Final Songs From Musicians That Have Tragic Origins

Being a musician can certainly lead to a long, fulfilling, and lucrative career, but it's just not like most other jobs. Musicianship isn't a regular 9-to-5, nor does it offer a hard "out" of retirement at a certain age. Musicians are artists, and the inspiration to create and perform works of art never quite goes away for many of the greatest to ever pick up a guitar or sit behind a piano.

Plenty of rock and pop stars kept writing and recording the melodies and lyrics that popped into their head almost until the moments they took their last breaths, aware that death was coming due to advanced age or serious illness. Others made music up to the time of their unexpected demise. What they all have in common is that their final works took on a poignant air. Those compositions became their de facto last words and creative statements, a fine point on a legacy. Here are some very special songs made all the more affecting because they originated in, or were the result of, tragic or deadly moments for the musicians who made them.

In February 1991, Queen singer Freddie Mercury increasingly retreated from public life while denying rumors that his significant weight loss was caused by HIV or AIDS. In November 1991, Mercury publicly confirmed that he did have AIDS, and the next day he died at the age of 45. The story of Queen continued, with the surviving musicians electing to stay together, but it took them almost four years to complete the recordings built around some vocal tracks the singer left behind.

Mercury spent most of his final months living in the resort town of Montreux, Switzerland, primarily in a house overlooking Lake Geneva. He wrote and recorded some songs without the rest of Queen throughout 1991. The very last tune Mercury would finish was called "A Winter's Tale," inspired by the natural beauty in and around the lake. "The extraordinary thing is he's talking about life and its beauty at a time when he knows he hasn't got very long to go, yet there's no wallowing in emotion, it's just absolutely purely observed," Queen guitarist Brian May told Mojo (via The Daily Express). Included on the 1995 Queen album "Made in Heaven" and released as a single, "A Winter's Tale" debuted at No. 6 on the U.K. pop chart.

The B-52's song "Rock Lobster" spurred John Lennon to emerge from a self-imposed, six-year hiatus he had taken to raise his young son, inspiring him to write and record music again. In November 1980, "Double Fantasy" hit stores, an album written and recorded in tandem by Lennon and his wife, experimental musician Yoko Ono.

While compiling the LP, Lennon saw a movie on TV where a woman sent a poem to her boyfriend: Robert Browning's epic romantic piece "Rabbi Ben Ezra," popularly known as "Grow Old Along With Me," written in the 19th century for his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lennon adapted the poem into "Grow Old With Me," dedicated to Ono. The song was so special to the couple that they kept pushing back recording so they could apply the proper amount of time and effort. But then the deadline for "Double Fantasy" arrived, with "Grow Old With Me" never making it past the demo stage.

The 40-year-old former Beatle and Ono wouldn't grow old together — John Lennon was tragically murdered on December 8, 1980. About two weeks later, Ono discovered her Christmas gift from her late husband: a portrait and a piece of Barrett Browning's handwriting framed together. Lennon's demos became the basis for the recording of "Grow Old With Me" on the 1984 posthumous album "Milk and Honey."

Warren Zevon only ever had one significant hit song, his 1978 debut single "Werewolves of London." He built up a career as a singer-songwriter with a cult following and the respect of his fellow musicians, who appreciated his often blunt and dark humor.

In 2002, Zevon received a terminal lung cancer diagnosis. With the full knowledge that his death was imminent, the musician began writing and recording his final album, "The Wind," mere weeks later. A subtle and not-so-subtle rumination on mortality, a life well lived, regrets, and a fear of death, Zevon recorded originals like "Please Stay" and a cover of Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." Those themes all come through on the very last song on "The Wind," the haunting and imploring "Keep Me in Your Heart," in which Zevon quietly hoped that he wouldn't be forgotten. "The Wind" was released on August 26, 2003; Zevon died at age 56 just 12 days later. In 2004, Zevon received the first and only five Grammy nods of his career, including a Song of the Year nomination for "Keep Me in Your Heart."

With the Velvet Underground and his solo work in the 1970s and beyond, Lou Reed was a heavily influential figure on modern rock music. He wrote, recorded, and performed songs about dark subjects, like addiction and despair. Reed was in poor health by the 2010s, coping with diabetes and undergoing powerful interferon therapy for hepatitis C. The treatment left him in pain and without his full physical facilities; during his concert appearances, he struggled to remember the lyrics to his works. The hepatitis so badly damaged Reed's liver that he received a potentially life-extending transplant in April 2013. Six months later, Reed was told that his liver issues were no longer treatable, and he was sent home to die. He was 71 years old.

