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10 MIND-BLOWING Stories Behind Popular Songs

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Five decades of hit singles, five backstories that have almost nothing to do with what’s on the radio.

A 2016 countdown from TheThings Celebrity, “10 MIND-BLOWING Stories Behind Popular Songs,” runs through the origin stories that get lost the moment a track climbs the charts. The premise is simple: a driving beat or a soaring hook makes listeners assume they know what a song is about, and in case after case they’re wrong. Grunge anthems get mistaken for generic teen angst, pop singles get mistaken for party tracks, and the actual event behind the lyric sheet gets buried entirely.

• Eddie Vedder wrote Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” after reading a newspaper report about Jeremy Wade Delle, a 16-year-old Richardson, Texas, student who died by suicide in front of his English class in January 1991.
• Sia’s “Chandelier” is built on her own history with alcoholism and prescription pill addiction, not the wild-nightlife imagery most listeners hear in it.
• Doc Pomus wrote The Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me” at his own wedding reception, watching his bride dance with other guests while he sat in the wheelchair he needed after contracting polio as a child.

A Newspaper Clipping Became a Grunge Anthem

Pearl Jam’s 1991 single “Jeremy” is one of the defining grunge singles of its era, but Eddie Vedder didn’t invent the story — he lifted it straight from a news report. Jeremy Wade Delle, a 16-year-old at a Richardson, Texas high school, died by suicide in front of his English class that January, and the account stuck with Vedder enough to become the basis for the song and its widely discussed music video. What plays on the radio as a churning rock anthem started as a real kid’s name in a real police blotter.

Sia’s Party Song That Isn’t About a Party

“Chandelier” dominated pop radio in 2014 with a chorus built for arm-waving choreography, but Sia has been direct about what the song is actually documenting: her own battles with alcoholism and prescription pill dependency. The “party girl” persona in the lyrics is the character she was living, not one she was celebrating. It’s the kind of gap between surface and substance that shows up across the entertainment industry, where the artists who look the most put-together on stage are sometimes the ones hiding the most — a pattern plenty of musicians turn out to have in common.

A Wedding Reception, a Wheelchair, and a Standard

Few origin stories are as literal as “Save the Last Dance for Me.” Lyricist Doc Pomus wrote the words at his own wedding reception in 1957. Pomus had contracted polio as a child and relied on crutches and a wheelchair, meaning he could only watch as his new bride danced with the other guests. The Drifters turned that image into a 1960 chart-topper that’s been covered for over sixty years, almost always read as pure romance rather than as a husband narrating his own limitation from the sidelines.

Andre 3000’s Warning Disguised as a Dance Track

“Hey Ya!” sounds like one of the most purely joyful singles Outkast ever released, but Andre 3000 wrote it as a critique of failed relationships and people who stay together out of fear rather than love. He even flagged the disconnect inside the song itself, dropping the self-aware line that most people singing along never register.

Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance.

Sarah McLachlan’s Heroin Confession

“Angel” is frequently filed away as a spiritual ballad, and later became inseparable from animal-rescue commercials that ran the song over footage of shelter dogs. That’s not where it came from. McLachlan wrote it about turning to heroin to escape emotional exhaustion, with the 1996 overdose death of Jonathan Melvoin — the touring keyboardist for Smashing Pumpkins — as a direct point of reference for the song’s darker undercurrent. It’s a reminder that the music industry’s tragedies don’t always make headlines the way, say, a DJ’s death eventually does — sometimes they just end up folded into a song people think is about something else entirely.

That’s the through-line the whole countdown keeps landing on: the chorus everyone can sing and the sentence the songwriter was actually trying to get out are frequently two different songs occupying the same three minutes.