'80s Songs With The Wildest Backstories

Some songs come from deep, personal, confessional places, some are the result of staunch and soldierly workmanship, and some are just off-the-cuff toolin' around. Some took years to write, like the six-year-long odyssey that created Queen's magnum opus, "Bohemian Rhapsody." Others, like "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival (with John Fogerty as the writer), took a mere 20 minutes to write, no matter how it brewed during the political currents of the day. And sometimes, a song's backstory is just as interesting as the song itself, if not more so.

Take 2007's "Love Song" by Sara Bareilles. The simple, saccharine piano bopper is made vastly more interesting when you learn that the track was her own, personal "f*** you," as Glamour quotes her, to the music industry's machinations. Hence the chorus, "I'm not gonna write you a love song / Cause you asked for it, 'cause you need one." 1991's 

"Shiny Happy People" from R.E.M. is another good example, which singer Michael Stipe called it a "really fruity, kind of bubblegum song," per The Quietus. It's tragically fruity, though, as it's based on a Moaist poster that read, "Shiny happy people holding hands." And of course, the song was released two years after the demonstrations at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. 

Songs from the '80s also come equipped with their own backstories, some of which are legitimately wild and of their time, like the raunchy tale behind Guns N' Roses' "Rocket Queen." Others are surprising and reveal exactly what goes on behind the scenes before a song reaches the public, like in the case of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "Don't Stop Believin'."

Go ahead and say "Don't Stop Believin'" and see if it's possible to not say it how Steve Perry from Journey sings it. And then, for extra karaoke fun, try to hit the high notes he hits during the "Streetlight people" line. Yep, not only is 1981's "Don't Stop Believin'" Journey's biggest song by a country mile (over 2.6 billion listens on Spotify), it's a masterclass in tight, emotional songwriting and virtuosic singing. It's natural to assume that such a song took tons of time to craft, down to each note of each passage that tells the journey (hah) of that small town girl, the city boy, and the other dreamers locked into unfulfilling lives that hold untold potential. But no. It was written on a dime.

In an interview with Rick Beato, aka, "that guy who knows literally everybody in the music industry," Journey guitarist and the only one left from the original band, Neal Schon, describes receiving an unexpected prompt that led him to write the main chord structure of "Don't Stop Believin':" "Play something dumb." During a discussion about a Roland amp, Schon says that he rolled with the request and fiddled around with something very similar to the recognizable rhythm part from Bachman-Turner Overdrive's 1974 "Takin' Care of Business." It sounds like some combination of the band and their producers made the request, but that isn't clear.

Eventually, Schon's song prototype became the simple and effective I–V–vi–IV (Emaj-Bmaj-C#min-Amaj) chord progression from "Don't Stop Believin'" (fans of Bush's "Glycerine:" prepare to have your minds blown). That's pretty good for a song that reached double diamond status, 20 million sold, in 2024.

Depending on your tolerance for Axl Rose's face, tendency to think in images, or general sense of social propriety, this next backstory tale might come across as a bit distasteful. Some might think that if we're citing Guns N' Roses in this article, we're going to be talking about how "Sweet Child O' Mine" was based on a simple guitar exercise of Slash's. But no, that tale is untrue. What isn't untrue, however, is a far more outrageous story about actual sex sounds being, uh ... inserted into 1987's "Rocket Queen" from "Appetite for Destruction."

As Rolling Stone recounts, the sex sounds come via Axl Rose and a then-19-year-old erotic dancer, Adriana Smith. Smith was the girlfriend of Guns N' Roses' drummer, Steven Adler, and agreed to the sex/recording session because she wanted revenge on Adler for cheating on her and because, "I would do anything Axl asked me to do ... He's f****** magical." 

Smith says that Rose snapped at her in the middle of the act for faking things, encouraging her to "make it real." She also says that the whole thing messed her up for years. While it's not too hard to believe that such happenings followed Guns N' Roses in their party-hardy wake, some outlets still call the whole incident "alleged."

