Pop Songs That Were Ripped Straight From The Headlines

In 2006, two miners, Brant Webb and Todd Russell, miraculously survived the Beaconsfield gold mine collapse in Australia. They were trapped nearly a kilometer underground for two full weeks. 

Rescuers managed to set up a supply line for Webb and Russell while they awaited transport to the surface, and one of their more lighthearted requests was an iPod loaded with songs by the Foo Fighters. Frontman Dave Grohl was reportedly moved to tears when he heard the news. In a note he sent down to Webb and Russell, he wrote “Two tickets to a Foos show, anywhere, and two cold beers waiting for you.” 

On his promise, Grohl did more than just deliver. He also wrote “Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners,” a stirring fingerpicking instrumental featured on the 2007 album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace. 

Webb caught the track live at the Sydney Opera House at a show he attended with his wife Rachel. 

Elton John’s 1973 single “Candle in the Wind” was originally written with lyricist Bernie Taupin in tribute to Marilyn Monroe. But after the sudden, heartbreaking death of John’s dear friend Princess Diana in 1997, a new version was penned. It was titled “Goodbye, England’s Rose,” and Taupin, who wrote it in a matter of hours, wanted “to make it sound like a country singing it,” he recalled to DW. 

John performed the special rewrite only one time ever, at Diana’s funeral a week after the accident. He went on to describe the experience as “surreal.” 

While John still performs “Candle in the Wind '' at concerts, he only ever plays the original 1973 version. He does, however, donate all sales proceeds from the song to charitable causes in Diana’s name. 

“If it weren’t for music, I think I would have shot myself,” Eddie Vedder powerfully revealed on MTV, while collecting the award for Video of the Year for “Jeremy.” 

It was a fitting proclamation for a song inspired by the real-life tragedy of 15-year-old Jeremy Wade Delle. Delle brought a gun to his school in 1991 and turned the weapon on himself in front of his English class. Pearl Jam frontman Vedder was so moved after reading about the events that he wrote a track in Jeremy’s honor. 

Unfortunately, a misleading version of the music video leaves out the key end scene, and many fans were wrongfully left to believe that Jeremy was a school shooter. The director Mark Pellington told Songfacts, “MTV made us edit the gun going into the mouth. That created the great confusion, which made it appear like he brought the gun and shot his classmates, which was a huge misinterpretation.”

When 28 undocumented Mexican workers were killed in a plane crash in 1948, the newspaper reports failed to mention any of them by name. Instead, the victims were referred to as “deportees.” 

That was until they were memorialized by Woodie Guthrie in his song “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” Their real names were never released, so Guthrie assigned them symbolic names like Juan, Rosalita, Jesus and Maria, lamenting in his lyrics, 

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?

Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?

To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil

And be called by no name except “deportees”

Guthrie originally wrote the song as a poem, but went on to inspire covers by Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, and others. 

Bob Dylan is known for telling epic stories, and “Hurricane,” released in 1976, is one of the most visceral. It was released as the lead single off his album Desire, and was inspired by the wrongful imprisonment of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Dylan sings, 

Here comes the story of the Hurricane

The man the authorities came to blame

For somethin' that he never done

Put in a prison cell, but one time he coulda been

The champion of the world

Carter was a Black champion boxer framed by the police for a triple murder in 1966. It took nearly two decades for his conviction to be overturned. Dylan’s song helped to bring attention to the case, and he visited Carter in prison as he was writing the eight minute-long opus. 

Dylan went on to play a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, raising $100,000 for Carter’s cause, before Carter’s release in 1985. 

Teenage runaway Melanie Coe was immortalized by The Beatles in “She’s Leaving Home,” a 1967 single penned after songwriter Paul McCartney read about Coe’s case in the Daily Mail. He recounted in a memoir, “I set out to imagine what might have happened, the sequence of events.” 

Apparently, McCartney hit Coe’s experience on the nose. She later revealed in an interview, 

The amazing thing about the song was how much it got right about my life. It quoted the parents as saying “We gave her everything money can buy,” which was true in my case… Then there was the line “After living alone for so many years,” which really struck home to me because I was an only child and I always felt alone. I never communicated with either of my parents. It was a constant battle… I must have been in my twenties when my mother said she’d seen Paul on television and he’d said that the song was based on a story in a newspaper. That’s when I started telling my friends it was about me.