For example, I remember the time when American Idiot by Green Day came out in 2004. The song “Wake Me Up When September Ends” was everywhere on the radio. The song is about the death of the vocalist’s father dying when he was age 10.
Yet, because that the song and album was released 3 years after 9/11 and 1 year since America started the War in Iraq, everyone associated that song with 9/11 more than what the song originally meant.
And everytime I have listened to it, I just continue to associate that song with it’s original meaning and not because people randomly decided to make it about 9/11.
I’m loving the responses.
There is one more song I feel I have to include that I originally was going to include but had a brainfart on it.
Soundgarden’s “The Day I Tried to Live” was falsely interpreted as a suicide song. It is not. Chris Cornell himself has gone on to say that it is about ‘trying to step out of being patterned and closed off and reclusive’. Essentially, what introverts try to do with themselves to be more normalized and outgoing, but having the struggle to.
Tearjerker is about the moment Anthony Kiedis heard that Kurt Cobain had died. That’s fairly well know by fans but less so by casual listeners. And I remember Kurt Loder / MTV News interrupting normal broadcast to report about Cobain the same way that people remember the JFK assassination or the Challenger disaster. So Tearjerker often prompts flashbacks.