Funny Aneurysm Moment/Music



""Look on the bright side is suicide...""
 * The Final Cut by Pink Floyd is both disturbingly prophetic and harrowing to listen to. Granted, the album was protesting the 1982 invasion of The Falkland Islands by the UK, but the track "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" features someone (Roger Waters) screaming, "Hey! Get your filthy hands off my desert!", followed shortly by the sound of an airplane flying over and an explosion.
 * The name of the band "Katrina And The Waves" (whose hits include "Walking on Sunshine") became retroactively disturbing after the events of Hurricane Katrina, in which huge, record-breaking 25-foot storm surges (aka "waves") devastated the gulf coast and breached approximately 50 of the levees surrounding the city of New Orleans, resulting in catastrophic flooding, nearly $90 billion in property damage, and worst of all the loss of more than 2,000 lives.
 * It is a little-known fact that in the early 1970s, the People's Temple Choir released a gospel album called He's Able, a collection of hymns that would otherwise be typical religious passion. Unfortunately, everyone involved in the gospel recordings is presumed to have died in Jonestown, and the album was reissued on CD as a morbid curiosity (like Charles Manson's recordings). The CD release contains Jim Jones' suicide sermon as a bonus track.
 * The Thrash/Hardcore band Early Graves was on tour with fellow Californian band The Funeral Pyre when a van accident took the life of Makh, their vocalist. Needless to say, the name and the fact that they had recently released an album entitled "Goner" didn't help much.
 * Many things surrounding Kurt Cobain became this after this suicide.
 * At least one DJ, shortly after Kurt's suicide, quipped, "Well, you lied, Kurt. You did have a gun" in reference to a repeated line from "Come As You Are".
 * Then there's the Nirvana publicity photo exposed atop this page.

""Pessimist, terrorist targeting the next mark
 * He also wrote "I'd rather be dead than cool".
 * Nirvana also recorded a song titled "I Hate Myself and Want to Die", which was supposed to be released as a B-side to the "Pennyroyal Tea" single. The title of the song was chosen as a rather sarcastic in-joke, at least according to an interview Cobain gave Rolling Stone in January 1994. When Kurt died, the single was immediately shelved, though it had already been released a year before on the compilation The Beavis and Butthead Experience.
 * The metal band Slayer recorded the song "Disciple", featured on God Hates Us All, contains heartwarming lines such as these:

Global chaos feeding on hysteria"

"Man made virus infecting the world

Self-destruct human time bomb.""

"I am the damned
 * On the God Hates Us All note, it was one of a handful of albums released on September 11, 2001.
 * Progressive metal band Dream Theater originally released their live album "Live: Scenes From New York" with artwork showing the NYC skyline, including the Twin Towers, in flames. The album was released on September 11, 2001. It was quickly recalled, and the artwork was changed -- but some copies with the original artwork were sold.
 * The Replacements, in 1981, recorded a song called "Johnny's Gonna Die" about New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders, who had a notorious drug addiction. Ten years after the song was released, Johnny Thunders did indeed die, presumably of drug-related causes. Replacements guitarist Bob Stinson died a few years afterwards, largely due to the toll years of drug and alcohol abuse took on his body.
 * In the music videos for his solo songs "Misery" and "Oblaat", X Japan guitarist hide posed hanging from a tower at one point in "Misery" and sticking his neck into a noose near the end of "Oblaat". In 1998, he would die in an accident involving self-inflicted asphyxiation.
 * Most of the stuff surrounding Michael Jackson becomes this by way of either his issues with pedophilia or his death.
 * The line "I'm not like other boys..." in the prologue of the "Thriller" video.
 * The video for Thriller, knowing that Michael Jackson has left us.
 * Or "The Girl Is Mine", his Thriller duet with Paul McCartney. Michael Jackson says: "You know, Paul, I'm a lover, not a fighter..." When Linda McCartney was alive, all of Paul's love songs were for her. That perspective makes "The Girl Is Mine" painful for Paul's fans.
 * Another example from Thriller is the song "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)." It's obviously about a young woman, but that title!
 * On a similar note, his concert series scheduled to start July 2009 was called This Is It. It doesn't help that the very last public interview he gave was announcing the tour to his fans, in which he repeatedly said, in reference to the concert title, "this is it, this is really it! This will be my last concert ever, I mean it! This is it!"
 * ''Who Is It" contains a now very unsettling set of lyrics in the second verse.

I am the dead

I am the agony inside a dying head."

"''"If Coke is a mystery
 * This even managed to affect other groups' music. The first two lines of U 2's "The Playboy Mansion", punning off of MJ's greatest hits album title:

And Michael Jackson, HIStory"''"

""The training wheels come off your bike, you start to notice boys you like""
 * The lyrics to Michael's song "Morphine".
 * From "Lisa, It's Your Birthday"

"''"No one ever left alive in nineteen-hundred-and-eighty-five will ever do
 * A good portion of Paul McCartney's solo album Driving Rain can cause headaches now for those who know the backstory because he included multiple love songs to Heather Mills. Songs declaring eternal love to someone you have since broken up with are by definition painful.
 * This also happened to his song "Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five", presumably written for Linda, once he remarried.

She may be right, she may be fine, she may get love, but she won't get mine, 'cause I've got you..."''"

""I can hardly wait to see you come of age, so I guess we'll both just have to be patient.""
 * The Beatles' song "When I'm 64". This is Paul McCartney's song, and its verses end, "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" Anyway, one month before his 64th birthday, he and Heather Mills separated.
 * Another McCartney album, Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, released in 2005, was recognized immediately as a Concept Album and recognized immediately as having Heather Mills as a primary subject; but they thought it was mostly an album of mere Silly Love Songs (Paul is a believer in Death of the Author, usually, so his analyses aren't always helpful). The album was critically acclaimed when it was released. There was one unambiguously vicious song on the album, "Riding to Vanity Fair", but it was considered Mood Whiplash, and there was much speculation towards who it was about... Then Paul and Heather separated in May 2006. Some quickly realized what "Chaos and Creation" (as an album) was really about. Others never recovered from the Logic Bomb (there are Silly Love Songs on there -- it's just that most of them have darker interpretations) and lost respect for the work.
 * John Lennon once told the press that he acted silly so that he wouldn't become a martyr. It didn't work.
 * It gets worse - on the day John Lennon was murdered, he recorded an interview, in which he made a reference to "when I'm dead and buried - which I hope is a long, long time from now." In the same interview, Lennon also talked of how much hope he had for the 1980s and how he looked forward to the new decade.
 * The lyrics "First you must learn to smile as you kill" in Lennon's song "Working Class Hero" acquired a touch of creepiness as Lennon's killer, remained calm, smiling and politely replying, "I just shot John Lennon."
 * Double Fantasy closed with the Ono-penned song "Hard Times Are Over". Lennon was gunned down just under three weeks after its release.
 * "Beautiful Boy", about his son Sean:

