Pop Songs That Were Ripped Straight From The Headlines

“If it weren’t for music, I think I would have shot myself,” Eddie Vedder powerfully revealed on MTV, while collecting the award for Video of the Year for “Jeremy.” 

It was a fitting proclamation for a song inspired by the real-life tragedy of 15-year-old Jeremy Wade Delle. Delle brought a gun to his school in 1991 and turned the weapon on himself in front of his English class. Pearl Jam frontman Vedder was so moved after reading about the events that he wrote a track in Jeremy’s honor. 

Unfortunately, a misleading version of the music video leaves out the key end scene, and many fans were wrongfully left to believe that Jeremy was a school shooter. The director Mark Pellington told Songfacts, “MTV made us edit the gun going into the mouth. That created the great confusion, which made it appear like he brought the gun and shot his classmates, which was a huge misinterpretation.”

In 2006, two miners, Brant Webb and Todd Russell, miraculously survived the Beaconsfield gold mine collapse in Australia. They were trapped nearly a kilometer underground for two full weeks. 

Rescuers managed to set up a supply line for Webb and Russell while they awaited transport to the surface, and one of their more lighthearted requests was an iPod loaded with songs by the Foo Fighters. Frontman Dave Grohl was reportedly moved to tears when he heard the news. In a note he sent down to Webb and Russell, he wrote “Two tickets to a Foos show, anywhere, and two cold beers waiting for you.” 

On his promise, Grohl did more than just deliver. He also wrote “Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners,” a stirring fingerpicking instrumental featured on the 2007 album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace. 

Webb caught the track live at the Sydney Opera House at a show he attended with his wife Rachel. 

Elton John’s 1973 single “Candle in the Wind” was originally written with lyricist Bernie Taupin in tribute to Marilyn Monroe. But after the sudden, heartbreaking death of John’s dear friend Princess Diana in 1997, a new version was penned. It was titled “Goodbye, England’s Rose,” and Taupin, who wrote it in a matter of hours, wanted “to make it sound like a country singing it,” he recalled to DW. 

John performed the special rewrite only one time ever, at Diana’s funeral a week after the accident. He went on to describe the experience as “surreal.” 

While John still performs “Candle in the Wind '' at concerts, he only ever plays the original 1973 version. He does, however, donate all sales proceeds from the song to charitable causes in Diana’s name. 

You’ll never listen to “The Way” by Fastball again. That’s because it’s so much more than a dad rock earworm; it’s also practically a play-by-play of the unsolved deaths of Lela and Raymond Howard. An elderly couple from Texas, their case made headlines when they went missing after a fiddling festival in 1997. 

Fastball lead singer Tony Scalzo remembered, 

Right away this story sort of struck me. I just started getting these ideas: maybe they don’t want to be found, maybe they’re just sick of being responsible and they just want to go out and have fun.

The couple turned up weeks later – at the bottom of a 25-foot cliff hundreds of miles away in Arkansas. “The Way” went on to become one of the biggest hits of the year, and according to Lela’s son, Hal Ray Copeland, his mom would have been over the moon. He revealed, “My cousin said she left a star. On TV all the time, a song about her. She would have loved it.” 

Bob Dylan is known for telling epic stories, and “Hurricane,” released in 1976, is one of the most visceral. It was released as the lead single off his album Desire, and was inspired by the wrongful imprisonment of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Dylan sings, 

Here comes the story of the Hurricane

The man the authorities came to blame

For somethin' that he never done

Put in a prison cell, but one time he coulda been

The champion of the world

Carter was a Black champion boxer framed by the police for a triple murder in 1966. It took nearly two decades for his conviction to be overturned. Dylan’s song helped to bring attention to the case, and he visited Carter in prison as he was writing the eight minute-long opus. 

Dylan went on to play a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, raising $100,000 for Carter’s cause, before Carter’s release in 1985. 

Redbone was founded by two brothers, Pat and Lolly Vegas, who were passionate about commemorating their Yaqui, Shoshone and Mexican heritage in their art. One example was the 1973 single “We Were All Wounded At Wounded Knee,” which remembers the massacre of Lakota Sioux Indians in 1890 at the hands of the US government. 

But according to Pat, the band’s label, CBS/Epic “wouldn’t record it, so I paid for it myself.” The song managed to make its way to Europe and even topped the charts in The Netherlands. But back in the States, several radio stations went so far as to ban the track because of its controversial lyrics.