Reality Subtext / Music

• Warren Zevon's final album The Wind carried a much more depressing tone than his previous albums, as Zevon was dying of lung cancer and the album was meant to be his swan song.
• Most of Queen's later songs are about the futility of life and the inevitability of death. At the time Freddie Mercury was dying of AIDS.
• In 1991, most of Reba McEntire's road band was killed in a plane crash. The next album she released, titled For My Broken Heart, was a collection of heartbreaking songs. McEntire explicitly stated that the project was intended to help her and her team through their grief.
• The most famous Ur-Example for a generation may be Alanis Morissette's biggest hit, "You Oughta Know" from Jagged Little Pill, based on a former bad relationship of the Canadian singer. It's still debated who that guy was, with pro hockey players and Full House's Dave Coulier being the most popular choices.
• From the same generation comes Eric Clapton's song "Tears in Heaven". It was written in the immediate aftermath of his young son's death, and the song quickly became far more famous as his personal response to that tragedy than for ostensibly being a soundtrack song for the movie Rush.
• Similarly, the song "All My Love" from Led Zeppelin's album In Through The Out Door, was about front-man Robert Plant's son's sudden death from a stomach infection.
• Much of Rush's 2002 album Vapor Trails deals with overcoming tragedy. This is based on two events: First, the deaths of lyricist Neil Peart's wife and daughter within a year of each other, shortly after the release of their previous album, Test For Echo (particularly "Ghost Rider"). Second, the 9/11 attacks the previous year (most blatantly "Peaceable Kingdom").
• David Bowie's 1993 song "Jump They Say" was inspired by the suicide of his schizophrenic half-brother Terry in 1985.
  • His late-1970s works saw Bowie in the throes of cocaine addiction and divorce. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) depicted Bowie recovering from the addiction.
  • In late 2014, Bowie was diagnosed with liver cancer. ★, recorded early the following year, was composed as a way for Bowie to reflect on this information and the very real possibility that the disease would kill him. It did: his cancer was declared terminal in November, and he passed away on January 10, 2016, two days after both ★'s release and his 69th birthday.
• Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" from American Idiot is about Billie Joe Armstrong's father's death from cancer when Billie was 10. The funeral was at the beginning of September, and when he came home from it with his mum, Billie locked himself in his bedroom, telling his mum to wake him up when the month ended.
• Harry Chapin's song "Cat's in the Cradle" was based on a poem his wife wrote and was inspired by not being present at his son's birth.
• Steven Curtis Chapman's song "Cinderella", about a father reflecting on how quickly his daughter is growing up and that he needs to be there for her even when he's busy, was originally inspired by his young daughters trying to get his attention by putting on Cinderella costumes and dancing while he was rushing through their bedtime routine so that he could get to the studio and work. The song—which features lyrics like "Soon the clock will strike midnight and she'll be gone"—took on a tragic meaning later when one of his daughters that inspired the song, Maria Sue, was killed when her older brother accidentally ran over her in the driveway of their home. Although Chapman originally decided to never sing the song live again, he later decided to use the song to reflect his hope that he'd see his daughter again in Heaven, changing the final line from "she'll be gone" to "I know the dance will go on."
• In-Universe example: in the film A Mighty Wind, Mitch Cohen's solo work after the breakup of the group Mitch & Mickey mimic his growing depression and mental instability, featuring such albums as "Cry for Help" (cover: Mitch in a padded room restrained by a straightjacket) and "Calling it Quits" (cover: Mitch waist-deep in a grave holding a shovel, with a tombstone behind him reading "RIP Mitch Cohen"). Like almost everything else in the movie, this is played for laughs.
• Teen Pop example: Miley Cyrus wrote the songs on her Breakout album following her breakup with her first serious boyfriend, Nick Jonas. Several of the songs refer to the breakup.
  • In turn, The Jonas Brothers album Lines, Vines And Trying Times might contain songs written from Nick's standpoint about that same breakup.
