10 songs that embarrassed the musicians who made them
Being an artist is inherently embarrassing.
To make a living from music, you have to lay yourself bare. Your problems might feel small, embarrassing, or even the result of your own bad decisions, but they still have to go into the mix if you want to create something honest.
At times, the music you intend to make and the music you actually release can drift so far apart that they barely resemble each other. Tastes shift quickly. What sounded brilliant yesterday, or in a studio full of nodding yes-men, can feel hollow once it finally reaches the airwaves.
Back in the day, bands could afford to try something new and fail. Most likely, only a handful of people would’ve witnessed it. A bootleg copy here or there might do the rounds. There was no pesky Instagram footage tracking every wince-worthy beat.
There are many problems with the internet, but one of the biggest for artists is that things just won’t die. You put out one sketchy song when the creative juices have dried up, and that shit can haunt you for years. You want to leave behind a cat-screech ballad about missing your childhood best friend? You can’t. Somewhere deep in a Reddit hole, the fans have the very first recording.
There are many reasons to feel embarrassed about something. It might’ve been an outlet for a messy divorce that, a few years down the line, comes across as a little nasty (Bring Me The Horizon, we’re looking at you). It might be you’ve just moved on from being the world’s innocent virgin (sorry, Madonna), or you think you’re genuinely just better than the work everyone thinks is your best (Radiohead, I hear you).
Whatever the reason, plenty of artists have been there. Here are ten songs that embarrassed the musicians who made them. Try not to wince while you read.
10 songs artists were embarrassed by:
‘Creep’ – Radiohead
This might be the only song on the list that you’re familiar with; everybody knows that Radiohead hate their hallmark hit. Upon its release in 1992, everything was quiet. A pesky re-release in 1993 brought on a new mania for the reluctant group. What kind of image is that to lead with, anyway? The soft-boi-ification of Thom Yorke whining, “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.”
This wasn’t lost on him. The sheer number of times the band was required to play the song for fans who had obviously come to hear one thing, and one thing only, was mind-numbing and almost offensive. Yorke told Rolling Stone in 1993, “It’s like it’s not our song anymore. It feels like we’re doing a cover.”
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – Nirvana
Yorke wasn’t the only one to slag off his own song to Rolling Stone. Famously, late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain called their huge hit, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, “an embarrassment to play.”
He blamed MTV in part for this, which seemed to play the project on a loop, so that it was inescapable. Nirvana had no choice but to face up to their creation, Frankenstein style. “It’s been pounded into their brains,” Cobain mused. “I can barely, especially on a bad night, get through ‘Teen Spirit.’ I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away.”
‘Party in the USA’ – Miley Cyrus
Miley Cyrus’ career has enjoyed some shocking twists and turns; for the most part, the global superstar has been great at sticking by her achievements and decisions, no matter how outlandish. And yet, when looking back at the sugary-sweet 2009 track ‘Party in the USA’, Cyrus told V Magazine, “I would never take it back. But that’s not who I am, that’s not where I want to sing, that’s not what I want to sing, and that’s not what I want my voice to sound like, because you can’t hear me through there.”
Plus, Cyrus used the idea to reference Donald Trump’s election in 2017, alluding that, at that time, it did “not feel like a party in the USA.” While there’s no real need for the actor and singer to be embarrassed by the mega-hit, the Trump administration is a whole different kettle of fish.
‘Like A Virgin’ – Madonna
Whether you clocked onto Madonna’s iconic ‘Like A Virgin’ through the a acapella rendition in the 2012 comedy movie Pitch Perfect, or through her second studio album released in 1984, it’s a pure and simple fact that the song will never be forgotten.
That’s not exactly how Madonna would like things to go, however. Battling with her legacy in an interview in 2008, the star shared, “I’m not sure I can sing ‘Holiday’ or ‘Like A Virgin’ ever again. I just can’t – unless somebody paid me like $30million or something.” The hallmark hit followed her everywhere. And the innocent, confessional nature of the track got a little embarrassing after a while. Not for the very first time.
‘Into My Arms’ – Nick Cave
By now, Nick Cave has grown to have rightful reverence for this track. It remains an essential part of every show he does and stands as perhaps the most well-known and beloved track from the artist, walking couples down aisles, soundtracking first dancing and generally being held up as a romantic anthem.
However, when Cave first wrote and released the song, along with the rest of the album The Boatman’s Call, it sent a shiver down his spine out of sheer embarrassment. The record symbolised a shift in him, ushering out the wild storytelling and bringing in a moment of personal honesty. Written during a period of heartache and strife, he felt he had no other way. But then, when it hit the shelves, he wasn’t just shy about it, but was completely “disgusted” by the record, with ‘Into My Arms’ feeling like the pinnacle of that feeling.
“After The Boatman’s Call came out, I experienced a kind of embarrassment. I felt I had exposed too much,” he wrote on his Red Hand Files, having to hold back the urge to go buy every possible copy he could find to get it off the shelves. Over time, though, he’d grow out of that, instead coming to see personal songwriting as a truly noble and powerful form.