Nevertheless, less than two years before his death, Reed determinedly recorded the album "Lulu" with Metallica, a challenge owing to his many health limitations. He was desperate to say something and make something good in what little time he knew he had left. "He always felt, in a way, unappreciated," friend and filmmaker Julian Schnabel told Vulture. "He never felt like people really got it." One of the last songs Reed wrote, and which would fall last in the track list of "Lulu," was the slight, understated "Junior Dad." Utilizing metaphorical imagery of drowning and boats, Reed laments that time has ravaged his body and that he felt he disappointed his father as much as his father disappointed him.

As a major figure in the singer-songwriter movement of the early 1970s, Jim Croce broke through in 1972 with the hit singles "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" and "Operator," and then topped the pop chart twice in 1973 with "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and "Time in a Bottle." That resonant ballad about the remarkably swift passage of time was made all the more poignant because it made it to No. 1 after Croce died. In September 1973, Croce was one of five people who didn't survive a small plane crash, and the newly minted pop star joined the list of musicians who died at the age of 30.

Croce left behind a lot of material that would see release and chart success in the years after his death, as well as some songs he wrote but never recorded. He also left behind a 2-year-old son, A.J., who'd grow up to become an acclaimed pianist and singer across multiple genres. Decades into his career, A.J. Croce recorded Jim Croce's final composition, "Name of the Game," in 2017. As an adult, the younger Croce temporarily set aside the piano and learned guitar, which set him down the road to learning his father's work. "It pulled me into the orbit of my father's music," Croce told ASCAP. "It became fun to play through his songs."

Throughout the 1970s, Bob Marley helped popularize and pioneer reggae with his band the Wailers. In 1977, a doctor discovered a cancerous lesion beneath one of Marley's toenails. He eschewed amputation of the toe in favor of less aggressive medical treatments, but by the summer of 1980, the cancer had moved into the musician's lungs and brain. Around that time, an increasingly ill Marley finished the studio album "Uprising" with the knowledge that it would likely be his last, and the LP-concluding song is the performer's thesis and mission statement, touching upon themes of liberation and revolution.

"Redemption Song" includes the lines "emancipate yourself from mental slavery / none but ourselves can free our minds," which reworks a quote by civil rights leader Marcus Garvey, and it was originally recorded as a reggae song with the full participation of the Wailers. Producer Chris Blackwell implored Marley to return to his folk roots and record it as just one voice with one acoustic guitar. Bob Marley's tragic real-life story came to an end in 1981; he was 36 years old.

In the 1960s, Glen Campbell was a sought-after session guitarist and toured with the Beach Boys before pivoting to country, where he became a superstar. He announced a farewell tour in February 2011, and four months later, Campbell revealed the reason behind his retirement: A few years prior, he'd received an Alzheimer's diagnosis, and the degenerative neurological disease had advanced to the point where performance was no longer tenable.

Filmmaker James Keach filmed the musician on that last tour for the documentary "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me." Throughout that final road trip, fans and associates asked so many questions about Alzheimer's and retirement that it frustrated Campbell. "He didn't talk too much about it, but came up to me and said, 'I don't know what everybody's worried about. It's not like I'm going to miss anyone anyway,'" Campbell collaborator Julian Raymond told the Wall Street Journal. That bit of fatalistic, self-deprecating wordplay, a hallmark of country music, became the basis of "I'm Not Gonna Miss You." Campbell required just four takes to finish the song, and the session was filmed for the documentary. "I'm Not Gonna Miss You" received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song in 2015, two years before the musician died at age 81.

Boasting a stark, stripped-down, and haunting sound befitting the melancholy, pained lyrics of lead singer Ian Curtis, Joy Division became a sensation in its native U.K. on the basis of tracks like "Transmission" and "She's Lost Control" and its two albums. On May 2, 1980, Joy Division played a show at Birmingham University in England. The band kicked things off with a song marked on its set list as "New One," later titled "Ceremony." Curtis wrote the lyrics, and he worked out the tune with the rest of Joy Division in the weeks before the show. Collectively, the musicians were pleased with the song and thought it marked a creative turning point and had the potential to be a big hit.