  • Miley's 2013 New Sound Album Bangerz was recorded at the age of 20-going-on-21 following a transitional period in her life. She had stayed in Detroit filming LOL, then shot So Undercover in Philadelphia, where according to Word of God Miley had for the first time in her life truly grown up, away from her family, her comfort zone in Toluca Lake, California, and her Disney bubble. She had gotten her first tattoo away from the supervision of her mother, went clubbing, gotten to walk around freely in the streets of Philadelphia without paparazzi, enjoying life, and she had gotten a pixie haircut. She left her manager and record label, decided after the limited releases and subsequent flops of those films to concentrate almost exclusively on music and worked on developing a new sound and mature lyrical/musical approach to the album, working with producers Mike Will Made It and Pharrell Williams. She had worked so intensely on the record, apparently her most personal record, that her longtime relationship to fiance Liam Hemsworth deteriorated. They called off their engagement not long before the album came out. The album's lyrics reflect these changes; in keeping with her new image and Hotter and Sexier approach, the album was released with an Explicit Lyrics sticker for the first time in her career.
• Elton John and his lyricist partner Bernie Taupin were on a career high in 1976. Albums were debuting at #1, and Elton was perhaps the top solo artist of The '70s. Personally, though, Elton and Bernie were both burned out from the rock lifestyle and superstardom. Elton broke up with his boyfriend, manager John Reid, while Bernie's first marriage was collapsing. Elton and Bernie had taken to drugs and alcohol, and Elton would soon reveal himself as a bisexual (in 1988, he would come clean as gay) to Rolling Stone magazine, leading to a backlash in Middle America. Elton's mental health was eroding as well, leading to depression and failed suicide attempts. This would be the context of Elton's 1976 double album Blue Moves, an album filled with dark, introspective, despairing songs about failed relationships and dark character studies, with bits of bitter irony scattered around. Oddly enough, it would later be cited as one of Elton's favorite albums that he made.
  • The One and songs like "Runaway Train", "Simple Life" and the title track, and subsequent songs like "Weight Of The World", "Dark Diamond", "The Bridge" and "My Elusive Drug" reflect on Elton's rehabilitation in 1990.
• Dan Fogelberg's 1980 song "Same Old Lang Syne" tells the story of how the singer met and caught up with an old flame one Christmas Eve. It turns out that the song is, with some minor changes, Based on a True Story. It happened in 1975, and the woman he caught up with was actually his high-school sweetheart. She came forward after Fogelberg's death in 2008. She said she waited because she feared needlessly harming his marriage.
• 1978 saw Progressive Rock band Genesis score their first hit, an (at the time) uncharacteristically romantic pop ballad called "Follow You Follow Me". They embarked on their longest, most successful tour yet, with a new audience thanks to FYFM's popularity. Phil Collins returned to an empty home, his wife having left him (she had an affair with the house painter, then left for her native Canada) and taken the kids and dogs with her. Phil and the band took a hiatus for Phil to (unsuccessfully) repair the relationship. He channeled his grief and frustration into his first solo album, Face Value. the songs he contributed to Genesis' Duke album, and some of Phil's Hello, I Must Be Going album. "Against All Odds", in fact, was written around the same time.
  • Collins later channeled the grief of his second marriage collapsing in songs on his But Seriously... and Both Sides albums. "Dance Into The Light" and Testify, more "up" albums lyrically and musically, celebrate his romance to Orianne Cevey, who would be his third wife (they'd sadly divorce as well).
• Earlier, former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel felt stifled. The band wanted to lean more towards top 40 material, whereas he wanted to continue experimenting with Progressive Rock. This was as the band was starting to reach mainstream success, and Gabriel's personal life (troubled marriage, sick daughter) meant that giving up his creative ambitions looked like a sensible option. He rejected the "sensible option" and started his solo career with the triumphant "Solsbury Hill," about his decision to take that risk and leave.
  • His 1992 album Us was written while Gabriel was divorcing his first wife Jill, going through a breakup with actress girlfriend Rosanna Arquette, and estranged from his daughter Anna. The resulting album lyrically deals with dysfunction and miscommunication in relationships.
  • Up deals with mortality and death, a reflection of the death of his father and that of a mutual friend.
