Musicians often live the craziest lives, and far too many wind up dying young.
Death is an uncomfortable subject that many artists gravitate towards in their lyrics,
pondering the eternal question of what's waiting on the "other side," if anything.
But the following musicians seem to have predicted their own deaths… in their lyrics and elsewhere.
Here's one particularly uncanny death prediction to wrap your head around.
According to Music News, singer Amy Winehouse's friend Alex Foden said she knew she wasn't
destined for a long life:
"Amy always told me she thought she would die young and that she knew she'd become a
part of the '27 Club.'"
For those who don't know, the "27 Club" consists solely of artists who died at the age of 27,
including such luminaries as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain.
And Winehouse did, in fact, die in 2011 at the age of 27.
The coroner's report revealed Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning.
That's not too surprising, considering the singer was prone to doing everything in excess.
"What makes me crazy?
Alcohol doesn't do nice things to me.
I'm quite a horrible drunk.
Quite a horrible drunk, actually."
Winehouse reportedly had a pronounced problem with drugs and alcohol and suffered from bulimia,
which likely left her body too weak to handle all the other excesses.
Let's just ignore the fact that plenty of celebrities died at the age of twenty-six,
and plenty of celebrities died at twenty-eight.
For some reason, we only think it's spooky when famous people die at the age of twenty-seven.
It's bizarre and entirely tragic that Winehouse correctly predicted she'd be joining their
ranks.
Some eerie coincidences preceded the death of rapper Mac Miller, whose last music video
for the single "Self Care" featured him lying in a casket.
The video's theme is the downward spiral of addiction, and it even included a scene where
Miller carves the Latin phrase "Memento mori" into the casket.
If you were fortunate enough to avoid Latin in school, that means:
"Remember that you have to die."
Miller wasn't exactly secretive about his substance abuse.
"I've proved to myself that I can be faded all the time, make great music, and make it
day to day, and carry on."
In 2013, he told Complex that he'd had a hard time dealing with criticism after his first
album, especially when it seemed deliberately cruel:
"A lot of the reviews were more on me as a person."
Miller was just a kid when his first album came out, and he handled that negativity badly:
He started taking promethazine a drug that is used to treat allergies and motion sickness.
Promethazine is also a strong sedative that can become addictive, and it can be deadly
when taken in excess.
Promethazine didn't kill him, though.
In fact he kicked that habit but moved onto more serious drugs.
The coroner reported that the rapper died from a lethal cocktail of Fentanyl, cocaine,
and alcohol.
The D12 rapper Proof was in a nightclub in his hometown when he was shot and killed during
an argument.
Two years before that, on the 2004 album D12 World, he rapped:
"I'm in the club to beef, you gotta murder me there."
That's eerily specific, considering that Proof was murdered in a club.
And the circumstances of his death are even weirder when you consider his participation
in Eminem's 2005 music video for "Like Toy Soldiers," which dramatizes the murder of
D12 member Bugz.
Proof portrayed the deceased rapper in the video, even re-enacting his murder.
Watching the rapper act out a situation all-too similar to his own death makes for an intensely
eerie viewing experience.
Proof's friend H. Mack told the Guardian Proof wasn't the sort of guy who would initiate
a gun fight over something stupid, so there's not much reason to feel like that was an especially
likely way for Proof to go.
Many fans believed Bob Marley was a sort of prophet, like Nostradamus only with musical
talent and cooler hair.
According to the book Bob Marley: Musician, Marley's mother claimed he was able to predict
the future even as a small child, and some people believe he predicted the modern wars
in Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria.
But perhaps the weirdest of all his predictions was the one about his own death.
When Marley was twenty-four, he told friends exactly how old he'd be when he died:
"I know I'm going to die at 36."
In 1977, Marley was diagnosed with melanoma under the nail of his big toe.
Doctors recommended amputation, but as a Rastafarian, Marley believed amputation was sinful.
So he refused treatment, and by the summer of 1980 the cancer had spread throughout his
body.
He flew to Germany in the hope that a doctor who peddled controversial cancer treatments
might offer a cure, but holistic medicine didn't seem to help.
Marley decided to return to Jamaica to die, but he didn't make it that far - he died during
a stopover in Miami, on May 11, 1981.
As he predicted, he was 36.
Folk music star John Denver will always be remembered for bonfire melodies like "Take
Me Home, Country Roads" and "Annie's Song," but his first stepping stone toward musical
stardom was his song "Babe I Hate To Go."
"Nature has always been the source of the greatest contentment in my life."
According to CNN, the song first became a hit when it was re-recorded by folk trio Peter,
Paul and Mary under a new title: "Leaving on a Jet Plane."
The lyrics to "Leaving on a Jet Plane" involve the singer saying goodbye to a loved one shortly
before getting on a plane, repeatedly stating that he doesn't know when he'll be back and
that he hates to go.
These lines proved to be horribly uncanny, though certainly not by design.
In 1997, Denver was piloting his own private plane down the coast of California when the
engine failed, sending him crashing into the ocean.
He was the only person onboard.
He was fifty-three.