Without getting into too many details, the sex sounds happen about midway through "Rocket Queen" during a solo that, non-coincidentally, builds to a climax. And as for the song's lyrics, they contain telling lines like, "I'm a bisexual innuendo in this burned-out paradise / If you turn me on to anything, you better turn me on tonight." Indeed, Axl. Indeed.

For a moment, try and forget Bonnie Tyler and any memories connected with her massive 1983 hit, "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Then watch the music video, set in a dark, cathedral-like manor house full of flowing wind, gothic imagery, and also football players and ninjas, for some reason. Listen to the music's immense melodrama and imagine it set to a musical like "Phantom of the Opera" or a movie like "Rocky Horror Picture Show." It fits perfectly because the song was originally written for a musical about Nosferatu, the vampire from the 1922 (and eventually 2024) movie inspired by Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, "Dracula." 

In case you're wondering about the song's pedigree, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was written by Jim Steinman. He's the guy who penned "I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)", "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad," and "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" for Meat Loaf, "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" for Celine Dion, and, "Holding Out for a Hero" for Bonnie Taylor. So yeah, Steinman has an unparalleled skill for writing grandiose, theatrical pop music that belongs on stage. In fact, the original version of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" took root way back in 1969 when Steinman released his rock musical, "The Dream Engine."

It's Tyler who reached out to Steinman after seeing Meat Loaf performing songs from 1977's monumental "Bat Out of Hell" because she wanted to work with him. Steinman originally refused, but changed his mind when he heard Tyler sing. As for the song itself, Steinman said it was all about "the power of darkness and love's place in [the] dark" (per Louder Sound).

It's a testament to the power of "One" off of Metallica's fourth album, 1988's " ... And Justice for All," that the song still comes across as horrifying today. "One" is a dark, harrowing foray into the hopelessness and terror experienced by a war veteran who's lost not one, not two, but all four of his limbs as well as his hearing, sight, speech — everything. As the song's lyrics say on one of the most intense, powerful, machine-gunning bridges of any metal song, ever, "Darkness, imprisoning me / All that I see, absolute horror / I cannot live, I cannot die / Trapped in myself, body my holding cell."

While it's possible to listen to "One" and not understand its subject matter, the song's black-and-white video and Metallica's eventual 1989 Grammy performance of the song (when they controversially lost to Jethro Tull), complete with simulated cannons and gunfire, made its lyrics hard to ignore. Thankfully, no one in Metallica knew anyone personally who went through such an ordeal. Rather, the song's story and backstory both originate in a 1939 war novel called "Johnny Got His Gun," by Dalton Trumbo. Metallica frontman James Hetfield read the book, which had also been made into a 1971 movie of the same name, and more or less transcribed its tale into musical format. 

Metallica also tackled war as a topic in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" from the Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name, off of 1984's "Ride the Lightning,"  and the song "Disposable Heroes" from 1986's "Master of Puppets," which tells its story right in its title. But in the end, the truly horrifying story within "One's" backstory comes from the real-life wars that inspired its own 1939 literary inspiration.

Let's clear the air tonight (oh Lord): The drum fill in Phil Collin's 1981 "In the Air Tonight" is one of the, if not the, most memorable, chill-inducing, explosive and emotional use of drums in a song, ever. It's a testament to how well the music is crafted that the iconic moment takes over three minutes to hit, but the song remains captivating until then with nothing but minimal instrumentation plus Collin's voice. Plus, there's the whole thing about Collins witnessing a murder as a kid, hiring a detective to track down the killer as an adult, and giving the killer a ticket to his concert so that the guy could get arrested in front of the crowd in dramatic, condemnatatory fashion because that's what "In the Air Tonight" is about. Say what, again?

This tale circulated for quite some time and became a veritable urban legend, hinging on a few lines from "In the Air Tonight," like, "Well, if you told me you were drowning / I would not lend a hand" and "Well, I was there and I saw what you did /I saw it with my own two eyes." This isn't a new story, either. In 2000s "Stan," Eminem says, "You know the song by Phil Collins, "In the Air of the Night" / About that guy who coulda saved that other guy from drownin'."

Come 2016, Collins set the record straight on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." The legend is false, he said. "In the Air Tonight" was about the divorce that he was going through when he wrote it, and was "pissed off" — that's it.