From The Velvet Underground to Nirvana: The 10 best songs written about heroin
Over the years, countless musicians have resorted to the use – and typically misuse – of heroin, filling their veins with the dangerous substance as a means to cope with serious mental health issues. Other times, its widespread availability and use in certain musical circles has led the drug to fall into the hands of those susceptible to addiction, and the results have been tragic. In the 1960s and 1970s, the hedonistic rock and roll lifestyle involved heroin with an alarming regularity, yet this continued into the 1990s and 2000s, even leading to a fashion style known as ‘heroin chic’.
The sad reality is that plenty of talented musicians have lost their lives due to an addiction to heroin, including the likes of Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Sid Vicious and Chet Baker. Thus, songs about heroin are often intense to listen to, knowing the destruction the class A drug can cause. That hasn’t stopped certain musicians from singing about it, though, sometimes bringing awareness to its damaging qualities, other times declaring their love for the substance.
One of the best examples of a musician who frequently returned to singing about heroin is Lou Reed. On The Velvet Underground’s debut album, multiple tracks are preoccupied with the drug, such as ‘Run Run Run’, ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ and, of course, ‘Heroin’. Moreover, Reed’s solo track ‘Perfect Day’ is widely speculated to be about heroin, although he has denied this claim.
Simialrly, The Beatles’ ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ included the lines, “I need a fix ’cause I’m going down”, which led critics to believe that John Lennon was singing about heroin. However, he denied this claim, stating that he was referring to his intense sexual desire for Yoko Ono. So, from Phoebe Bridgers’ touching ballad ‘Funeral’ to Iggy Pop’s iconic Trainspotting anthem ‘Lust for Life’, here are ten fantastic songs that were actually inspired by heroin.
The 10 best songs about heroin:
10. ‘Chelsea Girls’ – Nico
Penned by The Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, Nico’s ‘Chelsea Girls’ defined an era, referencing different artists that lived in the Chelsea Hotel, with a similar structure to Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. The title is taken from Andy Warhol’s 1966 film of the same name, which followed different residents of the iconic New York hotel who were dependent on drugs.
Nico sings about the different girls in the hotel and their habits, referring to heroin users in the first verse with the lines, “Brigid’s all wrapped up in foil/ You wonder if she can uncoil.” Later on she quips: “You wonder just/ How high they go.” The flute-led track is one of Nico’s best, appearing on her debut solo album of the same name.
9. ‘Funeral’ – Phoebe Bridgers
One of indie rock’s biggest names right now is Phoebe Bridgers, who has taken the music world by storm with her melancholic and relatable lyricism. On her debut album, Stranger in the Alps, Bridgers explored the death of a close friend from a heroin overdose on ‘Funeral’. The track opens with the declaration, “I’m singin’ at a funeral tomorrow/ For a kid a year older than me.”
The singer parallels the topic with her own experiences of depression, including one of her most iconic yet soul crushing lines, “Jesus Christ, I’m so blue all the time/ And that’s just how I feel.” Although the drug is never explicitly mentioned, the devastating ‘Funeral’ remains one of the saddest songs on this list due to its exploration of emotions associated with heroin overdose and its moving backstory.
8. ‘Needle in the Hay’ – Elliott Smith
American musician Elliott Smith found himself addicted to heroin in the early 2000s, shortly before his premature death in 2003. However, back in 1995, he penned ‘Needle in the Hay’, using heroin as a metaphor for dependency. He paints the picture of struggling addicts through the opening verse’s lines, “Strung out and thin/ Calling some friend, trying to cash some check.” An interview with Smith’s friend Dorien Garry for Pitchfork revealed that the song referred to what was “going on in the Pacific Northwest in the small music community in the early 90s and how badly drugs were infiltrating it.”
The lines “Down downstairs to the man/ He’s gonna make it all okay/ I can’t be myself/ I can’t be myself and I don’t want to talk/ I’m taking the cure so I can be quiet wherever I want/ So leave me alone,” paint a moving picture of isolation, with Smith hoping that drugs will cure this feeling.
7. ‘I Think I’m In Love’ – Spiritualised
On Spiritualised’s seminal 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, the band’s main creative force, Jason Pierce, sings about his heartbreak and the beauty of using drugs to numb his pain. He sings with a hazy tone, “Cool ’cause I’m wired and I’m out of my mind/ Warm as the dope running down my spine/ But I don’t care about you and I’ve got nothing to do.”
After a brief pause, the song picks up its pace, and Pierce continues his heroin binge, singing, “Love in the middle of the afternoon/ Just me and my spike and my arm and my spoon/ Feel the warmth of the sun in the room.” Despite the upbeat tempo of the track, Pierce’s lyrics are actually utterly tragic.