• Alan Jackson's "I'll Go On Loving You" (self-explanatory) was released around the time that he and longtime wife Denise were going through some rough times, and actually spent some time apart from each other to cool down.
• Demi Lovato recorded their hit, "Skyscraper", during the time period when their then-unknown depression, eating disorder and self-harm issues were at their peak, and their bulimia was damaging their voice. They claim the raw, emotional vocal take used was Demi singing from the heart as a kind of cry for help. A more technically polished take was apparently attempted post-rehab, but they preferred the more raw and emotional performance from the year before.
• The nostalgic, fun-loving album An Innocent Man was recorded in 1983 during Billy Joel's courtship to supermodel Christie Brinkley, who would be Billy's second wife. The bitter, self-reflective River Of Dreams was recorded in 1994 following his legal battle with his ex-brother-in-law (to his first wife) turned financial manager, and while Joel was breaking up with Brinkley.
• Afro Celt Sound System's song "Release" is sung from the perspective of someone dead, encouraging the living to not "argue amongst yourselves / because of the loss of me", and to "be happy for me". These lyrics were written in the aftermath of keyboardist Jo Bruce's sudden death—the rest of the band had to put their upcoming album on hiatus as they mourned. Sinead O'Connor penned the lyrics, and it was the inspiration the band needed to come to terms with Bruce's death.
• Pink Floyd's The Wall was actually Roger Waters' way of dealing with the realization that he was becoming a cold and destructive person, like Pink, the eponymous character of the album, and a way for him to reverse course on that. There are numerous other references to Pink Floyd's internal issues throughout the album as well, such as Pink saying that he has "a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains" being a reference to Richard Wright's cocaine addiction.
  • Waters wrote The Wall, The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking and parts of The Final Cut (mostly songs left off of The Wall) in the same 1978-79 period, during his Creator Breakdown. The songs are lyrically and musically similar to each other and share similar themes of adultery, divorce, alienation, personal reflection, paranoia, fear, war, lack of communication and aging.
  • The Dark Side of the Moon was written while Waters was 29, and fearing time pass him by while he felt disappointed that he hadn't really had a real breakthrough success with Pink Floyd in the years following Syd Barrett's departure. Much of the album deals with mortality and the meaning of life. The follow-up, Wish You Were Here (1975), was built around the pressures of the music industry, the band's disjointing and lack of focus when under pressure to record DSOTM and watching the positive and negative effects of their amazing success affect the band.
  • David Gilmour wrote The Division Bell after a period dealing with cocaine addiction and overeating, adultery, legal issues, a painful divorce from his first wife, an initially sometimes-rocky relationship with his current wife, troublesome relations between himself and his Pink Floyd band members, a period of writers block and his estrangement from Roger Waters. The album deals with breakdowns in communication and the struggles he faced during that time.
  • The themes of lack of communication between band members and their wives are equally explored on albums like Obscured By Clouds and Atom Heart Mother, notably "Stay", "If" and "Summer '68". All four band members' first marriages would break up by the end of The '80s and would contribute to the Creator Breakdowns of each member (Gilmour, Wright, and Mason would be affected vias strong cases of Writer's Block, which would lead indirectly to their estrangement from Roger Waters).
• John Lennon, with The Beatles and as a solo artist, often wrote songs based on his personal life, sometimes as events were happening to him. Most famously, his Mind Games and Walls And Bridges albums (1973 and 1974 respectively) were written as John and Yoko separated and as John moved to Los Angeles to go through a painful two-year alcoholic binge he later referred to as his "lost weekend". Double Fantasy (1980) and Milk And Honey (recorded in 1980; posthumously released in 1984) saw John five years later, having reunited with Yoko, moved back to New York City, cleaned up, taken control of his life and living away from the music industry for five years to raise their son Sean and become a house-husband.
• Lennon's ex-writing partner Paul McCartney wrote the 1972 song "Dear Friend" as a peace offering to Lennon during the pair's very public feuding, and the 1982 song "Here Today" as a posthumous tribute to John. "Put It There" was a tribute to Paul's then recently deceased father.
