Vol. 23: When Your Life Becomes A Lyric
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This article is also available as an audio edition, narrated by Ryan McVey.
Some of our favourite songs are about people we don’t know. We sing their names. We feel anger or love towards them. They might even remind us of someone we do know.
An old girlfriend or boyfriend. Someone we lost. Someone we probably should have forgotten a long time ago.
But the reality is that we don’t know them at all.
I guess that’s a testament to great songwriting. When an artist can tell a story about a person who has impacted their life in a way that an audience can relate to — that’s mission accomplished, I would think.
But imagine being the person the song was actually written about. You turn on the radio and hear pieces of your own life coming through the speakers.
Better yet, imagine millions of other people singing along to it. People who don't know you, but somehow know something about your marriage, your breakup, your childhood or, in one particularly strange case, your phone number.
Songwriters have always borrowed from their own lives. Sometimes they disguise the people they're writing about. Sometimes they change the names. And sometimes they put the name right there in the song and leave absolutely nothing to the imagination.
Here are six people whose lives became part of music history — whether they intended to or not.
Pattie Boyd — Layla, Something and Wonderful Tonight
If there were a Hall of Fame for musical muses, Pattie Boyd might have her own wing.
Boyd was a successful model when she met George Harrison on the set of A Hard Day's Night in 1964. The two married in 1966, placing Boyd at the centre of perhaps the most famous period in Beatles history.
And then Eric Clapton fell in love with her.
There was one fairly significant complication: Clapton and Harrison were close friends.
Clapton's unrequited love for Boyd became the emotional fuel behind Layla, recorded with Derek and the Dominos and released in 1970. Even the title allowed him to hide the real subject somewhat — it was inspired by the Persian love story Layla and Majnun, about a man driven nearly mad by an unattainable woman.
The unattainable woman in Clapton's life was his friend's wife.
Boyd initially stayed with Harrison, but their marriage deteriorated, and she and Clapton eventually became a couple. They married in 1979.
And Layla wasn't the only classic associated with her.
Boyd has long said that George Harrison told her Something was written about her, although Harrison later gave different answers about the song's inspiration. Then there was Clapton's Wonderful Tonight, which Boyd has described as being written while she was upstairs getting ready to attend a party with him.
Think about that for a moment.
Most people would be thrilled to have one great love song written about them.
Pattie Boyd ended up associated with three songs by two of rock music's most celebrated songwriters — while simultaneously finding herself in the middle of one of rock's most famous love triangles.
Not bad for someone who wasn't actually in either band.
Blake Fielder-Civil — Back to Black
This one is considerably darker.
Amy Winehouse met Blake Fielder-Civil in a London pub in 2005, and their relationship quickly became intense, turbulent and ultimately destructive.
When Fielder-Civil left Winehouse and returned to a previous girlfriend, Winehouse turned the heartbreak into music.
A lot of music.
Her 2006 album Back to Black is filled with songs informed by that relationship, but the title track is perhaps its clearest expression. He went back to his former girlfriend. Amy, as she put it, went “back to black.”
They eventually reunited and married in 2007, but their relationship continued to play out publicly amid addiction, arguments, arrests and relentless tabloid coverage. They divorced in 2009.
Then, in 2011, Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning at just 27.
In the years since, Fielder-Civil has had to live not only with the loss of Winehouse but with his permanent place in her story. To many fans, he became the villain in the Amy Winehouse tragedy — a characterization he has pushed back against while also acknowledging mistakes he made during their relationship.
That's the strange thing about becoming somebody's muse.
Amy Winehouse got to tell her story through her songs. Blake Fielder-Civil has spent years living inside the version of the story the rest of the world heard.
And every time Back to Black plays, that story begins again.
Delilah DiCrescenzo — Hey There Delilah
This might be my favourite story of the bunch simply because the song isn't really telling the truth.
Tom Higgenson of the Plain White T's met Delilah DiCrescenzo through a mutual friend in the early 2000s. She was a competitive distance runner, and Higgenson was immediately attracted to her.
There was a problem.
Delilah had a boyfriend.
That didn't stop Higgenson from telling her that he had already written a song about her.
He hadn't.
Eventually, though, he did.
The resulting Hey There Delilah sounds like an intimate account of a long-distance relationship between a musician and the woman he loves. He's a thousand miles away. She's in New York City. He promises that someday his music will pay the bills and they'll have the life they've dreamed about.
Except Higgenson and DiCrescenzo were never a couple.
Much of the romance in the song was imagined — essentially Higgenson writing about the relationship he wished they had.
And then something even stranger happened.
The song became enormous.
Hey There Delilah reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the Plain White T's received two Grammy nominations.
Remember that girl Higgenson tried to impress by telling her he'd write a song about her?
Delilah attended the Grammys with him.
Sometimes the pickup line actually works.
Sort of.
Caroline Kennedy — Sweet Caroline
For decades, Neil Diamond wouldn't tell anyone who Caroline was.
