The 10 best songs about heaven and hell
The afterlife is always a bit of a daunting prospect for anyone to take in. We are all going to die someday, but there’s an unspoken fear that everyone holds regarding how they are going to meet their end. It’s never easy to open up about heaven or hell, but artists from Radiohead to The Cure weren’t afraid to tackle it head-on.
Although none of the artists below claim to have all the answers, they offer their own insight as to what exists beyond this earthly existence. While some artists may have already had brushes with death before recording the material, these songs are a reminder to keep calm even when confronting what happens when you reach the other side.
While some of these chosen tracks might have a hopeful message about what happens after you die, others aren’t as forgiving. For every great song about heaven, there’s another one about the wonders of the underworld, looking back on what will happen to those who have done more harm than good in this lifetime.
It’s all about balance in rock and roll, though, and each of these songs give a good indication of what might be awaiting us once we pack our bags for that one last trip. The idea of death might be a morbid thought, but we shouldn’t have anything to fear as long as we have these songs to keep us sane.
The 10 best songs about heaven and hell:
‘Just Like Heaven’ – The Cure
Most artists treat heaven like it’s something fleeting in their lyrics. As much as you might like to talk about what paradise might be like, it almost seems unattainable. For Robert Smith, though, the closest thing to heaven exists right here on Earth when you’re with that special someone.
Although every Cure song has a deep well of emotion in it, ‘Just Like Heaven’ is singular in its affection, talking about a girl who is smitten by Smith’s every move, even though Smith might take her for granted. As they reach closer throughout the song, the last verse sees Smith crying after he loses his girlfriend to the sea.
Left with only his thoughts, Smith can only remember the vision of her, soft and lonely as she tries to make her way through the cold world. While her touch may be the closest thing to heaven, it’s fleeting now that Smith is alone in his thoughts. Love can make you do crazy things, but when you’re broken-hearted, it’s like someone closing the gate to paradise in a few seconds.
‘Highway to Hell’ – AC/DC
Every vision of Hell tends to be big, bad, and scary. The kind of songs that mention hell paint it as a grim place where you can’t outrun the demons coming to kill you. Who says that all trips to the underworld have to be sad, though?
As AC/DC were coming up the ranks, ‘Highway to Hell’ is a loving tribute to the seedy side of rock and roll, as Bon Scott talks about taking his friends down to their favourite watering hole in Hell. Despite the subject matter, Scott parallels the idea of going to Hell to being in a rock and roll band, as you go through town after town and laying waste to everything that stands in your path.
While the song may have been meant as a celebration, the grim reaper came a bit too early for Scott, passing away a few months after this song hit shelves after a night of heavy drinking. For a band that was always about raising hell wherever they went, having this as one of Scott’s final songs is actually a nice epitaph for his final days with the band.
‘Heaven’ – Talking Heads
It’s hard to tell whether David Byrne is being serious, even at the best of times. Throughout his time with the Talking Heads, Byrne’s lyrics are equal parts serious, sarcastic, and incoherent, depending on which album you find yourself in. Though the band never betrayed their art rock tendencies, ‘Heaven’ contains some of the most plainspoken lyrics of Byrne’s career.
While Fear of Music goes through many different passages, ‘Heaven’ is a much more sombre affair, as Byrne describes what the concept of the afterlife means to him. Although the one phrase “heaven is a place where nothing really happens” seems bleak, it’s actually a more comforting thought that it would lead you to believe.
The afterlife might seem like a dark void with a description like that, but Byrne isn’t looking to talk about the darker side of heaven. This is just a peaceful oasis where you can be free to rest and not worry about the hustle and bustle of what’s going on on Earth. It might seem boring on first listen, but heaven could very well be a place where everyone is finally free from stress.
‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – The Rolling Stones
There’s no getting around talking about the underworld and not bringing up Satan himself. While we might have committed a lot of sins to land ourselves in Hell, it’s Lucifer who turns the gears in our heads that tend to drive us towards evil. Though the image might be a demon with a handlebar moustache, The Stones suggest that the king of evil is a lot more seductive.
Modelled after the novel The Master and Margarita, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ is a loose samba from the Stones, as Mick Jagger sings about all of the atrocities that Lucifer has seen over the years. After making sure that Pontius Pilate washed his hands during Jesus’ execution, Lucifer doesn’t even need you to guess his name to know that he is a slimy character.
While the song might be from the devil’s point of view, he doesn’t let humanity off the hook either, turning to the rest of the world and pointing out the atrocities that they’ve committed, like the death of the Kennedys. Humanity has been taught time and time again that the devil is bad, but the urge to enter the underworld has never been this sultry.
‘Mama’ – My Chemical Romance
Every second of My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade is informed by the afterlife. As we follow a patient’s final days after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, he seems to take inventory of his life and wonders where he’s going to land. In ‘Mama’ though, our protagonist learns a valuable lesson: there’s no heaven.