  • Paul's Driving Rain album was written while he was in the glow of love to second wife Heather Mills. Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, in retrospect, may have reflected the pair's strained relationship, which would end in a bitter divorce.
  • Wings guitarist Jimmy McCulloch struggled with drug and alcohol dependency, and his two Wings compositions, "Medicine Jar" from Venus And Mars", and "Wino Junko" from Wings At The Speed Of Sound", seem to reflect on his struggles. He died in 1979 of morphine and alcohol poisoning, two years after leaving Wings and a short stint in The Small Faces.
• The Kinks' "Two Sisters" is about a young woman who is married with children - she starts off being jealous of the more glamorous life led by her single, freewheeling sister, then realizes she's better off because her children are important to her. Ray Davies actually meant the song to be a Gender Flipped portrayal of the relationship at the time to his band-mate and brother Dave Davies: He was married with children, while Dave was single and more free to live the rock star lifestyle.
• Metallica's St. Anger was born out of struggling with diminishing relationships between the band members, alcoholism and never getting over Cliff Burton's death. This is all painfully documented in the rockumentary Some Kind Of Monster.
• Taylor Swift's romantic relationships and personal life are often reflected upon in her songs, sometimes to the point of humorists joking that she must start and end romances to provide subject matter for her music.
  • Much like the Hideaki Anno example right in the anime folder, this may overlap with Creator Breakdown when it doesn't end well.
• Due to the sometimes foul mood Ian Anderson went through recording Jethro Tull's Minstrel In The Gallery album, at a time when Ian was going through a divorce from his first wife, and he felt his band splintering and not playing as well together or concentrating on the music as well as they could have been (much of the album was acoustic/acoustical as a result), and he was busy writing the music in tax exile in Monte Carlo while watching "grotesque" tourists lounge around on the beach, the album had an even more cynical, darker (and self-reflective) air to it than usual. Ian would in later years see it as well-recorded but humorless, and would cite it as one of his less favorite albums as a result, in spite of it being a fan favorite to this day.
  • Benefit saw Ian coping with success, the pressures of being seen as a countercultural hero, mistaken as a drug user/hippie for his madcap performing image and long hair, and his alienation at not really relating to many aspects of the counterculture who idolized him, such as recreational drug taking. He also saw conformity in how the counterculture conducted themselves, and in interviews expressed his distaste for the "seas of blue denim" flocking to his concerts^note One anecdote made by Ian in an interview taken around this time claimed that had Jesus been alive today, he and Ian would be turning over the racks of blue denim at all of the clothing stores in town. He'd explore this further in Thick As A Brick.)
  • Ian also suggested the reasons for A Passion Play being written so complexly and with so little chances for the listener to breathe, is because Ian was fed up with drunken audience members whistling and screaming for "Aqualung" or "Locomotive Breath" during the soft acoustic passages during Tull's performances of Thick As A Brick, a decision that in hindsight, Ian regrets, and felt helped lead the album to be a hard listen (even for Ian) and so critically panned.
• Tragically, the pained breakup songs written by Motown staff writer Rodger Penzabene, including The Temptations' hits "I Wish It Would Rain", "You're My Everything" and "I Could Never Love Another (After Loving You)" and the Gladys Knight/Marvin Gaye duet "The End Of Our Road" were inspired by the songwriter's Real Life heartbreak over his wife's adultery, and the couple's subsequent divorce. According to The Other Wiki, Penzabene would commit suicide on New Year's Eve 1967, one week after "I Wish It Would Rain"'s release.
• Much of the music and lyrics written by Elvis Costello, at least judging by the liner notes of the 1990s remasters of his albums, seemed to be written by Costello as he gradually took on the same Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll lifestyle (mainly pills, alcohol and one-night-stands) he promised himself he'd never get involved in. Armed Forces and Get Happy!! in particular are filled with songs of regret, anger, and heartbreak. His lifestyle, and the dissolution of his friendship with Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas, also seemed to accelerate the end of his first marriage, which would inform latter-period albums like Goodbye Cruel World and Blood & Chocolate.