The Birmingham University gig was supposed to be Joy Division's last concert before it left for its first U.S. tour on May 19, 1980. Tragically, it became the last Joy Division concert ever — Ian Curtis died by suicide on May 18. Honoring a pact made before his death, the surviving musicians agreed to continue, but under a different name. That new band became New Order, and its first release was a studio recording of the bittersweet "Ceremony," with vocals by Joy Division bassist Bernard Sumner.

Shortly after completing the North American leg of the career-capping "Piano and a Microphone Tour," Prince returned to his Paisley Park home and studio complex in the Minneapolis area. On the morning of April 21, 2016, Prince was discovered in an elevator, deceased from an overdose of the prescription painkillers he used to cope with the pain preceding and following a reported hip replacement surgery. Among the things we learned about Prince after he died: He had some unfinished projects.

Nearly six months after Prince died, a crew from NBC's "Today" was permitted to gather footage at Paisley Park one day before the building became a publicly accessible Prince museum. A camera operator noticed a music stand in a recording space bearing a handwritten lyric sheet for a song called "Stay Cool." It's not known if and when Prince planned to record the song, but it appears to be the last trace of music he left behind before his death at age 57.

David Bowie earned some of the best reviews of his lengthy and storied career for "Blackstar." Recorded with a New York jazz quartet and with Bowie refusing media requests, the album was released on January 8, 2016, the iconic musician's 69th birthday. Two days later, Bowie died from a condition the public didn't even know he had. "David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer," read a statement on his Facebook page. Bowie learned he had liver cancer in the summer of 2014, and he started studio work on "Blackstar" in January 2015, attending chemotherapy treatments in the mornings and working on the album in the afternoons.

The initial critical consensus on "Blackstar" was that it was an experimental and inscrutable record. After Bowie's death, the message behind many of the songs came into focus. "A farewell gift," producer Tony Visconti proclaimed to The Guardian. "This was a man who was facing his own mortality," cover designer Jonathan Barnbrook told Dezeen. "I Can't Give Everything Away" was the seventh and final track on "Blackstar," thus Bowie's last act of expression. "This is all I ever meant / That's the message that I sent," Bowie sang.

An undeniably talented soul singer and songwriter, Otis Redding was just starting to break out in 1967. His original version of "Respect" had been a minor hit, but Aretha Franklin's cover went all the way to No. 1. He'd enjoyed his biggest success with "Try a Little Tenderness" in 1966, which he performed on "Upbeat," a Cleveland-taped syndicated music show on December 9, 1967. The next day, Redding and his band, the Bar-Kays, boarded a small plane out of Cleveland, and it plunged into Lake Monona outside Madison, Wisconsin, killing almost everyone on board. Redding was 26 years old.

Two days before he publicly performed for the last time in Cleveland, Redding recorded a new song in Memphis that he wrote with producer Steve Cropper called "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay." The powerful ballad wasn't actually done: The whistling at the end was supposed to be replaced later, when Redding came up with some lyrics; he never got the chance. "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" later topped he pop chart, the first time a posthumously released single reached No. 1.

Amy Winehouse's time in the spotlight was brief but impactful. At the 2008 Grammy Awards, the British vocalist, who combined classic jazz and soul with gritty contemporary elements, won Record of the Year and Song of the Year for "Rehab," her smash hit that touched on her history with substance abuse, as well as Best New Artist.

While Winehouse engaged in many big feuds with other celebrities, she adored and idolized Tony Bennett. In 2011, the crooner invited Winehouse to contribute to his "Duets II" album with a collaboration on the track "Body and Soul." "She was very nervous to perform, but I said, 'You know, it sounds like you're influenced by Dinah Washington.' And all of the sudden, her whole life changed. She said, 'How did you know that Dinah Washington is my goddess?'" Bennett recalled to Entertainment Weekly. "And it came out wonderful. She was like, 'Tony understands me, you know?'"

Recording "Body and Soul" with Bennett was Winehouse's last song. In July 2011, she died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 27. The tune was released to the public on September 14, 2011 — what should've been Winehouse's birthday.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues or is struggling or in crisis, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
• Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org