The 50-year-old rock song inspired by an irregular heartbeat that will live forever
No matter what genre you’re into, be it rock, folk, blues, or everything else out there, music can provide you with a real sense of comfort.
It all goes back to the birth of Romanticism within music. There was a moment hundreds of years ago when suddenly, something snapped, and artists decided to stop with music that was technically proficient and start making music that allowed both the artist and the listener to feel something profound. Emotion ran through every note, and that’s an idea that continues to prevail now, centuries later.
As people continue to try writing music which is a reflection of their genuine emotions and allows those within earshot to feel something real, they reach into areas of their psyche that contain their most raw feelings and pull out whatever they can. It’s uncomfortable for a lot of people to do, but it also leads to some of the greatest, most romantic, and most impactful music out there.
One of these feelings that often inspires such moving songs is that of loss. When someone close to you passes away, it can be hard to put that loss into words, and so people instead opt to put it into music. It’s a much easier way to express yourself, and when the song is released, it can also help people who are experiencing something similar. For instance, the album Faith by The Cure was written while the band were experiencing several losses, and it comes across in the sombre nature of the songs.
“The whole band had a family member die, and that really colored Faith,” said Robert Smith, “The initial demos that we did in my mom and dad’s dining room are really quite upbeat. Then, within about two weeks, the whole mood of the band had completely changed. I wrote ‘The Funeral Party’ and ‘All Cats Are Grey’ in one night, and that really set the tone for the album.”
Of course, these feelings don’t necessarily need to be reactive either. There are some songs out there that talk about the fear of loss, as opposed to loss itself. One of these came in the form of ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’, a classic rock song by Blue Öyster Cult, which is a lot of people’s favourite. There were many who originally thought the track was about suicide, but Buck Dharma from the band has confirmed that it’s more about pondering the afterlife and being cautious of death.
When people write songs, they are usually doing so over a 4/4 beat. Granted, there are some artists who prefer to use more experimental time signatures, but for the most part, the beats that people are keen to work with make sense and are good to lay down music to. However, Dharma was working with a completely different kind of beat: that of his own heart.
The reason why Dharma used to think about death so much and what might happen to us in the afterlife is that he was diagnosed with having an irregular heartbeat. As a result, he would often wonder about what would happen if he were to die at a young age because of it. It was these macabre glimpses of existentialism that inspired him to write the track ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’, and penning such a classic gave him a strange sense of comfort as he came face to face with his own mortality.
“I thought I was going to maybe not live that long,” he said in an interview with Songfacts, “I had been diagnosed with a heart condition, and your mind starts running away with you, especially when you’re young-ish. So, that’s why I wrote the story. It’s imagining you can survive death in terms of your spirit. Your spirit will prevail.”
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