Music is supposed to evoke emotion, stir us to action, help us relax, and build up a feeling that the musician has been carrying with them and simply must share. But the music business is a place where you often truly don’t know where the music really comes from. And so it’s only natural that some people would suspect that certain songs come from places beyond our physical world. These songs often are said to be cursed, and have a strange effect on the listener. And some of these songs it is said can even kill you.
Even musicians who have written the first notes on paper themselves often suggest that the song itself came to them in a dream. And these chords can often convey a deeper meaning that the singer and/or songwriter is not fully aware of. Such was the case with the cursed song Gloomy Sunday which has been responsible to date for several dozen suicides and possibly even murder. Such was the case with the infamous song that would eventually become known as the Hungarian Suicide Song, Gloomy Sunday. Gloomy Sunday was originally written by Rezso Seress, a Hungarian pianist and avid writer of music. But one fact about the song that is often not repeated is that the song itself was from the poet Laszlo Javor. Both the song and the poem itself were intended to convey the vast changes sweeping the world in the 1930’s and the problems that came about with them. And both songs have been said to have come not from thinking at a desk, but from realms of the imagination unexplored as the composers and writers slept and dreamed. Many who listened to the song felt an overwhelming sense of despair and many musicians would refuse to sing it. Those who did seemed to risk becoming the song’s next victim. Over the years many committed suicide shortly after performing the song publicly.
And the Mars Volta album Bedlam and Goliath has had relatively little attention despite the fact that the band released with their album a terrifying story regarding the events surrounding the song’s creation. The lyrics were apparently channeled on a ouija board by an entity who made various demands including that the band release this album or be cursed forever. The entity was said to be a perfectionist and claims were made that any changes to the song from its original form were often met with harsh “punishment” from the entity. Eventually the band almost was destroyed by this experience, but the ouija board was destroyed and buried in an undisclosed location in the desert. Shortly after the album’s release, the first accounts of people being mysteriously cursed or otherwise affected by its lyrics started pouring in.
Altogether there are many songs that bear with them a terrible curse. But before these songs bother you too much, you should keep in mind that hundreds to thousands of people hear any given song. They’re often not enough to actually cause a major change in someone’s overall life. Of course this is little comfort to those who have had their lives damaged by a mysterious tune they happened to hear. Of course for these individuals it’s often not just one listening that will affect them. It’s only after repeatedly and obsessively listening to the music that they find their lives disturbed by some unknown and unexplainable force.