""I'll probably be popped off by some looney.""
 * Jann Wenner, in 1971 while interviewing John, asked him how he expected to die. John's answer:

""When I hold you in my arms
 * The repeated line "shoot me" in "Come Together" (a Beatles song that John wrote) is hard to overlook.
 * Then there's the song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun":

And I put my finger on your little trigger

I know that you'll never do me no harm...""

"Everybody loves you when you're six feet in the ground"
 * An official picture of The Beatles shows John dead and the remaining three being worried about him. What makes it worse is that George is wearing John's glasses--and he was the next Beatle to bite the dust.
 * A song he wrote for Ringo is called "Life Begins at 40".
 * Lennon made a cynical observation in a rare interview from 1980 found on YouTube, about those who criticized him for being in seclusion for five years, not releasing any music, and not calling any of his rock star drinking buddies to party, was that when John dies, the rock community who criticized him for hiding would say nothing but nice things about him when he's dead, but the fact that he didn't die in L.A. from his "lost weekend" excesses in the mid-1970's meant that they were free to judge John for settling down and for not partying with his rock star friends until he became a "rock casualty".
 * He's a Rebel, a Phil Spector biography by Marc Ribowsky, recounts an incident where Spector fired a gun in the studio, which led John to protest, "If you wanna shoot me, go ahead, but don't fuck with my ears! I need them!" It's doubly harsher with Phil Spector's conviction.
 * In a Rolling Stone interview conducted three days before his death, John said of his fans, "what they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I'm not interesting in being a fuckin' dead hero." The same interview had John saying he may go back to touring someday, but he wasn't doing any serious planning at the moment because "there's plenty of time."
 * There's also the line in "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out":

""where the magnolia blossoms fill the air
 * In the late 1980s, George Harrison was once asked if he feared for his own safety after Lennon's murder. In a bit of self-deprecating humor, he answered that he wasn't important enough to kill. Near the end of 1999, a crazy fan decided the exact opposite, broke into his home, and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest, nearly succeeding in killing him.
 * Guns N' Roses' most famous song, "Sweet Child o' Mine", was Axl Rose's declaration of love for then-fiance Erin Everly. A few years later, Axl and Erin were involved in a bitter divorce battle where Erin accused Axl in court of hitting her.
 * The They Might Be Giants song "Meridian" contains the lyric, "I'm sleeping in the Astrodome!" A year after it was written, Hurricane Katrina hit, resulting in hundreds of evacuees being bused to the Houston Astrodome, while the less fortunate ones who were trapped in New Orleans' own Superdome.
 * The initial album cover for the 1977 Lynyrd Skynyrd album Street Survivors depicted the band members surrounded by an outdoor fire. Unfortunately, the tragic plane crash that killed Ronnie Van Zandt and Steve Gaines occurred three days after the album was released. As a result, the album was reissued with the fire cover replaced by a solemn cover depicting the band members in a black space, illuminated by a spotlight. In 2008, when Street Survivors was reissued in a Deluxe Edition CD set, the original fire cover was chosen instead of the spotlight cover.
 * Many songs were hit by hurricane Katrina, including:
 * "When The Levee Breaks", by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, later versioned by Led Zeppelin. The song refers to one of the most destructive river floods in United States history, though New Orleans was largely spared. It becomes harsher post-Hurricane Katrina. While levees did break before that, it was never quite on that scale.
 * The blues song "New Orleans":

Oh, you ain't been to heaven till you've been down there!""

"''That makes me sad for my friends who have taken their own lives, because I know that if your time is not finished here, and you end it yourself, then you gotta finish it somewhere else.
 * "Proud Mary", whose aftermath covers omit the second verse.
 * Chris Thomas King's "Flooding in the Delta".
 * Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip did this twice, in 2003 with "If New Orleans is Beat" and in 1989 with the disturbingly prophetic "New Orleans is Sinking".
 * The standard "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?"
 * The Blues Brothers' opening to "A Briefcase Full of Blues" starts with a little dialogue stating that how (in 1978, when it was released) you hardly ever hear the blues, and "by the year 2006, the music known as the blues will exist only in the classical records section of your public library". This was not made funnier by a certain tragedy in late 2005 that wiped straight through the Mississippi Delta (home of the Delta Blues).
 * Katy Brand's Sugababes parody. One year later, Keisha Buchanan has left the band, and none of the original girls are in the group right now.
 * "Miami 2017" by Billy Joel is about the violent destruction of New York City. Lines like, "I've seen the lights go out on Broadway/I watched the mighty skyline fall..." are clearly reminiscent of the WTC attacks on 9/11/2001, despite being written in the 1970s. After the attack, Billy Joel sang the song to defy this trope.
 * To a lesser extent, the opening line of "Miami 2017", "I've seen the lights go out on Broadway." It was written in the 1970s. The lights going out on Broadway, then, was the first sign of the destruction of New York City. After New York got through its bankruptcy issues that decade, the song came to seem silly. Then, in the winter of 2007, the writers' strike did shut down Broadway.
 * Shortly after the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970, The Doors singer Jim Morrison, before he died, allegedly quipped, "You're drinking with number three."
 * He also once said that when he died, he wanted to "be there" (as he put it) and experience it, "not die in [his] sleep or of an OD or something". Knowing he felt this way makes his manner of death doubly sad.
 * Also, one of the lines in the Doors song "Roadhouse Blues" is "The future's uncertain and the end is always near." The song was released in 1970 and for Morrison, who died the following year, the end actually was near.
 * A well-known photograph depicts Blind Melon singer Shannon Hoon gleefully kissing Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley. Both singers had severe drug problems and died from fatal overdoses.
 * The last song Alice in Chains recorded with Layne before his overdose was called "Died".
 * Alice in Chains had a song titled "We Die Young". And well... Layne did.
 * Many of Layne's quotes such as:

Why do people keep taking drugs? Don't they hear my music? Don't they understand the words?

