My God What Have I Done / Music

• "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads is the trope namer, although it isn't quite a traditional example. The song is largely a paranoid ramble about the banality and existential panic of achieving a "safe", but generic and eventless middle-class life, so in context, David Byrne dropping this line doesn't specifically denote "My god, I've made a horrible mistake!", but "My god, I spent my life trying to find satisfaction — slaving away for a beautiful house and beautiful wife — and in ignoring what I have without enjoying it, I've ultimately gained nothing!"
• Evillious Chronicles:
  • In "Project "Ma"", Adam Moonlit essentially brainwashes Eve into loving him so he can use her as a subject for the project (which involves giving birth to twins). When the twins miscarry he realizes not only that his machinations have destroyed her mind, but that he genuinely loves her back.
  • In "Regret Message," after losing her kingdom, her home, her throne, and even her brother due to the tyrannical actions of her reign, Princess Rilianne travels to a beach that she and her brother used to go to when they were younger. As she puts a message in a bottle detailing the sins of her past, she breaks down in tears realizing that her selfishness has cost her everything and everyone she's ever loved.
• Relient K's "Deathbed" lampshades this. The narrator is on his deathbed and recounting his life and all the mistakes he made, including a shotgun wedding, a loveless marriage that ended in divorce, a few kids that are implied to not see him much after said divorce, and a drinking problem that nearly kills him at one point. At the end Jesus appears to take the narrator to heaven because he repented heavily in his last few years.
  You cried "wolf" / the tears they soaked your fur / the blood dripped from your fangs. / You said "What have I done?"
• On their first live album, Five Iron Frenzy prefaces a hidden track of Hilarious Outtakes with an introduction from the singer, containing the line:
  Reese Roper: You may notice that we are not rock stars, because you will hear these mess-ups and you will say to yourself, "My God, what have I done? What have I done?!" Oh, yes, you will.
• The House of Heroes song "Voices" is about a soldier having this kind of realization.
  In the silent hour I can hear them/ Pray to the Mother but the Mother doesn't love my soul/ In the blacked earth lay my secrets/ The hounds of Hell know everything...
• "The Ballad Of You Know Who" by Richard Swift deserves mention, for using this phrase as the entire chorus of the song.
• Seems to occur towards the end of the Vocaloid song "Rotten Heresy and Chocolate" about a girl who has a habit of spreading gossip turning her sights on a classmate, telling all her friends about how the girl is supposedly having sex with one of their teachers. In the final verse, she acknowledges how cruel she's been for her own amusement and how her guilt makes her want to avoid looking at the consequences of her actions.
  What will you fill into the grooves eaten out by the worms?
  I'll make an exception and let you take a grip of the tail I've grown out of guilt
• Iron Savior, of (unsurprisingly,) Iron Savior has one of these, touched on in a few songs. "I've Been To Hell";
  Out of control in this deadly machine
  Innocent victims are haunting my dreams
  • and "Made of Metal";
  Built and designed to obey, to keep Man alive
  Oh I have failed... Now they struggle to survive
• This is basically how the Handlebars video ends.
• "Father of Death" by The Protomen.
  • The crowd murmurs this a couple of times in "Hope Rides Alone", although it seems to boil down to an Ignored Epiphany.
• The first line of "It Gets Better" by Fun.: "What have we done? Oh, my God!" The answer? They lost their virginity together.
• Similar to the "Handlebars" mention above: Zero Sum, the final song on Nine Inch Nails' album "Year Zero" is basically one last humble apology from humanity to everyone who was hurt by the dystopian government that was allowed to come into power in the first place. All while the world quietly ends in the background.
  Shame on us
  For all we have done
  And all we ever were
  Just zeroes and ones...
• Criminally Insane by Slayer.
  Disapprobation, but what have I done
  I have yet only just begun
  To take your fuckin' lives!
• "Evaporated" by Ben Folds Five uses this line as the last line of the chorus - though it's never actually revealed what the singer actually has done.
