Best Music Albums About Death & Dying
Article originally appeared on Qeepr
Music has the ability to be completely transformative and pull you into a story or soundscape. It triggers emotion, it changes our brain chemistry and it alters and grows our imagination. Music has evolved with us over thousands of years and continues on as an essential form of communication.
At Qeepr, we’ve covered death and loss in books, movies and documentaries but have overlooked this most popular form of media. Many lists on the internet have been written about individual songs but none have looked at albums as a whole. Musicians often write albums with particular storylines and moods in mind, or with a coherent narrative they tell throughout. Those narratives often mirror our human fears, hopes and doubts (among others) but few topics are mirrored in music as much as death. Each album on this list deals with death in their own unique way. From folk heroes, bank robbers, pet loss and cancer patients, the stories they tell reflect our fears and hopes and our intimate knowing of the inevitable.
7. Bruce Springsteen – Nebraska (1982)
Everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Bruce Springsteen’s first acoustic album was not for the light hearted. Following his massive, radio friendly pop hits, Nebraska was slow, sad and self-reflexive. Nebraska had its folk heroes suffering through the tediousness and futility of life and hit upon themes of loss and grief. The title track featured strong themes of death, telling the story of a man sentenced to the electric chair. The song is based on the true story of a year 19 year old spree killer named Charles Starkweather. An album steeped in death and tragedy, it is hard to find a better Springsteen.
6. Sufjan stevens – Carrie & Lowell
via chartattack.com
And I long to be near you
But every road leads to and end.
The seventh album by Sufjan Stevens, Carrie & Lowell may be his most hard hitting and personal yet. Sufjan has always been a little eclectic and emotional. The 39 year old artist has been making impressively powerful music now for well over a decade. While musically it may be his simplest album, the subject matter is anything but; revolving around the loss of his mother in 2012. Carrie & Lowell is interspersed with sonic landscapes that call back to Sufjan’s childhood, the summer trips he would take with his mother and step-father and the trauma of dealing with her eventual death. The despair and honesty mixed with hope makes for an unparalleled album and one that anyone who has dealt with the loss of a parent can connect to.
5. Panda Bear – Young Prayer
via kcou.fm
Must the world let go of you?
You’re mine
You’re mine
Young Prayer is a critically acclaimed album from Animal Collective‘s Noah Lennox and in its own weird way deals heavily with loss and death. A warning that this is the strangest album in our top 7 list and may not be for everyone. Panda Bear, fronted and written by 38 year old Lennox, is part instrumental and part folk with very few lyrics that are often looped and manipulated. However these ambient tricks add gravity to its dark subject matter. It is clear from the brevity that Lennox was working through some complex emotions and these emotions connect in very strong ways.
4. Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night
‘Cause people let me tell you
It sent a chill up and down my spine
When I picked up the telephone And heard that he’d died
Released in 1975, this album is grief in it’s purest forms. Young was grappling with the drug overdose of friend and fellow guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. A deeply personal album, Tonight’s The Night grabs you from the first note and never releases. Young has stated in interviews that this album was written during a period in his life where he was completely lost and taken over by grief and despair. The quote: “I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.”, taken from the linear notes of the album can probably attest to this. From the titular opening track through to Tired Eyes, this album if grief and loss in pure, unadulterated form.
3. Modest Mouse – The Lonesome Crowded West
I’ve changed my mind so much I cant even trust it
My mind changed me so much I cant even trust myself
With Modest Mouse’s recent radio success, their obsession with the afterlife and the macabre may not be so obvious. However hidden behind their pop hits is a dark and distressing underbelly. Their second album,The Lonesome Crowded West has long been considered one of the best albums of the 1990s and for good reason. From songs of loneliness and despair, narratives of downtrodden cowboys to the heart wrenching Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset; a song about regretting suicide that is often difficult to listen through completely. Death and contemplations of the afterlife permeate this album and is worth the purchase.
2. A Silver Mt. Zion – He Has Left Us Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms
Don’t tell me that I am free
Cause I have not been well
Lately
The debut album by Montreal super-group A Silver Mt. Zion, this mostly instrumental post-rock album is rich in layer and rich in meaning. Singer Efrim Menuck was touring with his band Godspeed You! Black Emperorwhen he found out his dog Wanda had died. Wanting to memorialize his best friend, Efrim set about writing this album. The album is rich in Jewish tapestry and might be best described as a sonic Shiva(the Jewish mourning period). The title of the album is in itself an ode to the inability to put grief into words and the album is the musical equivalent of the destruction of death.
1. The Antlers – Hospice
via dailyrindblog.com
I’m trying to dig you out
but all you want is to be buried there together
Indie rock group The Antlers from Brooklyn, NY released Hospice in 2009 to critical acclaim. Written and sung by frontman Peter Silberman, Hospice is about the relationship between a male hospice worker, an unnamed woman and a hospital patient suffering from terminal bone cancer. The album is dark, depressing and bleak however it wraps the listener into its storyline and makes it hard to stop listening. The album is rife with sentimentality and the explosive instrumentals and has repeatedly been named one of the best albums of 2009. The album drifts from the autobiographical(though never confirmed), to third person narrative and tells a dark and beautiful story of collapse, illness, death and human relationships.
