Even Better Asks: Scary Tunes
Scary movies get all the love. How about some songs?
You’re reading Even Better Asks, a recurring series where the head honchos at Even Better come up with an open-ended question for our extended web of pals to answer in blurb form. Last time, we talked about our worst moviegoing experiences. This week’s prompt is another holiday special:
What’s the scariest song?
Below, you’ll find the tracks that keep us up at night:
David Sexton
When I was a teenager I would listen to music on my white iPod nano most nights before going to sleep. Sometimes I’d fall asleep listening to music and the battery would die or the headphones would fall out.
One night I fell asleep with the music on shuffle and woke hours later in the middle of “Invocation of Ratiocination” by Bill Callahan at full volume. The warbling voice blasting scared me so bad I yelled out and threw my headphones onto the floor. I think it cracked the iPod screen, hard to say. They were fragile. I still won’t listen to it even though it’s kind of a dumb song.
Patrick Haynes
A lot of the obvious answers here are always songs that, while I love many of them, seem so on the nose that it almost seems a bit hokey. I'm thinking of "Human Fly" and "I Walked With a Zombie" here. They're the Spirit Halloween or Scary Movie series of scary songs. Sure, it's fun but you know what you're getting there. My choice for the scariest song is "Frankie Teardrop" by Suicide. For starters, I know a ten-minute song can be horrifying for some. But between the production, the unnatural tone of the drum machine, and the vocals feeling like they were delivered from inside of the microphone itself really sells the tense vibe. That's before you even get to the blood-curdling screams and the arc of the lyrics. Springsteen has cited this song as a huge influence on Nebraska and I wish the Boss ever released something this deranged. Let's hear it for Frankie.
Aidan O’Neill
On a slow, cozy morning, Norah Jones has always been my go-to. Her songs are like leaning your head against a rainy cafe window, her voice like a mug of tea. This is even true for her murder ballad.
“Miriam” lulls with the same muted piano chords and dreamy vocals as the rest of early 2000s Norah…but it’s a different symptom of lovesickness here. 30 seconds in, Ms. Jones has put on her “I’m not a killer but don’t push me" Tupac, and she’s been pushed. This Miriam character – think “Jolene” if the lady didn’t listen to Dolly – is about to be friggin murked by 2003’s Teen Choice Awards Female Fashion Icon.
The lyrics grow darker and darker over the 4.5 minutes, the dreamy voice haunts rather than soothes, and you realize we’ve been in a minor key the whole time. When Norah closes with “I’m gonna smile when / I take your life,” the humming that follows is genuinely chilling. But still somehow cozy.
Eli Enis
I can't think of a song that's genuinely scared me as an adult, but when I was a teenager, "Jennifer" was so eerie that I'd have to wait until a family member came home to even listen alone in my bedroom. Although it's functionally just the spoken-word intro track to Pig Destroyer's 2001 grindcore opus, Prowler in the Yard, it's more viscerally disturbing than any of the gut-mashing metal songs that follow. As a 16-year-old, it felt quasi-illicit to be hearing a disembodied voice reciting a tale about two girls wrestling, one violently licking away the eyeballs of the other while a crowd of gawkers and jerk-offers looks on. In the way infamous gore videos of the time like "Pain Olympics" felt like something I shouldn't be seeing (and fortunately never did), "Jennifer" felt like something I shouldn't have been allowed to hear. Like I had unearthed a great evil that wasn't fit for human consumption.
Elliott Duea
It was 8th grade when I fell in love with Tool. The progressive metal outfit was the perfect rebellion band for this youth group kid who wasn’t supposed to go near “evil” music like that. They were my first forbidden fruit band, and made tunes that capital R Rocked and were capital D Deep; an ideal combo for 15 year old me.
I mostly skipped their filler tracks that barely qualified as “songs”, like the closer on 10,000 Days - “Viginti Tres”. The first time I listened to it properly was when I had my fellow Tool-pilled buddy Tim over to stay the night, and I was like “yo, this song seems crazy we should listen to it later.” We did just that at about 1 am with all the lights off and my stereo at full blast. It was one of the scariest experiences of our lives. What we heard was sporadic threatening noises that build to a horrifying crescendo of the deepest voice imaginable belting out an indecipherable phrase. We were laughing in terror. I continued to subject other friends of mine that spent the night to the “Viginti Tres” challenge, but nothing will ever top that initial listen when I had no idea what was coming. It’s the closest music experience I’ve had to a shaking-in-my-seat horror film.
Brendan Menapace
I do not like scary stuff. I've never been a horror movie guy, and I hate living as close as I do to Eastern State Penitentiary because I'll be trying to ride my bike to CVS and some try-hard zombie actor jumps me in the bike lane, thus making the streets of Philadelphia even less cyclist-friendly. With that, I don't know that I have enough experience listening to "scary" music to easily think of something scary in the traditional sense. But I'll tell you what scares the shit out of me as a 32-year-old man whose friends are moving to the suburbs, having kids, and drifting apart due to no fault other than the pursuit of their own happiness and personal growth. I really like having tight knit groups of friendships, so honestly what keeps me up at night is the very realization that life's natural course is weakening the bonds of those relationships and there's nothing I can nor should do about it. So, in conclusion, I will posit that the scariest song is Simple Plan's "I'm Just a Kid" because the idea of thinking you have a lot of friends but not hearing from them is the real nightmare.
Emily Schweich
In elementary school music class, cartoon listening maps brought orchestral music to life. At Halloween, we studied Camille Saint-Saëns’ symphonic poem “Danse Macabre,” based on a French superstition that, at midnight on Halloween, Death plays his fiddle to summon skeletons from their graves. The chilling piece starts with a harp striking 12, followed by a diabolical tritone from the violin and the sound of xylophones like clattering bones.
We each got roles to play during the poem. I longed to be a skeleton, who danced around the room with “clicking-clacking bones, clicking-clacking bodies,” or at least a waltzing witch. But, no, I was a bat, who got to fly for only one short passage. Years later, this piece still lives in my bones, rattling around in my brain each Halloween. And while my young self was disappointed, I think the “bat in the belfry” is the eeriest motif of all.
Shawn Cooke
It’s a copout, but my mind immediately went baby mode. Rosenshontz (Gary Rosen and Bill Shontz) were a fairly popular children’s music duo in the decade before I was born — think if Raffi was two people and his career got sideswiped by a recession. I certainly have no memory of ever seeing this album artwork (from their debut record Tickles You!), but the off-YouTube video for its song “Nose” will be forever seared in the brain. Accompanying this bouncy, cheery, Polka-y, appreciation of the human nose in all its power were the men of the hour and huge, superimposed noses of every size and shape darting around your TV like the famous DVD screensaver. I could barely take it. Sometimes the worst body horror of all is just being reminded how alien the regular old body parts you carry around with you every day can look.