Songs That Are Said To Be Cursed

Can a catchy composition kill? Could a tune turn your luck sour? Maybe, maybe not. But you better not take a chance on these infamous songs. A legacy of tragedy began in 1970, when Peter Hamm and Tom Evans, both members of the Welsh band Badfinger, merged two songs about their respective relationship woes into a single heart-wrenching ballad called Without You. At the time, Badfinger was poised to

become the next great rock band, having been mentored by the Beatles and signed Apple Records. But then everything fell apart. Apple Records crumbled onto the Beatles' disbanded, leaving Badfinger adrift. Desperate, they signed themselves over to the management of American fraudster Stan Polly. The band soon fell victim to Polly's criminal mismanagement, which left them practically penniless despite writing several hit songs. In the midst of his chaos,

singer-songwriter Harry Nielsen heard Without You at a Friend's House. Nielsen loved the song so much that he recorded his own chart-topping version, although pushed by his producer to sing at the upper limits of his vocal range on an arrangement he despised, he quickly grew to hate it. Nonetheless, it became an international hit for him in 1971. Hamm and Evans, meanwhile, saw little success from their creation

and remained mired in financial and legal struggles. As a result, both died by suicide at young ages. The song's curse seemingly struck again when singer Mariah Carey covered Without You in 1994. Just days before her chart-topping version debuted, Harry Nielsen died of a heart attack. As the British rock band The Who Learned, some song curses are quite selective with their victims. In the 2015 interview with

Howard Stern, whose singer Roger Dahltree claimed that their trouble began when drummer Keith Moon couldn't get the beat right in a song called Music Must Change. Moon's unconventional style wasn't meshing with the song's standard time signature. At the time, he was also struggling with severe addiction issues. As a result, the band ended up hiring a session musician to record drums for the song, which was released

on 1978's Who Are You? Then on September 7th, just a month after the album's release, Moon died of an accidental overdose. Following his tragic death, the remaining members of the band played Music Must Change only a handful of times before placing it into early retirement. While certainly a grim reminder of the darkness surrounding Moon's final days, the song's curse goes even deeper. When The Who finally

decided to resurrect, Music Must changed for a 2002 tour. Basis John Entwistle died just one day before the band was scheduled to hit the road. This was enough for Dahltree to lay the song to rest forever. The anchor mostly centers around how particularly awful the song sounds sung out of tune, which, if you're familiar with karaoke, is kind of a common phenomenon. In one notable incident

in 2007, a man named Romi Balagula was belting out my way at a Samateo karaoke bar when security guard Robolito Ortega hollered at him that he was badly off key. When Balagula carried on singing, Ortega whipped out a gun and shot him dead. At least five other similar killings have taken place, with many lesser byway infractions ending in violent fist fights. As for why this song

specifically rubs people the wrong way, some have pointed to its cocky lyrics. Butch Alberacine, owner of a singing school in the Philippines, told The New York Times, I did it my way, it's so arrogant. The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you're somebody when you're really nobody. Others claimed that the general machismo and aggression prevalent in Filipino culture is to

blame, and argue that my way just happens to be a popular choice for karaoke singers. Or at least it was. The accursed song is now banned in many of the country's karaoke bars. Best known for their hit surf city in the Little Old Lady from Pasadena, California's surf rock duo Jan and Dean were a big deal in the 1960s. But one of their most popular songs,

1964's Dead Man's Curve, ended up being eerily prophetic. In the song, the duo sings of racing in a Chevrolet Corvette stingray on a winding section of a Los Angeles road called Dead Man's Curve, somewhere near sunset boulevard in Vine Street. As you might expect, it doesn't end well. The song's last verse describes a terrible crash that leaves the narrator dead. Two years later, life imitated art.

