5 Songs That Recorded The Singer’s Actual Physical Pain

5 I Will Survive

The song “I Will Survive” would totally seem to be one of those songs speaking about someone’s real emotional pain. And it is, if we’re talking about the pain of the songwriter, Dino Fekaris, who was inspired by being fired by Motown Records. But if we’re talking about singer Gloria Gaynor, she was mostly inspired by pain in her back.

A little earlier in the year, she’d been performing at New York City’s Beacon Theatre, when she fell over onstage. The next morning, she woke up paralyzed from the waist down. This led to immediate surgeries to remove one disc and fuse two vertebrae together, which did let her walk again, but the spinal pain remained. It was strongest in the immediate aftermath, when she recorded “I Will Survive,” and it stuck around decades later.

She only fixed the pain with a later operation a full 40 years later. A doctor with the most suspicious name of Dr. Hooman M. Melamed reconstructed her spine, a surgery that involved first breaking it anew. An article about the surgery refers to the doctor as “a board-certified spine surgeon,” which frankly just makes us more suspicious. We would assume that he’s board certified, but the very fact that he identifies as such, and has chosen a name to sound as human as possible, suggests Gloria has been given an extraterrestrial implant and is now compromised. 

4 Through the Wire

Kanye West was doing some stuff in the music business in the 1990s, but his career really began with his 2002 car crash. It was 4 a.m., he was driving home from a recording session, and he fell asleep behind the wheel of his Lexus. He crashed into another car, breaking both the other driver’s legs and smashing apart his own jaw.

The hospital reconstructed his jaw and wired it shut. The jaws were still wired together when he wrote and recorded “Through the Wire,” his first hit. References to the accident are right there in the lyrics if you listen for them, but maybe you never did listen and just heard the chorus and its apparent gibberish. “Through the wire”? The phrase is supposed to be “through the fire,” so “through the wire” clearly doesn’t mean anything. 

The accident was so bad that some people, hearing the story years later, became convinced that he made it all up, but he did not. Also, years later, Kanye told Elon Musk that he believed the crash might have given him autism, and while that cannot be true, many agree that Kanye suffers from brain damage of some sort.

3 The Show Must Go On

Freddie Mercury didn’t record much music in the last year of his life. In fact, stories kept surfacing saying that the AIDS had killed him, and people generally believed it because this was something that was bound to happen eventually. 

Late in 1990, Queen were looking to record “The Show Must Go On,” which would be their last single before Mercury’s death. They weren’t very optimistic about the guy managing to do vocals for it. By this point, he could barely walk. But Mercury said, “I’ll fucking do it, darling.” And he managed this by taking a deep swallow of vodka to fortify himself. Vodka — it cures all ills, at least temporarily.

2 Projekt Misanthropia

We’ve had quite a few songs by artists who are in pain. But what if the artist isn’t in pain? Well, then they just have to find someone who is and record them, whether this person in agony is a singer or not. 

This is about the metal band Gulaggh, previously known as Stalaggh, both are which are references to history’s worst prison camps. One of the band members was working in a Dutch mental institution as of 2013, which isn’t exactly like a prison camp, but you can draw a few connections. Inside this facility, the band would record the screams of mental patients. They had the patients’ permission, they said — not a legal contract exactly, but they agreed to be recorded. The facility, meanwhile, gave permission on the understanding that this was an art project by a famous composer, not knowing that it was a metal album. 

For one track, they specifically recorded the screams of children. They put 30 child patients in a room, and the kids seemed to really relish the prompt to scream, but they wound up crying by the end. The band also picked up the screams of the asylum’s rape victims, figuring that it would be dishonest to leave them out. 

No one knows the exact identities of the members of the band, by the way. They have decided to keep those secret on the assumption that some of this might be illegal, and if they got caught, well, maybe that could result in their being locked up somewhere. 

1 The Köln Concert

One day in 1975, an opera house in Germany recorded a live performance that would go on to be the bestselling album of piano music of all time. It didn’t feel like a very auspicious day for pianist Keith Jarrett, though, as his back pain meant he needed to strap himself in a brace. 

That wasn’t the only issue. Jarrett also arrived at the opera house to find a broken piano on the stage. People had got mixed up and stuck this one on there instead of the proper grand piano that had been ordered. Getting the correct piano now was impossible because it was raining, and transporting a piano in the rain is only appropriate if you want to set up some cartoonish catastrophe. And so, they got to fixing the piano up with their little hammers, and Jarrett overcame his instincts, which said to just cancel the whole thing.

The concert was largely improvised, so you’re never going to get anything like it quite again. Also, Jarrett won’t be playing anything like it again because he’s partly paralyzed from a stroke. That sort of thing happens to a lot of people in their 70s. 

You don’t become less paralyzed when you hit your 70s, unless you’re Gloria Gaynor. 

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