I'm scared of death, especially death by my own hand. I'm scared of where I would go.''"

""Father, father, we don't need to escalate
 * The Luther Vandross song "Dance With my Father", about his wish for himself and his mother to be reunited with his father, came only a few years before both Vandross and his mother would pass on.
 * At one New Order show, Peter Hook dedicated a song to Ian Curtis, producer Martin Hannett and manager Rob Gretton, all deceased. Then he joked dryly, "Tony Wilson'll be next". And he was.
 * Depeche Mode songwriter Martin Gore wrote and sang the sardonic but generally lighthearted "A Question of Lust" for the band in 1986. It contains the line, "And I need to drink more than you seem to think before I'm anyone's". Twenty years later, after alcohol had destroyed his marriage, he would write "Precious" as an apology to his children.
 * There are also quite a few of their songs that play very differently in light of the lead singer's near-death experience.
 * Country singer Patsy Cline was nonchalant about the possibility of her death in a plane crash, saying to a member of her entourage, "Don't worry about me, Hoss. When it's my time to go, it's my time." A week before, she said to another singer, "Honey, I've had two bad ones (accidents). The third one will either be a charm or it'll kill me."
 * The 1994 Notorious B.I.G. song "Juicy" includes the line "...Blow up like the World Trade", which took on a rather different meaning seven years later (he was referring to an attack on the towers in 1993 that, while deadly, was mostly limited to the parking garage and didn't cause the towers to fall). When "A Dream" by Jay-Z samples the iconic verse, that line is blanked out.
 * There's the title of his first popular album: Ready to Die. Ouch.
 * His final album, released after his death but planned out before it, was called Life After Death and featured a photo of him standing next to a hearse. For the final touch, a track on the album is titled "You're Nobody Til Somebody Kills You".
 * He also shoots himself at the end of the song. Both Biggie and 2Pac Shakur were unusually, almost preternaturally obsessed with their own deaths (possibly due to the big "East coast/West coast" rap rivalries); when they were both gunned down, it was almost a Self Fulfilling Prophecy.
 * In Ol' Dirty Bastard's relatively upbeat 1999 track "N***a Please", there is a line referring to how ODB "gets that cocaine to clean out my sinuses". This got a lot less funny after he died of a cocaine overdose five years later.
 * Marvin Gaye's 1971 hit "What's Going On". Evidence from thirteen years later suggests that his father violently disagreed with this:

You see, war is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate"."

""I'm dead drunk and heaving hanging upside down
 * In the little known AC/DC song "Carry Me Home", Bon Scott sings about getting so drunk he can't move and is pretending to be drunk while singing. Also the last lines:

And you're getting up and leaving, you think I'm gonna drown.""

""I'm on the highway to hell""
 * And then there's every line of "Highway to Hell"... especially the last one.

""Oh, I will dance with Cinderella
 * In October of 2007, a popular Christian singer named Steven Curtis Chapman released an album that included a song titled "Cinderella". The song is about Steven's daughters and is about how someday they'll eventually grow up and get married. But in May of 2008, the song's lyrics took on a tragic meaning when the youngest of Chapman's adopted daughters--she was just five--was killed when her older brother accidentally ran her over in the driveway. The last half of the chorus goes like this:

I don't want to miss even one song

'Cause all too soon the clock will strike midnight

And she'll be gone...""


 * Blink 182's Music Video for "All the Small Things" was one of the funniest music videos of its time. But the opening shot of drummer Travis Barker nonchalantly walking off a plane is kind of painful to see, considering he was severely burned by a jet crash.
 * One song from Queen's debut album, "Great King Rat," features an apparent Author Avatar who quotes several other songs on the album and "died syphilis, forty-four on his birthday." Two decades later, the writer and lead singer would be dead, at forty-five, of a venereal disease.
 * An even worse moment came in their Live At Wembley Stadium concert, where Freddie Mercury told fans that "we're going to stay together until we fucking well die, I assure you." This become the saddest section of the concert and its album release.
 * "I'm Going Slightly Mad" seemed like another lighthearted Queen song when it appeared on their final album, Innuendo- before Freddie's illness was widely known about. When later replayed during the tribute concert, the possibility of its reference to some form of AIDS-related dementia (something which has apparently been confirmed since) was more obvious and chilling.
 * Since Queen's popularity in America had been flagging in the late eighties, Freddie Mercury reportedly said to Brian May, "I'll probably have to die before we're popular there again." This turned out to be true.
 * "Who Wants to Live Forever" seems a lot more awkward when you realize that, apparently, Freddie Mercury didn't want to hard enough.

Speaking of which, the song (along with other Queen's songs) was used in Highlander II: The Quickening which was given its American Release Date of November 1, 1991. Freddie died in November 24 of the same year. ""Hollywood's often tried to mix
 * Sure, it's a Brian May song, but it's difficult not to associate the title (and, to a lesser extent, the lyrics) of "Too Much Love Will Kill You" with Freddie's illness.
 * Made In Heaven, the posthumous album, start to finish. "Let Me Live", "Made In Heaven", "My Life Has Been Saved", "Too Much Love Will Kill You", "It's A Beautiful Day", and "Mother Love".
 * A good chunk of Innuendo is like this, Songs in particular: "Delilah" (about one of Freddie's cats), "I'm Going Slightly Mad", "The Show Must Go On"
 * "Play The Game" contains "My love is flowing through my veins". Seeing as most people associate AIDS and blood this line can be a little bit uncomfortable...
 * Tom Lehrer's "George Murphy" from 1965.

show business with politics

from Helen Gahagan

to... Ronald Reagan?"

