The one that comes to mind right off the bat is Shawn Colvin’s Sunny Came Home.
Rosanne Cash tends to excel at righting these (Of course I’m way biased as I’m a huge fan of Rosanne Cash) who had two excellent “disturbing songs” on her Interiors CD: The first appropriately titled Living In The Land Of Nightmares, and This World. Let’s face it not a lot of other artists are gonna be able to get away with writing a song with the lyrics: (From This World)
So what other songs have you heard that are profoundly disturbing to you?
Entrails Ripped From a Virgin’s Cunt by Cannibal Corpse.
That band has issues. I’ll spoiler the lyrics as they are NSFW
“Tied to my mattress
Legs spread wide
Ruptured bowel, yanked
From her insides
Devirginized with my knife
Internally bleeding
Vagina, secreting
her blood-wet pussy
I am eating”
Everyone knows The Police’s creepy stalker song, “Every Breath You Take,” so…
“Once Upon A Daydream” by The Police. Narrator knocks up his girlfriend, her dad finds out, beats the shit out of her, and kills the baby. Narrator blows dad’s head off. Cheery stuff!
The Police also have “A Kind of Loving,” which is cacophony set to the sound of Sting’s character in Brimstone and Treacle raping a retarded girl.
Sting continued the creepy stuff into his solo career. “I Hung My Head” is a song about a kid who accidentally shoots a horseman and is sentenced to death. “Love Is Stronger Than Justice” is about a band of brothers who courageously save a damsel in distress, thinking that there are seven. So Sting’s character kills his brothers for the girl.
Talking Heads have “Psycho Killer,” which is from the POV of a… psycho killer.
Squeeze’s “Last Time Forever” could either be about a bad break up, or the narrator killing his girlfriend. It’s vague, which makes it creepy.
The Smiths’ “Meat Is Murder” has a creepy intro. Abattoir noise with the random cow mooing, and piano stabs. I couldn’t listen to that record at night when I was younger, what with Morrissey reminding that I was a murderer for having a McDonald’s.
Another disturbing Smiths track is “Death at One’s Elbow,” with the classic lines: “Oh Glen, don’t come to the house tonight/Because there’s somebody here that’ll take a hatchet to your ear.”
The inestimable Johnny Dowd was nearly fifty years old when he released his second country-tinged honky-tonkish album, Pictures From Life’s Other Side. There’s a song called called Hope You Don’t Mind on it.
It’s a sweet, simple melody, with sparse instrumentation; a real ballad.
Until he let’s loose with the next line:
The rest of the song is him detailing his obsession and stalking of this schoolgirl and pledging to love her forever. Creepy.
Or there’s No Woman’s Flesh But Hers, a monologue by a man who was so intoxicated he ran his car off the road, putting his wife/GF in a coma from which she will never wake. He visits her every day, and pledges that he will have no woman’s flesh, but hers, as pennance for his sins.
In fact, the guys a brilliant walking cupboard full of creepiness. I have most of his albums.
Not a bad album, IMHO. But I did want to point that the Murder Ballad is a longstanding element of the American folk tradition. So it’s only shocking in the sense that he released an entire album consisting only of them, which is an artistic choice of its own, I suppose.