When you think about talented artists who were taken from us far too soon, the name
Jeff Buckley quickly springs to mind.
"Played my first gig in a club, that was it, y'know, yeah okay I like this, it smells bad,
I can be here."
"Dream Brother" is one Jeff Buckley song that particularly stands out, because it's a haunting
melody paired with lyrics about drowning.
It's hard not to be struck by the lyrics regarding a dark angel of death with black, feathery
wings, but the most eerie line of the song has to be:
"Asleep in the sand, with the ocean washing over..."
The lyric foretold what was coming in Buckley's future.
In 1997, Rolling Stone reported that Buckley and a friend had decided to go take a dip
in the Wolf River channel of the Mississippi River, with disastrous consequences.
The river, known for being a risky place to swim, carried Buckley away and he disappeared.
After six days of searching, his body was found washed up on the shore.
At the time of his death, he was only thirty years old.
Country music star Merle Haggard probably knew he was going to die just based on everything
his body had been through in the last few months of his life.
"We want to continue and we don't want to ever die.
And you know that's the next big event, once you retire."
According to Heavy, Haggard's health had forced him to cancel a number of shows, and his diagnosis
of double pneumonia was pretty dire for someone who was about to turn seventy-nine.
But the weirdest thing about Haggard's death is that the singer seemed to know exactly
the day of his death, a week before it actually happened.
On the day of his father's death, Haggard's son Ben wrote on Instagram:
"A week ago dad told us he was gonna pass on his birthday, and he wasn't wrong.
An hour ago he took his last breath...."
It could've been a lucky guess, or perhaps Haggard was so in tune with his body that
he instinctively knew how many days were left in him.
With song titles like "Everything Dies" and "Love You To Death," it wouldn't be out of
line to assume Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele had a preoccupation with death.
"You happy to be here?"
"I'm less miserable."
Not only did Steele write a lot of songs about death and dying, he also regularly predicted
his own death, attempted suicide, and at one point basically faked his own death.
According to Loudwire, in 2005 the band posted an announcement on their website that Steele
had died when he had, in fact, been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.
So really, it's not that weird that Peter Steele predicted his own death, because he'd
been doing it for years.
What is weird is he seemed to predict his exact manner of his death.
It's the lyrics to the 2003 song "I Don't Wanna Be Me" that are especially creepy:
"Two steps forward, two steps back.
Without warning, heart attack."
Seven years later, the 48-year-old singer was sick in bed with the flu, when he unexpectedly
died from an aortic aneurysm.
That's not technically the same thing as a heart attack: an aortic aneurysm is actually
a bulge in the aorta that can burst, or lead to other problems including heart attack and
stroke.
It's not clear which of these secondary problems led to Steele's death.
What is clear is these 2003 lyrics proved eerily apt.
Rock star Warren Zevon was best known for his 1978 song "Werewolves of London," but
he also wrote a song called "The Factory" in 1987.
Despite its seemingly upbeat sound, the lyrics tell the story of a man following in his father's
footsteps, slaving away in a factory to support his family and eventually inhaling cancerous
substances like polyvinyl chloride, plastic, and asbestos.
Decades later, tragedy struck, or at least a prior tragedy became publicly known.
What Zevon didn't realize when he wrote the song was that his own exposure to asbestos
- which probably happened during his childhood, when asbestos was all over the place - had
caused irreversible damage to his lungs.
Zevon was reportedly diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma in 2002 and given a terminal
prognosis.
"I seem to have already exceeded one of the predictions which was that I only had a few
months."
Zevon declined treatment and spent the last months of his life finishing up his final
album, The Wind, which he released just before he died in 2003.
Back in his day, Jackie Wilson - also known as "Mr. Excitement" - was a legendary performer
who put out over fifty hit singles in his lifetime.
According to the Winston-Salem Journal, his personal life was more troubled, often plagued
by relationship problems, personal drama, and alcoholism.
In 1975, Wilson was on stage in New Jersey belting out his famous song "Lonely Teardrops,"
when he was struck by a heart attack.
In a tragic twist, the words Wilson was singing as his chest seized up were reportedly:
"My heart is crying."
Wilson collapsed before the audience and was rushed to the hospital.
He didn't die that day, but his bumpy path continued.
He spent a few months in a coma before regaining consciousness, but he was immobile and unable
to speak.
He was transferred between various care facilities in a vegetative state for almost nine years
before finally passing away in 1984.
It seems like Avicii saw it coming.
In the 2017 Netflix documentary Avicii: True Stories, the Swedish musician and DJ behind
the hits "Levels" and "Wake Me Up" said he was going to die if he didn't retire from
performing.
This certainty of impending death seemed to motivate his 2016 retirement, as he felt that
his health problems and alcoholic tendencies would overwhelm him if he didn't step back
from the spotlight.
But he said he still felt a constant pressure to do more gigs, despite the anxiety it gave
him.
In 2018, Avicii - whose real name was Tim Bergling - was found dead in a resort in Muscat,
Oman.
His family later released a public statement that implied he'd committed suicide.
He was only twenty-eight years old.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).