• Forgive Durden's musical, Razia's Shadow uses this trope in a near-verbatim manner at the conclusion of "Toba the Tura," when Ahrima comes to grips with his sin of destroying the lamps.
  What have I done?
  Please make me your son
  What have I become?
  Destroyed all I love!
  • Also in Razias Shadow, Pallis' reaction to stabbing Adakias, thus causing his brother's death. While having been aware of what he intended to do, his reaction is full of regret; "Brother, what have I done? My blade has pierced your side. This was never my intent, oh god, please stay alive!" And then "Please don't let your tired heart stop beating. You're bleeding. Just keep breathing!"
• In the song "The Flame" by Chimera, the lasts lines are "Oh God…What Have I Done"
• The protagonist of Genesis' "One for the Vine" becomes the murderous conquerer he (as a lowly foot soldier) had deserted at the beginning of the song. No, not just a very similar figure - the exact same one.
  • 'Dreaming While You Sleep' carries heavy undertones of this, as the protagonist hits a pedestrian with his car ... and drives off, hoping 'the miles between would somehow put it right'.
• The Iced Earth song "Gettysburg(1863)-High Water Mark" features an example in the form of Robert E. Lee lamenting the Confederate army's loss at the battle, due to his plan.
  I look across this blood soaked land
  All this blood is on my hands
  God forgive me, please forgive me
  It's all my fault, the blood is on my hands!
• In the song "In the Glass" by OK Go, the protagonist immediately regrets his decision to become his reflection.
  But oh, what have I done? What have I done?
  My God, what have I done?
• Tarby wrote a 20 minute My Little Pony song based on the infamous Cupcakes fanfic. Pinkie Pie goes through this after the first murder.
• Though you'll never hear these words in Pink Floyd's The Wall, the songs "Hey You" and "Stop" serve this purpose. In the first instance, he realizes exactly what he's done by completing the wall; in the second, he's horrified by what he's turned into.
  • The Final Cut also features this line: "What have we done? Maggie [Thatcher], what have we done? What have we done to England?"
• "Warm Blood Rush" by Destroyer and "A Single Word" by Music/The Fall of Troy share an opening line: "Dear God, what have I done?"
• The third refrain from "She's Leaving Home" by The Beatles:
  She (What did we do that was wrong?)
  Is having (We didn't know it was wrong)
  Fun (Fun is the one thing that money can't buy)
• Machine Head's "Now I Lay Thee Down."
  What have I done? I've gone and killed the only one I love. How could I do this?
  I'm screaming at God, why do you curse me?
  Fuck it, load it, sever the day.
• The title track to Underoath's debut album Act of Depression—whose subject matter differs drastically from what they would do later—combines this with a Perspective Flip. The first two thirds of the song accounts the thoughts of a depressed person Driven to Suicide, who makes clear that being bullied was the deciding factor in finalizing the choice. The song then switches to the POV of one of the bullies, who has this very reaction upon seeing the dead body of the song's initial subject.
  Victim: Thanks to all the people who drove me to death. Without you, I could have never ended my breath. Through your anger and hate, I was able to choose my fate. There was a way out, but I chose the easy route.
  
  Narrator: Ice cold fingers, body lays on the floor. Pool of blood you see, you scream out in terror. Her body is now a part of mutilation, her soul the victim of strangulation.
  
  Bully: I will not accept this evil anymore! I never thought of who I hurt or I never tried to look for the good. I'm sorry for whoever I hurt. It's not easy to look back on my life and know I did not know Christ. For now I live in a real hell. I wish I had another chance. Then I would live my life with love.
• "Neon Orange Glimmer Song [We'll Meet on the Street Tomorrow.]" by the Mountain Goats features a narrator who describes himself as a monster for something he has done.