(audience laughs)"

"It goes like this: "We have no choice"
 * On The Darkness' 2003 album "Permission To Land", there was a song about heroin addiction ("Giving Up"). Later, the lead singer got addicted to crack and had to go into rehab.
 * Soul Coughing's "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago", recorded in 1994, repeats the line, "A man drives a plane into the Chrysler Building." For obvious reasons, Mike Doughty refused to play the song after 9/11 for a long time, before he brought it back by surprise at a late 2008 solo gig. He has played it occasionally since then, mostly in 2010.
 * A particularly horrifying example would be The Coup's "Party Music" and it's original album artwork; the album was scheduled for release in September 2001.
 * Hank Williams' last single released before his death was called "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive".
 * John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane", generally viewed as the song that launched his career. He died in a crash involving an experimental light aircraft. Since then, his version of the song has all but disappeared from distribution. Even a singer/songwriter compilation chose to use the Cover Version from Peter, Paul, and Mary even though Denver wrote it and the other songs were sung by their writers.
 * Marc Bolan of T.Rex stated in a number of interviews, in an off-hand manner, that he was scared that he wouldn't live to the age of thirty and never learned to drive because of his fear of premature death. Despite this, cars were mentioned with varying degrees of prominence in most of the band's songs. Two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, he was killed in a car crash. Another band member was killed in the same way a few years later.
 * It doesn't end there. He was once asked what exactly made him decide to stop the self-destructive lifestyle he once lived. He replied that it was because of his young son Rolan, and that if he had continued in that lifestyle, he'd be unable to take care of him. Due to circumstances that not only had nothing to do with his lifestyle but were also entirely beyond his control, that happened anyway.
 * The line "It's better to burn out than to fade away" from Neil Young's "My My, Hey Hey" became something of a Stock Shout Out, appearing in places up to and including Def Leppard songs. They came to an abrupt end when it showed up in Kurt Cobain's suicide note. Since then, even classic radio stations don't want to touch the half of the song containing that lyric.
 * Ironically, that reference supposedly applied to Sex Pistols' singer Johnny Rotten ("The king is gone but he's not forgotten/ This is the story of Johnny Rotten..."). But Rotten is still alive today, even if he isn't using that name anymore. (He reverted to John Lydon.) The dead Pistol was Sid Vicious, who replaced original bassist Glenn Matlock and was not "the king" of anything except the image of Punk Rock.
 * The music video for Eminem's anti-gang war song "Like Toy Soldiers" show D12 member Proof dying in a drive-by. Two years later, Proof did die when he was shot at a night club. It's a little freaky to see him in a hospital dying of gunshot wounds.
 * "Exodus'04" in Utada's 2004 album Exodus is a beautiful love song that Hikaru most likely wrote about her marrying Kazuaki Kiriya, fifteen years her senior, when she was only 19 and had just recovered from an ovarian cancer. It's about how her family and people around her saw that move as rushed and immature, but she's glad of her decision because their love is true. The couple didn't make it to their fifth wedding anniversary.
 * Barenaked Ladies' "Sell Sell Sell", released in 2000, is about an actor who stars in a film about either (depending on your interpretation) the Gulf War or a fictitious second war in Iraq. The second interpretation is eerie enough, but it also works disturbingly well as an allegory for, and condemnation of, the second war itself: "A bad guy who's not there", "a smoking gun" that "distracts us while the actor takes the stand," and this choice bit:

The minarets, the wailing voice

And vaguely Celtic music fills the air

We choose a foreigner to hate

The new Iraq gets more irate

We really know nothing about them, and no one cares"

""All this I cannot witness any longer/ Cannot the kingdom of Heaven/ Call me home?""
 * On the other hand, the song works even better as an allegory for a real event that had already occurred, in 1998: Bill Clinton, in the midst of controversy over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, ordered an airstrike on Iraq, which has been seen as a desperate attempt to distract the country from the affair and subsequent perjury trial and, like the invasion in 2003, has been viewed as unprovoked by the critics of the President that ordered it. History repeats itself mighty fast these days.
 * Snot's only album features the song "Joyride," an energetic song about driving irresponsibly that ends with the sound of a car crash. Snot's singer Lynn Strait (along with his beloved dog and band mascot Dobbs) died in a car crash one year after the album's release.
 * "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" by John Adams was scheduled to be performed at the Last Night of the Proms in 1997, but was removed because of the death of Princess Diana in a car crash. It was on the schedule again in 2001, but was removed once more because the September 11th attacks had occurred just a few days before the Last Night.
 * The early Beach Boys song, "I'm Bugged At My Ol' Man" is the lament of a teenager who has been grounded by his father for staying out too late, with the specifics of his punishment exaggerated and Played for Laughs. At least, we hope they were exaggerated. It would later come out that Murry Wilson, father of three members of the band, including the song's vocalist and songwriter Brian Wilson, had a history of physically and emotionally abusing his sons. This makes lines like "I wish I could see outside/ but he tacked up boards on my window" seem less humorous than they were originally meant to be.
 * A comedy sketch on a Beach Boys album, "'Cassius' Love Vs. 'Sonny' Wilson", has Mike Love and Brian Wilson engaged in a mock-insult war in the studio. Later on, Mike would sue Brian for publishing royalties and song credits over songs with lyrics Mike wrote, after Brian got control of his '60's publihing company back.
 * The Electric Six album Flashy. On the album, there is a song called Transatlantic Flight, a darkly humorous song about a transatlantic flight crashing into the sea in the middle of the night. One of the lines of said song is "In the event of a water landing, you can use my body as a flotation device". Then, the Brazil-France flight in the early hours of June 1 crashed somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
 * Rihanna's 2008 hit song, "Disturbia", was written in part by Chris Brown. Lyrics such as "A disease of the mind/It can control you/I feel like a monster" are truly disturbing in light of Chris Brown's arrest for physical abuse against a woman later identified as Rihanna.
 * Rihanna's song "Take a Bow" is sung from the point of view of someone strong enough to leave a lover who was mistreating them and betraying the relationship. It became bitterly ironic once she decided not to leave Chris Brown after he hit and choked her.
 * And another disturbing Rihanna song is "Hate That I Love You" which is all about staying in a very bad relationship. Yeah...
 * Eazy-E did his own take on Bootsy Collin's I'd Rather Be With You, called...well, I'd Rather Fuck You, with lyrics such as "I'd rather fuck with you all goddamn night 'cause your pussy's good" and "We can do it doggy style, or you can get on top!" Needless to say, the song, as well as many of his others, have taken on a whole new light after Eazy's death from AIDS.
 * When asked in an interview what he'd say to his teenage self if he could go back in time and meet him, Malice Mizer's drummer Kami answered "Just hurry up and die." A few years later he did, aged just 26.
 * The song Jordan's First Choice from folk-punk band Against Me!'s first album features "Tell me where was your head when you broke that promise to yourself?" amongst its first lines. They were very strongly committed to anarchist politics and remaining on indie labels. Needless to say, they discarded both principles and the song is now difficult to listen to.
 * "Punk Rock Classic" from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The song takes swipes at bands (specifically Guns N' Roses) that claim to be underground but really want to be on MTV, make videos, and release radio-friendly ballads. After "Under the Bridge" came out and the band got big, the Chilis became exactly what they had mocked. To add to that irony, GNR's Slash originally didn't like "Sweet Child O'Mine" - the riff mocked at the end of "Punk Rock Classic" - because he felt it was too poppish.
 * The title track to The Dandy Warhols' 2003 album Welcome To The Monkey House featured the line "When Michael Jackson dies, we're covering 'Blackbird'", which was just meant as a flippant joke about Michael Jackson controlling the publishing rights of The Beatles. Shortly after Jackson's death, they did announce on their website that they were in fact planning to cover "Blackbird" when they got the chance, and they put a version out as a standalone single later that year.
 * Every other song 2Pac wrote was about him dying before his time (same thing with Biggie Smalls as mentioned above). Case in point: Troublesome '96.
 * The Grass Roots' "Let's Live For Today". Now that people are a lot more concerned with the environment and economy...
 * Metallica recorded "Trapped Under Ice" in 1984. Two years later, bassist Cliff Burton died in Sweden - crushed instead of frozen, but the lyrics are still unsettling ("Freezing, can't move at all, screaming, can't hear my call, I am dying to live").
 * During an early interview, when the band was asked who out of them was likely to die first, Cliff jokingly said he would die first.
 * The lyrics credited to Burton on the song "To Live is To Die." Most of those "lyrics" are actually cribbed from the film Excalibur; Burton's original contribution read:

"And when my friend and I were done
 * Frank Zappa wrote a decidedly tongue-in-cheek song called "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee", then years later died of prostate cancer.
 * Some of the songs on Zappa's "We're Only In It For The Money" are based on the absurdity of the idea of cops killing hippies. The album was released in 1968- two years before the Kent State massacre.
 * Syd Barrett, founding member of Pink Floyd, gave the band their first hit with a song entitled "Arnold Layne", which is about a crossdresser. Not too long afterwards, after Syd Barrett began his mental decline, he developed some similar tendencies of his own.
 * Similarly, the 1965 Syd Barrett composition "Lucy Leave" is a pretty run-of-the-mill song about a cruel girl who takes advantage of the narrator's love for her. Nothing creepy there. However, since the term "Lucy" is slang for LSD, which is generally thought to have either caused or exacerbated Syd's mental breakdown two years later...yeah.
 * Courtney Love (controversial wife of Kurt Cobain) was in a band called Hole, which released an album called Live Through This on April 12, 1994 - only four days after Kurt Cobain was found dead in his home. To make matters worse, one of the songs (entitled "Rock Star", a thing Kurt was never comfortable with being) has a line "Barrel of laughs to be Nirvana, hope you'd rather die". Even if you're aware that the album was completed before Kurt died, it's still pretty creepy (especially if you believe that Courtney murdered Kurt). It's possibly worth noting that Hole's bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died of a heroin overdose several months later.
 * The album took its title from a line of the song Asking For It, which at some point was a duet between Courtney and Kurt (the recording still exists in bootleg form). The full line goes "if you live through this with me I'll die for you". Yes, they both sing it. It's damn creepy.
 * With the death of Patrick Swayze, the line "And I'm Ghost like Swayze" in The Lonely Island's Lazy Sunday takes a whole other meaning.
 * And so does Mistah Fab'sGhost Ride It, with the verse "Who's that driving? Patrick Swayze!"
 * The Who's album Who Are You has Keith Moon sitting on a chair labeled "Not to be taken away". About one month after its release, Moon passed away.
 * The line "Hope I die before I get old" in "My Generation".
 * Warren Zevon wrote many songs dealing with death. A line from "Life'll Kill Ya" (from the album of the same name) says "Some get the awful, awful diseases." Later in the album, he sings "Don't let us get sick, don't let us get old." The cover of his next album, My Ride's Here, showed him riding in a hearse. Zevon died of mesothelioma at the age of 56.
 * In his song "Play it All Night Long," Zevon mocked "country livin'." The chorus goes "'Sweet Home Alabama'/ Play that dead band's song," a jab at Lynyrd Skynyrd. Thing is, Lynyrd Skynyrd survived the deaths of most of its original members. Zevon has not outlived that band.
 * Kid Rock later Covered Up "Werewolves of London" with "All Summer Long" in a song that sampled both "Werewolves" and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama." The song was exactly what "Play It All Night Long" was mocking -- the narrator is reminiscing about the good old days in northern Michigan, "singing 'Sweet Home Alabama' all summer long."
 * "My Shit's Fucked Up", the song about being diagnosed with a terminal illness.
 * On a cold night in February in 1959, J.P. Richardson (aka The Big Bopper), ill with the flu, asked his friend Buddy Holly if he could get a seat on his plane to their next gig. Holly's bassist Waylon Jennings gave up his seat for Richardson. Holly jokingly yelled, "I hope your bus freezes up", and Jennings shot back, "Well, I hope your damn plane crashes!" Tragically, Jennings got his wish, as the plane crashed, killing Holly, Richardson, and Ritchie Valens. It was decades before Jennings forgave himself.
 * Released in 2001, "Apology Song" by The Decemberists features the line "Guess we'll never see poor Madeleine again." It's the name of his friend's bicycle that the narrator was looking after while said friend was on holiday and was stolen because he left it unlocked while he ran into a shop. The meaning of it has changed somewhat since 2007 and Madeleine McCann's disappearance...
 * Johnny Cash and June Carter sang a duet about dying & meeting in heaven, called "Far Side Banks of Jordan". Johnny sings the first verse, then June sings, "If it proves to be His will that I am first to go/And somehow I've a feeling it will be". June died four months before Johnny.
 * The Dead Milkmen had a fair amount of darkly humorous upbeat sounding songs about death and suicide that became a little unnerving after bassist Dave Blood's suicide (The self-explanatory "I Hate Myself" and "Death's Alright With Me" for instance). The last verse of "Life Is Shit" even becomes kind of a tearjerker:

we went to rest upon the sun

'cause life takes from us the things we love

and robs us of the special ones

and puts them high where where we can't climb

and we only miss them all the time"

