The five creepiest opening lyrics ever written
A great song doesn’t need a great opening lyric, but most great opening lyrics result in great songs. The finest pop song lyrics ever written make it seem almost as though the song was fully realised before the pen even touched the page.
This seems all the more important when it comes to songs of a creepy nature. We need to be primed and teased into an unsettled state. If a track begins with a platitude, then any creepiness that follows will feel engineered, but if we’re startled from the off, then everything else will feel seamlessly uneasy by wicked design.
However, creepiness requires great guile, too. Subtlety, subverisely, feels far more shocking than anything intended to be shocking in this case. As Stephen King mused, “Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it, and hell is only a poor synonym.” Eeriness echoes in this uncanny valley of space with deafening resonance.
So, which songs nail this spooky sentiment from the off? Which bloody awful ballads craft a singular opening that stirs the listener with immediate effect, and would even have Jason Statham thinking about flicking a light on at night? Well, we’ve decided to focus on five fantastic examples of odiously creeping opening lines.
The five creepiest opening lyrics ever written:
‘Killing for Company’ – Swans
“I couldn’t stop myself,
I knew I’d do it again…”
Part of our fascination with serial killers is due to the psychological degeneracy it takes to become so heinous. Swans tap into that thought with sickening ease. One of the most disturbing answers we find on this front is the case of Dennis Nilsen, a homosexual who claimed he strangled his 12-15 male victims out of extreme loneliness, hence the song’s title ‘Killing for Company’.
Once Nilsen had killed his victims, he would reportedly have sex with them, bath them, and then prop the cadavers up on the sofa as though they were watching TV with him. Swans capture the true darkness of Scotland’s most grisly crime chapter in a perturbing sound and even more unsettling lyrics.
‘The Revolution Blues’ – Neil Young
“Well, we live in a trailer at the edge of town,
You never see us ’cause we don’t come around…”
The paths of Charles Manson and Neil Young crossed long before this song was ever written. In a quirk of history, the two men once shared a jam session when Manson was a plucky up-and-comer trying to infiltrate the music industry before things turned horrifically sour.
The cult leader’s life has been eternalised many times over through movies, songs, books and every other medium possible, but naturally, few have the same spooky insight that Young has on the matter. In many ways, Young captures both the individual and the societal issues that led to the heinous crimes that shocked Hollywood. And he does it from the off with an opening line that captures everything from our culpable ‘blind eye’ to perverting ways of exclusion and even poverty.
‘Red Right Hand’ – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
“Take a little walk to the edge of town,
And go across the tracks…”
On the surface, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ gnarly anthem ‘Red Right Hand’ explores the outskirts of the urban world presided over by some trading estate villain. However, there is a lot of mystique in the welter and the tale stretches way beyond the fable of some metropolitan Freddie Kruger flogging knock-off cologne and ‘genuine fakes’.
In fact, ‘Red Right Hand’ begins in 1608 with the birth of a certain literary revolutionary by the name of John Milton. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ timeless anthem borrows a motif that is scattered throughout history since Milton first wove the wherefores of his bold worldview in the epic poem Paradise Lost, pitting the forces of heaven and hell in a roving battle. This backstory seems to imbue the seediness of which he sings with a chilling sense of eternity, conjuring a Lynchian sense of genuine, mystic evil.
‘Dead Flag Blues’ – Godspeed You! Black Emperor
“The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel,
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides…”
From the evocative opening image to the gut-punch of the following thought, Godspeed You! Black Emperor nail a terrifying Cormac McCarthy-like feel with this intense opening to ‘Dead Flag Blues’. The song takes off in a dystopian ramble thereafter, with the burning car always writ large across the psyche as the grey end of civilisation sinks in.
Alongside the ominous drone, this opening monologue perfectly sets the tone for F♯ A♯ ∞, a world contained within an album, eerily close to our own. Above all, the most chilling aspect of the prose is its distance. It doesn’t follow some petrified character with any great vitality, but rather surveys unfurling devastation like an idle bystander. It feels merely observed, and as a result, devoid of hope.
‘John Wayne Gacy Jr’ – Sufjan Stevens
“His father was a drinker,
And his mother cried in bed…”
“Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf”… Philip Larkin might have been thinking of a more mundane brand of hereditary gloom in his poem ‘This Be The Verse’, but it’s a line that encapsulates a lot. There are no prizes for guessing which serial killer Sufjan Stevens was talking about in his most extreme examination of the deepening coastal shelf of man’s decrepit despair.
Part of what makes this song so captivating is the incongruous mix of Stevens’ almost ethereally soft vocals and the abject horrors that such a sweet sound actually depicts. Never has a lyric like “Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid” sounded more inexplicably beguiling. But it all begins by stating its thesis very firmly from the off, giving the track an added intellectual air too.