‘Medicine’ – Bring Me The Horizon
Bring Me The Horizon have been through several different phases, ranging from their deathcore beginnings with 2006’s Count Your Blessings, the glitchy experimental techno of their 2019 release Music to Listen To…, and the hyperpop-inflected Post Human Series. Vocalist Oli Sykes throws himself with formidable gusto into the requirements of each aestheticised image, but even he has misgivings about a particular song.
The track, ‘Medicine’, from their 2019 release, Amo, opens with the rhyme “Some people are a lot like clouds, you know / ‘Cause life’s so much brighter when they go,” and, in somewhat gimmicky fashion with cloddish melodic focus, follows Sykes’ messy divorce.
When the crowd asked the Sheffield band to play the track at Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel in 2024, Sykes had a simple answer: “Medicine’? Are you guys all right? You’re good, you’re good, right? You guys would like to hear ‘Medicine’? Even I think that song is shit.”
‘Royals’ – Lorde
Imagine having your thoughts from when you were 16 haunt you and follow you around for the rest of your life – That’s the reality Lorde lives in.
‘Royals’ launched Lorde’s career. She already had a cult following online for other, and admittedly much better, songs, but it was this super hit that made her a star in an instant as she flew to number one and has been revered as one of the leaders of alt-pop ever since.
However, ‘Royals’ is a teenage fancy. The singer wrote it when she was 16, and even more than that, she wrote it in a session with a producer right at the very infancy of even beginning to dream she might be able to be a bigger deal than just an internet figure. That leads to the lethal combination of the lyrics being both childlike and cliché, written with the design to be a hit.
She reflected on the song in 2014 to The Music, stating, “I understand why it worked and why it was kind of a hit, I can see those qualities in it, but at the same time there’s part of me that’s like…these melodies are just not as good as something I could have written now’, or like ‘I definitely wouldn’t have written this lyric this way if I had’ve written it now’”, adding plainly, “It definitely feels like a bit of a relic now”. So now, ‘Royals’ is skipped from her set list when she thinks she can get away with it.
‘Break The Rules’ – Charli XCX
Charli XCX is a fascinating figure. While outsiders often mistakenly talk about her as if she burst out of nowhere with Brat, she’s been around a long time, and even longer than most understand. Long before her name was first seen in 2011 on the Stay Away EP, the girl behind it, Charlotte Aitchison, had been busy.
She’d been busy getting her parents to take her along to illegal raves to do DJ sets, and somehow managing to get one of her tracks to Blondie to sing on their album Pollinator, but Charli was especially busy writing. In 2012, Charli’s breakout came through one of the songs she’d written for another artist, as Icona Pop’s ‘I Love It’, penned by Aitchison, was everywhere. That was one of a big bank of more outright pop songs she had stacked up with the plan to sell them.
On that pile, though, there was ‘Break The Rules’, a classic teen girl gone wild song that Charli herself never really thought matched her vibe, but clearly her label did, as she released it as a single in 2014. The entirety of Sucker seemed to be her label trying to make Charli a plain ol’ pop star, leading her to publicly dislike that entire album, but more than any track, she hates ‘Break The Rules’.
Even when she wrote it, she thought any artist who would sing it was an “idiot”, so it was embarrassing when she ended up having to be that fool.
‘Shiny Happy People’ – REM
Selling out and not even having your sell-out track be your biggest hit? That’s got to be rough.
The exact reason why people loved REM is that the band, coming out of the innovative yet genre-less Athens scene, didn’t follow any strict formula or stick in any clear box. Yet still, when they followed up ‘Losing My Religion’ with the bubblegum, cheap pop of ‘Shiny Happy People’, fans were confused, and Michael Stipe was embarrassed.
“[Shiny Happy People] was my attempt at writing bubblegum pop music for kids,” Stipe said to Today. It was a studio mess-around project, and then suddenly, it was being released and positioned as their next big hit. To him, though, it was never anything but “a really fruity, kind of bubblegum song”, telling The Quietus, “It’s just a little bit embarrassing that it became as big a hit as it did!”
‘Brass In Pocket’ – The Pretenders
The way Chrissie Hynde describes the release of The Pretenders’ ‘Brass In Pocket’ sounds like a genuine horror show.
“I remember walking around Oxford Circus [and] hearing it blasting out of people’s radios,” she said as suddenly the world was playing a tune she was utterly embarrassed of, adding, “I was mortified.”
Her feelings about it were clear from the start. Immediately after recording the track and hearing it, Hynde told the track’s producer, “This goes out over my dead body.” But as is always the way, the label got involved, and that decision got taken away. They liked the song, and so the song would be released – whether Hynde wanted it to or not.
Eventually, artists seem to just get Stockholm syndrome in these situations. “Now I like that song because it’s one of those songs that served me well,” she said, having sung it so many times that she’s just had to surrender to it.