Then, in 2007, he finally revealed it.
Caroline was Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President John F. Kennedy.
Diamond said he had seen a magazine photograph of Caroline as a young girl, dressed in riding clothes beside her pony. There was something about the innocence of the photograph that stayed with him.
Years later, while writing in a Memphis hotel room, Diamond needed a three-syllable name that fit the melody he had in his head.
Caroline did.
Sweet Caroline was released in 1969.
The little girl in that photograph grew up, while the song bearing her name became something much larger than either of them could have anticipated. It became a sporting-event anthem, a wedding staple and one of those songs that can make an entire room of people instinctively yell “BAH BAH BAH!” whether they planned to participate or not.
Diamond kept the inspiration secret for decades because he hoped to tell Caroline himself one day.
Eventually he got the chance.
He revealed the story after performing the song for Caroline Kennedy via satellite at her 50th birthday celebration.
Imagine discovering that one of the most recognizable songs of the past half-century exists, at least in part, because a songwriter happened to see a photograph of you as a little girl.
There's another reason this song has always meant something in our house.
My wife's mother, who passed away years ago, was named Caroline. So when Sweet Caroline comes on, my wife doesn't think about Caroline Kennedy. She thinks about her mom.
And I suppose that's one of the interesting things about songs written about real people. Neil Diamond may have had one Caroline in mind, but somewhere along the way, the song became about countless other Carolines too.
Sara Lownds Dylan — Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
Bob Dylan married Sara Lownds in a quiet ceremony in 1965.
Not long afterward, she became the subject of one of the most ambitious love songs he ever recorded.
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands closes Dylan's 1966 album Blonde on Blonde and occupies the entire fourth side of the original double LP.
Years later, Dylan made the connection explicit in another song.
On Sara, from his 1976 album Desire, Dylan looked back at their relationship and remembered staying up for days at New York's Chelsea Hotel writing Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for her.
But by the time he was singing Sara, their relationship was falling apart.
That makes these two songs fascinating to hear together.
One captures a man near the beginning of a marriage, writing an enormous, mysterious love song for the woman he has just married.
The other captures him roughly a decade later, looking backward and trying to hold onto that marriage as it slips away.
Dylan and Sara divorced in 1977.
Most relationships leave behind photographs, letters and memories.
Theirs left behind songs.
Jenny — 867-5309/Jenny
And then there's Jenny.
Except there probably wasn't a Jenny.
867-5309/Jenny was written by Alex Call and Jim Keller and released by Tommy Tutone in 1981. The song tells us that somebody has found a girl's name and telephone number written on a wall and is contemplating calling her.
The number, unfortunately, was very easy to remember.
867-5309.
You probably just sang it in your head.
The song became a Top 5 hit in the United States, and listeners did exactly what human beings inevitably do when a hit record gives them a telephone number.
They called it.
The problem was that while 867-5309 might not have belonged to Jenny, it absolutely did belong to real people in different area codes across North America.
And their phones started ringing.
Again.
And again.
And again.
People would call and ask for Jenny. Some unfortunate owners of the number reportedly received hundreds or even thousands of calls. In Chicago, when a radio station obtained a local version of the number in 1982, it reportedly received 22,000 calls in four days.
Unlike Pattie, Blake, Delilah, Caroline and Sara, Jenny may never have existed at all.
But the people answering her phone certainly did.
Four decades later, 867-5309 remains one of the few telephone numbers that millions of people can recite without ever having dialed it.
Which might make Jenny the most famous fictional person on this list.
They Didn't Ask to Be Our Muse
As music fans, we find ourselves connecting with the artists and the emotions they're expressing. But we rarely consider the real people on the other side of those songs.
They didn't ask to be our muse.
Pattie Boyd didn't know that generations of people would hear Eric Clapton desperately calling her name. Blake Fielder-Civil probably never imagined that one of the most acclaimed albums of the century would forever be connected to the darkest parts of his relationship with Amy Winehouse. Delilah didn't even date the guy who made millions of people believe she did.
But somewhere along the way, these very personal stories stopped belonging only to the people who lived them.
Adele once said of 21, an album born largely out of her own heartbreak, that it didn't really belong to her anymore.
“It belongs to the people.”
I think that's what happens to great songs.
Neil Diamond had his Caroline. My wife has hers.
The song may have started with a photograph of Caroline Kennedy, but when my wife hears it, she's thinking about her mom. Someone else is thinking about a first love. Someone else might simply be remembering a night at a baseball game with their dad.
The songwriter gives us the story.
Eventually, we make it our own.
But perhaps it's worth remembering that before any of that happened — before we sang their names, attached our memories to their stories or made their songs part of our own lives — there was a real person who had to live it first.
This Week's Playlist
Every volume of Dad's Music Muse is accompanied by a curated Spotify playlist inspired by that week's topic.
This week's playlist features songs inspired by the real people behind the stories — from famous muses and complicated relationships to one unforgettable phone number.