  And I, I am a monster
  I can't believe the thing I've done
• In "White Pearl, Black Oceans..." by Sonata Arctica, the lighthouse-keeper has this reaction when he realizes shirking his duties for one night on New Year's Eve resulted in the White Pearl being destroyed due to crashing into the very rocks his lighthouse is there to warn against. He ends up leaping off the lighthouse, dashing himself on those same rocks.
  I hereby commit my body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body. When the sea shall give up her dead, the life of the world will come to our Lord. Amen...
• In Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop", Frankie says this after shooting his wife and kid, before turning the gun on himself.
• From Cormorant's song "Junta":
  His daughter bound in an army base
  used by soldiers in turn,
  till a rapist discerned her familiar face
  and, shamed, set her free.
• "Timothy" by the Buoys is about three miners trapped by a cave-in facing starvation. By the time a rescue team digs them out, only two of them are left. The titular Timothy is nowhere to be found ... because the other two turned cannibal and ate him. One of the survivor's guilt and remorse is apparent in the following lines:
  Timothy, Timothy, Joe was looking at you,
  Timothy, Timothy — God, what did we do?
• The first words of the chorus of "The Departure" by Falling in Reverse are this verbatim.
• "Banks of the Ohio" is a folk song about a man named Willie murdering his love for rejecting his marriage proposal. He immediately regrets it, crying "my God, what have I done?"
• Brad Paisley's "Whiskey Lullaby"'s first half has a man becoming an alcoholic after he gets his heart broken by a woman, killing himself when it gets too hard to keep going. Its second half is about that woman becoming an alcoholic and ending up killing herself because of her overwhelming guilt. Their friends decide to bury them under the same tree.
• Near the end of Mitch Benn's "Ed Sheeran Gets Everywhere":
  And everyone thinks it's just super-duper,
  Playing on a small guitar with a looper.
  Which some of us were doing already, incidentally,
  Oh Christ, you don't think he got it from me?
  I was just trying to have a bit of musical fun,
  My God, what have I done?
• The Megas:
  • Dr Light laments helping Wily build the first Robot Masters, thereby kicking off the endless battle, in "The Message from Dr Light":
    My mistakes, and my sins - what have I done?
  • Mega Man ends Get Equipped with "Lamentations of a War Machine", which is entirely about his regrets about all the killing he's had to do. It takes him most of the History Repeating double album to recover.
    If I've a heart made of steel/Then does that mean I cannot feel/Remorse for everything I've done? My hand's a smoking gun!
  • Even Wily has his regrets, but the only one he has trouble rationalising is the creation of Gamma, a "peacekeeping robot" that becomes an Omnicidal Maniac:
    (First two choruses) I'll give you power, you'll take control.
    (Final chorus) What good is power? You're out of control!
• "Afterglow" by Taylor Swift is about her feeling massive guilt after having a pointless fight with someone she loves and hurting them.
  Why'd I have to break what I love so much?
  It's on your face, and I'm to blame, I need to say
  Hey, it's all me, in my head
  I'm the one who burned us down
• "Careless Whisper" by George Michael is about him betraying a friend (possibly cheating on them, though it could be he let slip something they told him in confidence, as the title suggests) and feeling really guilty about it
  I'm never gonna dance again, guilty feet have got no rhythm
• "What I've Done" by Linkin Park mixes this with The Atoner and themes of rebirth and starting over. Bennington even explicitly stated on The Other Wiki that the song was about the band itself, specifically how they've changed over the years and what they planned on doing musically going forward.
• "Wake Up Call" by Maroon 5 is about Adam Levine finding out his girlfriend cheated on her with another man and as a result, shot him. During the bridge, he begins to realise what he did was wrong and begins rhetorically asking his partner whether he did the right thing, knowing full well it was a mistake he was foolish to make. As he comes to terms with what he’s done he begins to panic, checking to see if the dead adulterer has a pulse, which he evidently won’t.
  I'm so sorry, darling
  Did I do the wrong thing?
  Oh, what was I thinking?
  Is his heart still beating?