"Synyster Gates: "Yeah, he fucking planned it all, that crazy fuck. Knew he was gonna be gone before 30. He told my dad that he was fucking out. He said, "I know two things: I'm gonna be in a famous rock band, and I'm gonna die before I'm 30." He told my dad that at 15.""
 * Jermaine Stewart is most famous for his song "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off". Stewart later died of AIDS. Yeah.
 * The eponymous album by The Moldy Peaches was released on September 11, 2001 and features a song titled "NYC's Like A Graveyard"
 * The Smiths' "Paint a Vulgar Picture" gets less amusing and more depressing with every best-of album. It'll hit rock bottom when Morrissey becomes the dead star himself.
 * Avenged Sevenfold's song "Brompton Cocktail" has the back-up vocalist/drummer say something about meeting his maker, which takes on a WHOLE new meaning now that he's dead.
 * Their song, "Unbound (The Wild Ride)," also deals with death (in a less direct way). It has a section where a girl sings "There's nothing here to take for granted with each breath that we take, the hands of time strip youth from our bodies and we fade. Memories remain as time goes on" which was eerie sounding before The Rev died but has now moved up to freaky.
 * They also have Afterlife, which is Exactly What It Says On the Tin and has several backing lines (again, sang by their now dead drummer) about death.
 * And their song A Little Piece of Heaven", where The Rev sings "Everybody's gotta die sometime". As well as the original name of the last song he wrote, "Death". The song (now called "Fiction") is all about someone dying and apologizing to the ones they love. He gave the demo to the band's singer on Christmas 2009. Three days before he died''.

"While a song with the lyrical content of that one is somewhat susceptible to this, and I'm sure people named Robert have died in car crashes, I was actually coming here to write about this too."
 * Jello Biafra, of the seminal Hardcore Punk band Dead Kennedys, penned the typically blunt DK anthem "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" as his reaction to skinheads wrecking the LA Punk scene. Years later, he was hospitalized by a pack of skinheads... supposedly for "selling out" and "not being hardcore enough".
 * One of the Jimmy Eat World albums was named [[http://jandemessemaeker.net/music/albumcovers/Jimmy
 * For several years, copies pressed after 9/11 re-branded the album as being self-titled, and the titled track was renamed "Salt Sweet Sugar".
 * Elton John songs like "White Lady, White Powder" (1980) and "Heavy Traffic" (1988) both of which denounce cocaine abuse, "Idol" (1976), which describes a fallen idol (Elvis Presley, very likely) and "Social Disease" (1973), a bittersweet look at alcoholism, take on a new meaning when one realizes Elton's own debilitating cocaine and alcohol habits from the mid-seventies to 1990. Granted, Bernie Taupin, who had similar habits from the mid- to late 1970's, wrote the lyrics to both songs, but still...
 * Other examples are Rocket Man ("And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then...") and The Bitch Is Back ("I get high every evening, sniffin' pots of glue")
 * The Weird Al Yankovic song "Why Does This Always Happen to Me?", becomes this after the Haitian earthquake during the first verse, which describes a man's lamenting missing The Simpsons when it is interrupted by a special report on a "Devastating earthquake".

""Stay with me under these waves tonight\''"
 * There's also "Christmas at Ground Zero," which is actually more about nuclear war than 9/11, but...
 * His song "Traffic Jam", after his parents' deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning. The song opens with the line "Carbon monoxide making me choke."
 * The music video for "TMZ" depicts an actress running into humiliation everywhere after photos of her naked butt leak onto the internet. The album it was on was released just a few months before the same exact thing happened to Scarlett Johansson.
 * Outkast's "Bombs Over Baghdad", released in late 2000/early 2001. A few years after it was released, and...
 * Jeff Buckley covered The Smiths' "I Know It's Over," with the repeated line "I can feel the soil falling over my head." He drowned in 1997, aged 30.
 * He also wrote a song titled "River of Dope". The New Orleans flood and his own death makes it sadder.
 * Allusions to water and drowning were fairly common among Jeff Buckley's career, especially with the aptly titled "Nightmares by the Sea"

