Where Words Fail: Songs Born from Tragedy

If you have never felt pain where words become useless, count yourself truly fortunate. But if you have carried weights that are invisible, clung to sanity by a thread, and hurled questions at no one in particular, you have met grief. The abyss. Where language collapses, and yet silence feels like betrayal. It is here, against all reason, that some pick up their pens and somehow offer us a glimpse, an unsheltered introduction.

Expressing the Inexpressible

To hold contradiction without needing to resolve it: the hymn that says “this is devastating” and in the same breath “it is well”, and a K-pop ballad that encodes the unspeakable in melody, the protest song that is both defiant and mournful all at once. Music has many voices, but grief lends its voice the loudest.

It is not a secret and rarely a conscious choice, but some of the most enduring songs ever written were wrested from moments of devastation. Just tragedy proving itself one of the most honest muses there is.

Where Words Fail, Music Speaks

It Is Well With My Soul (1873): Horatio Spafford

In November 1873, Horatio Spafford sent his wife Anna and their four daughters ahead of him to England on the French ocean liner Ville du Havre, promising to join them later once business in Chicago was settled. That was the last time he saw his daughters.

A shipwreck on the night of November 22 left most of the 313 souls aboard dead, with only 87 surviving. His daughters, aged 12, 9, 5, and 2, all perished. Only Anna survived.

Horatio wrote the words that became one of Christianity’s most enduring hymns, standing over the very waters where his daughters drowned. The first verse of that song says:

When peace like a river, attendeth my way

When sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say

It is well, it is well, with my soul

Some call it strength in adversity, others resignation. But it is undoubtedly grief, a father trying to make sense of a loss that parents describe as their worst nightmare.

American Pie (1971): Don McLean

This song is such an earworm that having it stuck in my head for days on repeat prompted a little digging into its lyrics and history. What I found was a thirteen-year-old boy discovering grief for the first time on the pages of a newspaper. On February 3, 1959, three of his favourite musicians, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson, were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. This event was widely reported as “the day the music died”. Not long after, Mclean experienced loss again with the death of his father. 

It took him twelve years to unburden that weight in a song. 

To be fair, American Pie is not just an elegy for three musicians; it is nine minutes of compressed history: the Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement. An anthem that most people sing without fully grasping the meaning behind it. According to the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts, it is one of the five greatest Songs of the 20th Century.

McLean took twelve years to put down grief. American Pie is what happened when he finally did.

Happy Survival (1972): Eddie Okwedy

The aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War was undoubtedly a trying time. For those who had lost everything, there was a desperate need for normalcy, but above all, a sense of community in mourning. It is against this backdrop that Eddie released Happy Survival. 

Like other songs from that period, it was an acknowledgement of the pain inflicted by war on the Igbo people, a soul-soothing balm that bore witness to unimaginable suffering while holding onto the determination to rise from it. Eddie understood that for people who had passed through that kind of tragedy, music could not afford to be merely entertainment. It had to be hope. 

Music endures, and in 2024, Childish Gambino, featuring Khruangbin, offered a rendition of this classic, bringing its message of hope and resilience back into our consciousness.

Coffin for Head of State (1981): Fela Kuti

Fela was no stranger to channelling grief. As Nigeria emerged from the ruins of the Civil War and sank deeper into military rule, his heavily laden socio-political lyrics became a form of resistance.

In 1976, he released Zombie, a song that heavily criticised the Nigerian military. A year later, on February 18, 1977, soldiers stormed his compound in Lagos. The raid lasted hours. The compound was burned. His family was beaten and harassed. His 77-year-old mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was thrown from a second-floor window. She survived the fall but never recovered. She died on April 13, 1978.

In anger and grief, Fela delivered his mother's coffin to the Dodan Barracks in Lagos. Then he went back to the studio. Because he needed people to know what happened that day, he made Coffin for Head of State, a song that calls the world to witness his pain, while indicting the ones who caused it. 

Spring Day (2017): BTS

To understand this song, you have to go back to April 16, 2014. A South Korean ferry, the MV Sewol, which was carrying 476 people, most of them second-year high school students on a field trip to Jeju Island, capsized off the coast of Jindo. The ship began to tilt and slowly sink. The captain and crew abandoned ship, leaving the passengers behind. Over the intercom, the students were told to remain in their cabins and wait. They obeyed. By the time evacuations began, it was already too late. Three hundred and four of them drowned.

The road to investigation and accountability was not an easy one, revealing layers of negligence and corruption. South Korea also have very strict anti-defamation laws, so publicly assigning blame was tricky. So how can a nation mourn a loss that has been politicised and minimised? 

To speak on a difficult topic where words face scrutiny, BTS used imagery. Yellow ribbons tied to a carousel, yellow being the colour adopted by the Sewol victims’ families. A mountain of clothing reaching to the ceiling, evoking the belongings left behind by those who never came home. A train with corridors that mirror the interior of a ferry. 

Spring Day became a public memorial. For the families who had lost loved ones, it was an acknowledgement of their grief. 

From the Ashes

It is not that grief is a necessary ingredient in an enduring song, but it is undeniable that it works. So why does tragedy produce music? Why does a boy spend twelve years putting words to his grief? Why is a hymn the outlet for a bereaved father? Why does echoing the heartbreak of an entire nation, even wrapped in symbolism, still matter?

I don’t think there is a single answer. Grief, like any human emotion, demands to be felt. Perhaps it is in the feeling that healing can find its opening. That is how we can have a protest song that is furious and defiant, yet mournful all at once. Or a song that celebrates survival while praying “Ozo emezi na”, never again.

These songs insist that tragedy was real. They call us to bear witness for the people whose lives were upended and even ended by it. In a world where bad news has become the new normal and loss is so easily trivialised, music is proof that these tragedies were real people, not just stories.

The songs do not undo any of it; they were not meant to. But they refuse to let the world move on as if it never happened.