On April 12, 1966, Jan Berry craved his own stingray while driving too fast on sunset boulevard. Just six miles away from the song setting. Unlike his protagonist, however, Berry survived his car crash. Although he suffered lifelong severe brain damage, partial paralysis, and speech impairments, the accident also derailed Berry's career at the peak of his popularity. Born into a black family in 1900's Mississippi, legendary blues musician

Robert Johnson lived a hard life. He found solace in music, however, escaping the life of a plantation worker. He eaked out of living as a musician and married his sweetheart. But his wife's religious family never approved of his chosen trade. In fact, when she died in childbirth, they attributed the tragedy to his affiliation with the devil's music. Johnson then devoted himself wholeheartedly to the blues, returning

to the scene with seemingly supernatural musical abilities. According to music journalist Paul Trinka in his book Portrait of the Blues, Johnson told fellow blues musicians Son House that he had met a dark man at a crossroads who had tuned his guitar for him, a common euphemism for selling one soul to the devil. Johnson faced hardships throughout his life, all the way up to his untimely and

was considering recording it before dying by suicide. The curse even seemed to impact John Mayer, who covered the song shortly before falling out of mainstream favor. Song curses aren't just reserved for the devil's music, of course. In the 19th century, many classical musicians believed in the dreaded curse of the 9th, in which composers were fated to die after completing their 9th symphonies. And it wasn't a

baseless fear. The Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Raph von Williams, and Anthony DeVoisac all died after their 9th. Following the death of Beethoven, one ultra-superstitious composer, Gustaf Moller, attempted to defeat the curse. As he wrote his 9th piece of music, Moller found a semantic loophole by simply not calling it a symphony. Unfortunately, the curse wasn't fooled. While composing his 10th symphony in 1911, Moller was stricken with pneumonia

and died before it could be finished. Of course, many composers, including Mozart, escape the curse unscathed. But trepidation around the curse of the 9th has survived to the modern age. Shortly after debuting his own in 2012, composer Philip Glass told the Los Angeles Times, everyone is afraid to do a 9th symphony. As a precaution, Glass composed his 9th and 10th symphonies together, and it seems his

trick worked better than Mollers. Lyrics by poet Lauslo Yavour, which describe a man who becomes suicidal after his lover's death that caught on. It eventually became known as the Hungarian Suicide Song. The song was translated into English, and later famously covered by Billy Holiday as Gloomy Sunday in 1941. But its popularity came with a troubling problem. A shocking number of people who heard it ended up

taking their own lives. Hundreds of suicides were bizarrely linked to the song, with one girl even found clutching the sheet music. In response, many networks banned it. Tragedy also befell the song's creators. Holiday herself died at age 44 in 1959, and years later in 1968, the song's original composer, Charest, died by suicide. Speaking about his creation with Thai magazine in 1936, Charest had lamented, this fatal

fame hurts me. I cried all of the disappointments of my heart into the song, and it seems that others with feelings like mine have found their own hurt in it. While all of this is certainly disturbing, a 2007 article published in Omega notes that the increase in 1930's Suicides likely had more to do with the ongoing Great Depression than the song itself. Russian composer Alexander Screamabin

was known for his innovative and progressive style. In 1911, however, he wrote a piece of piano music so intense, he actually scared himself. Screamabin described his sixth anata as such unflattering words as nightmarish, unclean, and mischievous. In fact, he was so afraid of his own creation that he never played it in public, and when he played it for friends, he appeared visibly frightened. The power of

Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you! Screamabin's biographer, Fabian Bowers, logically attributed the song's darkness to its haunting minor thirds and unsettling fourth and fifth harmonies. Still, in addition to describing the song as satanic, Bowers had this to say about it. Its dark and evil aspect embraced horror, terror, and the omnipresent unknown. Its mood directly inherits the incoherent, incomprehensible, unformed chaos of the dark

beginning, the void. On April 27, 1915, after composing four more pieces, Screamabin died of sepusemia caused by a mysterious sore on his lip at the height of his career. He was just 43 years old. Some words just weren't meant to be sung. Take the curious case of Pakistani singer Amanat Ali Khan's biggest song, for example. The lyrics of Insha'ji Uto were originally a poem written by

Pakistani author Ibn-e Inshah in the 1970s. In it, Inshah tells the story of a disenchanted man who decides on a whim to leave his city and his lover for good. Inspired by the poem's dark take on urban life, Khan received Inshah's permission to put it to music and make it into a gizol, a type of classical song based on Arabic poetry. After he sang it on

television in 1974, it became a huge hit, but just months after its success, Khan died suddenly of appendicitis at age 52. Four years later, on the exact date of the song's release, Inshah, the poet who penned its words, died of cancer. One day before his own death, Inshah attributed Khan's passing to the song. He wrote to a friend, how many more lies will this cursed poem

take? At least one more has it turns out. Khan's oldest son, Asad, also died at age 52. Not long after singing his father's famous song at a 2006 concert, it was one of the last songs he would ever sing. If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK. That's 1-800-273-8255.