After trying to repent for his sins, the narrator is certain that everyone goes to Hell eventually, finding a slight bit of humour in how he’s able to twist the knife in his mother’s heart by telling her that Satan is building a coffin her size. Although most would be scared, he’s willing to let the fire bathe him for what he did before finally landing in the underworld with a theatrical guitar lick calling him down.
While Liza Minelli’s cameo as his mother tries to help, the narrator has finally snapped, seeing his entire life as a bit of twisted revenge on his mother for being so disappointed with him over the years. We can try as hard as we’d like not to make it down to Hell, but sometimes that need for revenge is too great to pass up.
‘Tears in Heaven’ – Eric Clapton
It’s hard to put into words what no one can feel yet. While songwriters come and go throughout popular music, no one is able to properly articulate what heaven is really about if they are still breathing. When you see it through a child’s eye though, things get a little more complicated.
After losing his son Connor after he fell out of a window, Eric Clapton wrote this tearful song about what Connor might be doing in the afterlife. Despite not being there for him, Clapton is hoping that Connor is happy, no longer having to cry and hoping that one day he can hold his son’s hand one more time.
Even though this song is about the good times Connor can have on the other side, Clapton acknowledges that not being there for his son might have cost him his ticket through the pearly gates. Regardless of his missteps in the past, this song isn’t about just Connor being happy. This is a broken man trying to earn his way back into heaven through song.
‘Lazarus’ – David Bowie
Every rock star has to bow out gracefully one day. Although David Bowie knew that he had a terminal cancer diagnosis, he wasn’t going to let mortality interfere with what he was going to do in the studio. While Blackstar eventually played out as a dissection of the Starman’s imminent death, ‘Lazarus’ is the song where he acknowledges just how far gone he has become.
His broken voice definitely shows his age, but Bowie is looking to use his years of experience as an instrument, talking about looking down from heaven and seeing how the rest of the world responds to his death. As much as Bowie has juggled the occult and Christianity in his writing, he seems to be content with wherever he lands, saying that the afterlife will run its course just like his life did.
Bowie knew he had a long road ahead of him once he passed away, but listening to ‘Blackstar’ isn’t about the dread that comes with the afterlife. Death could be a new beginning, and Bowie is ready for whatever happens once he leaves his body.
‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ – Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan was never one to shy away from deep topics. Though some of his strongest moments were when he went political, Dylan’s wit turned up in some of the most human songs of the ‘60s, like the scathing ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. When Dylan took his writing to the big screen, he still poured just as much soul into it.
Written for the soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ was written about a dying lawman having to give up his gun for the last time before they put him in the ground. Despite the grim subject matter, Dylan sounds more weary on this track, like he’s inhabiting the character and trying to feel what it’s like to be on your last breaths before he expires.
Even when Guns N’ Roses turned the song into an over-the-top hair metal banger, they kept the most important sections intact, like Axl Rose adding subtle banging noises in between the lines of the chorus. Dylan might have left a few elements to your imagination, but when you hear the song in a massive stadium, those few words turn into a desperate plea for life.
‘Videotape’ – Radiohead
When we all eventually die, we’re going to have to take a look at what our life was like before heaven opens up. None of us are angels, so there are always going to be some elements of our lives that we wish we could change. You can’t change the past, but Radiohead have all of it saved to replay again and again.
Given the off-kilter piano figure, Thom Yorke sounds like he’s singing from the other side of consciousness on ‘Videotape’, talking about finally getting to see the pearly gates and watching his life play out on a videotape. While Yorke’s character may have been looking to preserve those moments in yellow, green, and blue images, the song almost realises what he left out of the picture.
Despite Yorke’s need to document everything, hearing him play back his life has a tinge of regret as if he knows the stuff that he missed out on while he lived by needing to get everything on video. Yorke might have the evidence of the life he had, but what good is that life if he didn’t have anything to show for it except for a couple of VHS tapes?
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ – The Beatles
The Beatles never tackled religion all that often. Although each of the Fab Four had their own unique takes on the afterlife, there was always an unspoken rule to touch on more universal elements like love and peace. While ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ broke down a barrier for the band, the lyrics talk about how you don’t have to be dead once you leave your body.
Taking lyrics from The Psychedelic Experience, John Lennon waxes poetic about what the effects of acid could enlighten you about. Though most of the song is about relaxing and letting your mind go wherever it wants, there’s an element that always comes back to moving from one plane of existence to another.
There’s a Buddhist mindset behind most of this song, as Lennon talks about playing the game of existence endlessly, moving out of your physical body and moving freely among other astral planes. The Beatles might have written plenty of love songs over the course of their career, but ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ has its mind focused on something a lot stronger than love: the mind.
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