6. ‘Golden Brown’ – The Stranglers
After emerging from the British punk scene in the 1970s, the band found mainstream success with their single ‘Golden Brown’, taken from their sixth studio album, La folie. The cheery harpsichord instrumentation makes way for vocalist Hugh Cornwell’s lyrical declarations of love for “golden brown.” He states, “texture like sun/ Lays me down, with my mind she runs/ Throughout the night, no need to fight/ Never a frown with golden brown.”
Cornwell revealed that the song has two meanings. In the book The Stranglers Song by Song, he explained, “’Golden Brown’ works on two levels. It’s about heroin and also about a girl… both provided me with pleasurable times.” He deliberately wrote the track with ambiguous lyrics to bypass censors, which he achieved with much success.
5. ‘Ashes to Ashes’ – David Bowie
Easily one of David Bowie’s greatest tracks from the 1980s, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was released as the leading single for his album, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). The song acts as a sequel to his 1969 track ‘Space Oddity’, which follows an alienated fictional astronaut, Major Tom. However, on ‘Ashes to Ashes’, Major Tom is now a drug addict floating in space. Bowie sings, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie/ Strung out in heaven’s high/ Hitting an all-time low.”
In Chris O’Leary’s book Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie 1976–2018, the musician explained, “We come to him 10 years later and find the whole thing has soured, because there was no reason for putting him up there. […] The most disastrous thing I could think of is that he finds solace in some kind of heroin-type drug, actually cosmic space feeding him: an addiction. He wants to return to the womb from whence he came.”
4. ‘Come As You Are’ – Nirvana
It’s no secret that Kurt Cobain struggled with heroin use. Despite his bandmate Krist Novoselic warning him against using the powerful drug, Cobain found that it eased his stomach issues. Tragically, when he took his own life with a shotgun, high traces of heroin were found in his system. One of the band’s biggest hits, ‘Come As You Are’, taken from Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, makes reference to Seattle’s HIV prevention campaign with the lines “Come doused in mud/soaked in bleach.” The campaign advised heroin users, “if [their needles are] doused in mud, soak in bleach.”
Although Cobain’s lyrics clearly allude to societal expectations for people to act a certain way, with the singer telling listening to simply “come as you are,” many lines can be interpreted as drug metaphors. “Well I swear that I don’t have a gun” could be a metaphor for heroin, with a gun representing a syringe.
3. ‘Beetlebum’ – Blur
Following their initial success as one of Britpop’s biggest bands, Blur sought to refine and mature their sound, resulting in their self-titled 1997 album. The record’s lead single, ‘Beetlebum’, was much more emotional and simplisitic, yet it managed to shoot straight to number one in the UK Singles Chart. At the time, frontman Damon Albarn and his then-girlfriend, Justine Frischmann from Elastica, were struggling with heroin addiction.
He explained in the documentary, No Distance Left to Run, “That whole period of a lot of people’s lives was fairly muddied by heroin for a lot of people. And it’s sort of, it’s in that place. And a lot of stuff was at that time.” Lines such as “Get nothing done” and “Just get numb” describe the disastrous effects of heroin use, with the song providing an insight into a user’s experience of being high.
2. ‘Lust for Life’ – Iggy Pop
Iggy Pop was a notorious heroin user, known to shoot up on stage during his heydey in the 1960s and 1970s. Pop claims that the last time he took the drug was in 1983. However, that hasn’t stopped people from associating him with heroin, all thanks to one of his biggest hits, ‘Lust for Life’. The track, taken from his 1977 album of the same name, references the William S. Burrough’s novel The Ticket That Exploded through the line, “Here comes Johnny Yen again.”
Burroughs was known for his heroin addiction, even penning a semi-autobiographical novel about his drug use, Junkie. The Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek has claimed that when Pop refers to Burrough’s character Johnny Yen, he is also referring to a local heroin dealer that would often show up with motorised dildos (“With the liquor and drugs, and the flesh machine”).
The track was suitably chosen as the opening piece of music for Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting, which follows the lives of several heroin addicts. Because of the song’s use in the popular film, it gained even more recognition, peaking at number 26 in the UK Singles Chart after it received a reissue.
1. ‘Heroin’ – The Velvet Underground
Lou Reed was no stranger to writing songs about the class A drug. Many of his solo tracks and compositions for The Velvet Underground centred around heroin, such as ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ from the band’s debut album. However, their greatest song about the topic is undoubtedly the aptly-named ‘Heroin’. The track neither praises or condemns the use of the drug; rather, Reed objectively describes using it, singing, “Heroin, be the death of me/ Heroin, it’s my wife and it’s my life.”
According to Reed, “I was working for a record company as a songwriter, where they’d lock me in a room and they’d say write ten surfing songs, ya know, and I wrote ‘Heroin’ and I said ‘Hey I got something for ya.’ They said, ‘Never gonna happen, never gonna happen.’”
The band’s lyrical drug references drew negative criticism from certain media outlets, who blamed the New York rockers for glorifying heroin. Moreover, Reed was “disturbed” to hear that many fans had misinterpreted the song and were shooting up heroin as they listened to it, which was not the musician’s intention.
