instantly.
• "Zombie" by The Cranberries opens with the lament of a child killed as a result of war and goes on to protest war in general and the effect on innocent children. The song itself was inspired by the second Warrington bombing, a terrorist attack on 20 February 1993 in Cheshire, England. Associated with The Troubles and executed with the support of the IRA, the only fatalities were two young boys, ages 3 and 12.
• The first three deaths mentioned in Jim Carroll's "People Who Died":
  • Teddy who fell from a roof after sniffing glue. He was only twelve.
  • Kathy who overdosed on "reds" and wine at eleven.
  • Bobby who died from leukemia at fourteen. After him, ages aren't given, but the victims' actions suggest they're too old for this trope.
• Christmas With The Tabernacle Choir typically has a portion of narration accompanied by the choir and orchestra, some of which deal with this topic.
  • "A Christmas Bell For Anya" ends with eight-year-old Anya dying when a mob/army roaming turn-of-the-century Tsarist Russia storms through her village.
  • "It is Well With My Soul" deals with the writer of that song and the tragedies his family experienced, most notably the loss of all four of his daughters during the sinking of the SS Ville du Havre.
• A number of 19th-century songs were prompted by the infant mortality rate of the times, such as "Baby's Gone to Heaven" and "Cradle's Empty, Baby's Gone".