• "You Try Somebody Else (We'll Be Back Together Again)" was one of the last songs written by B.G. De Sylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson before De Sylva left the songwriting team. De Sylva did go on to write songs with other collaborators (as did Brown and Henderson after they broke up a few years later) but never reunited with Brown or Henderson, and ultimately gave up songwriting to become a movie producer.
• Dennis DeYoung of Styx, similarly to Roger Waters, felt disenchanted and disappointed in his lack of success in the music industry, and had seriously considered quitting music to be a professional teacher in 1976; thankfully, his wife talked him out of it. Much of his music on The Grand Illusion, Pieces Of Eight, Cornerstone and Paradise Theatre are filled with songs of hope and affirmation. He claims he wrote the songs about himself to raise up his own hopes to and convince himself to never give up, and that it was a bonus that it touched so many other listeners similarly. Likewise, a lot of Killroy Was Here came about because conspiracy theory about alleged Satanic lyrics in their music and the attempts by said Moral Guardians to try and ban rock albums.
• The sole member of Grottomatic was so frustrated with the Brony culture that he wrote the song “The Bronies Have Landed,” portraying the whole Brony concept as a serious problem. By the time he had finished recording the song, he had learned to love it, and he soon wrote a followup called “Girly Cartoon About Ponies,” which praises the show.
• The Rolling Stones were on the verge of breaking up due to differences between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards by 1986's Dirty Work, a fact reflected in the conflictive/bitter lyrical content of the album's lyrics/song titles. By 1989's Steel Wheels, they had patched things up (quite possibly reflected in the album's lead single, "Mixed Emotions").
• Lisa Loeb's song "I Do" was written to sound like a breakup song, but it is also a Take That! to the record label agents who claimed they didn't hear a single on the album Firecracker (thus the hook "you don't hear it, but I do") .
• George Michael wrote the song "Freedom '90" expressly to commemorate the end of his contract with Sony Records. His music video for the song included, among other things, him burning his iconic leather jacket which he had worn in videos and promotional artwork for Wham.
• A particularly notable example would be the song "Save the Last Dance For Me". Its composer, Doc Pumus, suffered from polio and was inspired to write the song after watching his wife dance with other people at their wedding.
• At the time Dolly Parton wrote "I Will Always Love You", she was on Porter Waggoner's syndicated TV show. She wanted to leave the show to foster her budding solo career but wanted him to know that she appreciated all he did for her, and her thoughts resulted in the song. After she played it for him, he decided to release her from her contract as long as she had "Love You" recorded. It would go on to become a huge country hit and the rest is history.
• "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" is a hymn about someone in deep despair begging God to comfort them and give them strength. Thomas A. Dorsey wrote it after his wife Nettie died giving birth to their son, who also died two days later.
• The Headstones album The Oracle of Hi-Fi has a number of songs that reference rehabilitation, addiction, and mistakes. This album was recorded after lead singer Hugh Dillon got treatment for drug addiction. Incidentally, it is pretty apparent during the title track of their previous album, Nickels For Your Nightmares, that this album was recorded before his rehabilitation.
• Lesley Gore's 1972 album, Someplace Else Now, was written entirely by Gore and her writing partner Ellen Weston after a five year absence from the music business, during which Lesley had graduated college, come to terms with her sexuality, found herself becoming less and less in favor in the music industry after her Mercury Records contract expired and opportunities dried up, took on non-musical jobs for a while before deciding to move to California and make a return to the music industry, and refashioned herself as a singer-songwriter in the mold of the then-trendsetting Carole King and Laura Nyro as outside writers failed to present her with challenging material to record. The album is much more introspective, ambitious, and darker-themed than any Lesley album before (or maybe since).
• "I Was Born (A Unicorn)" by The Unicorns has a call-and-response bridge, presented as a musical argument between members Nicholas Thorburn and Alden Penner: This includes exchanges like "We're never gonna stop / I think I wanna stop!" and "I write the songs / I write the songs / You say I'm doing it wrong / You are doing it wrong!". Though it's played for laughs in the song, the band would break up a year later, citing Creative Differences and other tensions between Nicholas and Alden.