"Oh, I'd love to seduce her
 * Irish band The Thrills released a single called "Whatever Happened to Corey Haim?" in 2004 referencing the 80's star's diminished profile. On March 11th 2010, he died of overdose.
 * In the mid-1980's, comedienne Julie Brown released a novelty song called "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun," about a girl winning homecoming queen then blasting away at her classmates. The song itself is an over-the-top parody of fifties "tragedy songs" like "It's My Party," and contained lines like "An hour later, the cops arrived/by then the entire glee club had died." After Columbine, even SHE was uncomfortable with it.
 * New Orleans based metal band Down had a song on their 2002 album titled "New Orleans is a Dying Whore." Oops. They play it live as of 2009, but one imagines they took it out of rotation for a year or two following Katrina.
 * Thin Lizzy's closing track of their final album, entitled Heart Attack, features the lyrics "Mama I'm dying of an overdose". The group's frontman, Phil Lynott, would die of "blood poisoning", which was likely an indication of being related to heroin abuse, less than two years after its release.
 * The popularity of "Fire Burning on the Dance Floor" in the Philippines kinda gets a little uncomfortable if one is old enough to remember the Ozone Disco Club Fire (the worst fire in Philippine history) in which 162 people burned to death, most on the dance floor, because of poor fire exit design and the number of people in the club at that time.
 * In a PR stunt, the band Type O Negative started propagating a rumor in 2005 that their frontman Peter Steele died. Five years later he did for real. There's also the fact that their final two albums were entitled Life Is Killing Me and Dead Again.
 * Any jokes from TV appearances by former Morning Musume member Iida Kaori about Motherhood or Childbirth are this as she had a son who sadly died at only 6 months old.
 * Tenacious D's song "Dio" lost a decent bit of its humor after he died of stomach cancer in 2010, as did all the jokes among metalheads about how Dio would kick the ass of some personification of cancer as befitting his Memetic Badass status.
 * Telefon Tel Aviv's third and last album is called "Immolate Yourself". One day after it's release, Charles Cooper, half of the duo, went missing and was found dead a week later.
 * Once upon a time, in a magical land called Lollapalooza, Eddie Vedder sang a song encouraging the audience to boycott a particular gas company, BP. It plays differently after the Texas City's chemical leak and Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
 * In the 1970s, Gary Glitter was one of the most popular acts around and a star of the glam rock scene. Now, after his prosecutions for child pornography and soliciting children for sexual purposes in Thailand, not to mention the revelation that when he was in his mid 50s he dated a VERY young Denise van Outen (who was one of his backup dancers at the time and all of 17 when this happened)? "Do You Wanna Touch Me" is, in spite of its catchiness, not quite a jolly song to listen to....
 * A song by "Vărul Săndel” starts with the line ”Oh boy, did it rain hard in Tecuci...” and is eventually played for laughs. It gets a nasty twist when in this period, Tecuci is under risk of being flooded. This risks falling well into Dude Not Funny territory if you think the area Galați-Tecuci is often flooded because it's close to the Danube's falling into the Black Sea.
 * "Mary" by the Scissor Sisters is about Jake Shears' platonic love for his friend Mary. The song itself sounds a bit mournful, though it was released in 2004. It was two years before she died of an aneurysm.
 * The Aquabats are primarily known for being silly; their shtick is that they're really superheroes from the land of Aquabania, and "The Cat with Two Heads!" is typical of their work. They have a song called "Pizza Day!" about how great government-assisted school lunches were. It ends with a bit where one of the band members pretends to read a letter from Michael Jackson, of Encino, California. Aside from "Michael Jackson is weird!" jokes not being funny anymore, the line "When he's not at his his little theme park, he's eatin' pizza with the kids!" is cringe-inducing because of the charges against Jackson a few years after the song was released.
 * There's a cover of "Baby It's Cold Outside" done by Alan Cumming and Liza Minnelli. It's cute and funny, until you remember that Liza's mother who is supposedly "pacing the floor" was Judy Garland. ("Say, what's in this drink?")
 * David Bowie's "Kooks," dedicated to Zowie (aka Duncan Jones, later a film director), seems to have been meant as a light breather between the dramatic "Life on Mars" and the existential "Quicksand," but knowing the rocky relationship he would have with his son over the next few decades makes it much less cheerful.
 * Slipknot songs with titles such as "The Virus of Life", "Everything Ends" and "No Life" becomes this after the death of bassist Paul Gray.
 * The debut single off Shania Twain's breakthrough album The Woman in Me, "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under", a song about a cheating lover (which she co-wrote with her husband/producer Mutt Lange). 15 years later, Twain and Lange were divorced.
 * "You're Still The One", "I Ain't No Quitter" or "Forever and For Always", or any of her songs at all for that matter, seeing as she and Lange wrote all those songs together back when they were Happily Married.
 * And then there's the Cledus T. Judd parody written back in 1996:

But she married her producer

Now all I do is pray

Pray, pray

She'll get a divorce someday"

"In the year 2005, stopwatch futures took a dive
 * The Lemon Demon song "Behold, the Future!", written in 2003, contains a list of tongue-in-cheek predictions for the years 2004-2013. Two in particular are rather sad in hindsight:
 * One seems prescient of the 2008 recession...

Leaving us with nothing more than cents and dimes."

"This is the hand, the hand that takes.
 * Another describes how "In the year 2008, Don La Fontaine sealed our fate". 2008 was the year La Fontaine died.
 * Laurie Anderson recorded a live album in New York one week after 9/11. "O Superman", written 19 years earlier, suddenly went from being oddly creepy to full-on Tear Jerker without changing a word:

Here come the planes.

They're American planes. Made in America.

Smoking or non-smoking?

So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me, Mom, in your long arms."

"She's so lucky
 * Primus' album Frizzle Fry came out in February 1990 and included a jokey Protest Song called "Too Many Puppies", which mentions "too many puppies in foreign lands" and needing to "protect our oil fields". Six months later, the Gulf War broke out.
 * Britney Spears' songs "Lucky" and "Mona Lisa (Demo Version)" both have extra meaning after her publicized erratic behavior and meltdowns spanning from 2006 to 2008.

she's a star,

but she cry, cry, cries with her lonely heart, thinkin',

"if there's nothing, missing in my life,

then why do these, tears come at night.""

"''About Mona Lisa, and how she suddenly fell (huh)
 * and Mona Lisa:

See everyone knew her, they knew her oh so well

Now I am taking over, to release her from her spell

Don't have a break down you will hit the freaking wall

Cuz she's gone, cuz she's gone, gone''"

"KOMPRESSOR crushing American people
 * She recorded a song called "Oops, I Did it Again".
 * Lindsay Lohan's songs "Rumors", "A Beautiful Life", "Fastlane", "Disconnected" and "Anything But Me", since everything has seemed to got worst since she recorded these songs in the better times in her career, before she went off the deep end in every way possible. It's a strange experience either way.
 * "My Innocence" and "Confessions Of A Broken Heart" also are harder to listen to since she deleted her father from her life again after beating up another girlfriend/wife again.
 * In an example that features a slightly less disturbing coincidence than many of the 9/11 related songs and albums, Rammstein's music video for "Ich Will" begins with the band getting off of a prison bus going to a television awards ceremony in their honor. The rest of the video is what happened before: the band plays as a group of terrorists, and they rob and then blow up a bank. The whole video was intended as a Take That statement to the media for giving large amounts of attention to people who do bad things and then become famous. The part that makes it a Funny Aneurysm Moment is that it was a music video featuring terrorists released September 10, 2001. Osama Bin Laden, the head of Al-Qaeda and responsible of both attacks, was one of the most recognized, and hated, individuals in the world.
 * During the recording of the song "Gimme Shelter" for The Rolling Stones, guest vocalist Merry Clayton hit some very high notes, and even broke her voice during the bridge. She shortly after had a miscarriage, due to the stress that she put on her body during the recording. With this in mind, it probably wasn't very wise for the Stones to have named the album it is listed on as Let It Bleed.
 * There is a folk song called fire in the sky which refers to the space shuttle Columbia, among other things saying "see her big jets burning, see her fire in the sky." The inspiring line became more tragic after the Columbia spectacularly burned up on re-entry.
 * A weird example from Gorillaz canon: in the MTV Cribs bit, a quick gag shows a signed note from Dennis Hopper that says, 'Murdoc is a nob.' Murdoc glances at it and slinks away, snarling, "I'll get him..." Not so funny since Hopper's death a few years later.
 * Pre-9/11, KOMPRESSOR released a cover of Tunak Tunak Tun, with some added lyrics:

KOMPRESSOR driving cars into stores

KOMPRESSOR crushing all of Manhattan

KOMPRESSOR flying plane into building"


 * The first two lines of the Soviet National Anthem were "An unbreakable union of free republics/Great [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus_
 * Lady Gaga's single "The Edge of Glory" features a saxophone solo from Clarence Clemons from the E Street Band. The music video premiered on June 16, 2011 and featured Clemons. The combination of the premiere, the fact that the song is about the last few moments of life before death, and the fact that Clemons died on June 18, two days after the video was released...
 * The inside gatefold photo of Chicago's eleventh album, released in late 1977, depicts the band being chased by a group of policemen in another car, some of whom are firing guns. One policeman's gun appears directly aimed at the head of guitarist Terry Kath, who is driving the band's car. In January 1978, Kath would accidentally kill himself by a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.
 * Amy Winehouse's song "Rehab" (which centers on Amy refusing to get help for her drug addiction) is a whole lot darker now that she's dead.
 * Her song "You know I'm no good" isn't easy to listen to anymore, either.
 * Relatedly, the first line of The Midnight Beast's career-making parody of Kesha's "Tik Tok" opened with the line "Wake up in the morning feeling like Winehouse... not so funny anymore.
 * Space had a song called 'Drop Dead' on their first album, sung from the point of view of a crazed stalker. One year later, when the band were touring America, Tommy Scott had a stalker of his own, who turned up at every gig, sent him death threats and told him he was going to hell.
 * Early in his career, Randy Travis promised in "Forever And Ever, Amen" that he would love his wife forever. They divorced in 2011.
 * A couple of years back, the Capitol Steps released a song online called "We Arr The World", featuring an impersonation of Michael Jackson as one of the famous personalities. He died the same week, and was quickly replaced by Cher, then Christine O'Donnell, then finally after enough time had passed, he was put back in as "back from the afterlife".
 * One of the first hits by Mexican showman Juan Gabriel is El Noa Noa, a song about a night club in Ciudad Juarez where he began his career. Now that the Noa Noa club is closed and Ciudad Juarez has become a Wretched Hive... eeeeeeeep.
 * It's get better: the song describes the titular night-club as a "Lugar de ambiente", which maybe at the time meant "the It place" but in many Spanish-speaking places is slang for "Gay Bar". Juan Gabriel act is Campier than Liberace's, and the popular perception of him is that of a Camp Gay, but he denies every accusation of being gay himself, either by deflecting the question or claiming that he just doesn't want his and his partner/mother of his kids' private lives exposed to the tabloids.
 * Rapper Poetic performed as a member of Gravediggaz as "The Grym Reaper". And he was the one that died.
 * In Stevie Wonder's song "Master Blaster (Jammin')", he happily sings the line "Peace has come to Zimbabwe". Of course, it was true at the time: the song was first released in 1980, not long after the end of the end of the Rhodesian Bush War. Several decades later, however...
 * Katy Perry's last single from Teenage Dream was Break Up Song "The One That Got Away"... released two months before she got divorced from Russell Brand.
 * After The Mama's and the Papa's got back together for the first time they recorded a song called 'Creeque Alley' which included the line 'No one's getting fat except for Mama Cass' a reference to Cass Elliot, who was very well known as being an overweight woman in pop. The final refrain changes the line to 'And everybody's getting fat except for Mama Cass.' Given that Cass Elliot died in 1974, of a heart attack, allegedly due to her size, and she was the first of The Mama's and the Papa's to die...
 * Back in the 80s a magazine made a speculative guess on what certain then-current stars would be like in the future. There one on Michael Jackson shows him looking like an older version of his young adult self and with the line "In number, his fans will have grown tenfold by the year 2000".
 * The song "The Ghost At Number One" by Too Good to Last power-pop band Jellyfish tells of an underappreciated rock star who is only vindicated at death (possibly Roy Orbison, who would get his only #1 single posthumously with "You Got It"). Jellyfish would break up in 1994 following low sales of their second album (which feature that song), and much of their work would be reappraised decades after their breakup.
 * Sugarland's "It Happens" is a bouncy song about not wallowing in self-pity when things go wrong and instead learning to roll with the punches; that blunders, accidents, etc. are just part of life. This isn't so cheery when one considers that their attorneys' response to legal claims brought against them after high winds caused the stage to collapse before their scheduled performance at the 2011 Indiana State Fair -- a disaster that killed seven and injured 58 -- was to claim that not only was the band not responsible for what had happened, but that it was partially the fault of the waiting concertgoers for not leaving as the weather grew worse.
 * The Beach Boys' 1988 hit "Kokomo", with its references to Caribbean vacation-paradise islands, lost some of its charm when Montserrat ("...that Montserrat mystique...") was economically and geographically devastated by the Soufriere Hills volcano in the '90s.
 * In the same vein, Jimmy Buffet's "Volcano" was RECORDED on Montserrat...
 * Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous committed suicide by gunshot in 2010. All of a sudden, a whole slew of songs from his career became TearJerkers - but the hardest to take was Pig. "I wanna try and die, I wanna try and die..." And that's not counting this brief documentary.
 * Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues includes the line "I don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." While the line is iconic of the 1960s in its own right, it gained some undesirable subtext when terrorist group The Weathermen named themselves after the line.
 * The cover of Riot's 2011 album Immortal Soul features a pair of ghostly arms in a graveyard reaching toward a guitar. Just a couple of months after the album's release, founding guitarist and band leader Mark Reale lost his lifelong battle with Crohn's Disease, adding a major sense of tragedy to both the title and the cover of the album.