music you have listened during a car crash

Bobby Smith & The Dreamgirls - now he's gone
(actually caused it)

Some friends of mine were in a tour van that had a blowout and flipped over, during which the middle section of Whole Lotta Love was playing. Apparently it was a strange experience.

I remember an article years ago about a guy who flipped his car and was trapped upside down in a ditch with George Michael's Faith playing on repeat for like 4 hours or something until someone discovered him and they got him out. Guy was OK but said he didn't want to ever hear the album again.

No crash, but did a 360 going 80 on a busy freeway and thought for sure it was the end. Halleluhwah was playing and I couldn't listen to it for a while after that.

I was in a gnarly car accident on 9/7/99, and Soul II Soul's "Back to Life" was on the radio at the time. Permanent association.

I was not in the car but I always lol about my friend's story about flipping his car on the 17 while listening to that "I like you/and I'd like you to like me to fuck you" Momus song

In 1995 I smashed up the side of a minivan I was renting, in order to crank up "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as it came on the radio. 'Cause it not like you'd ever hear that song on the radio then. Sheesh. I was barely employed a the time, ugly arbitration settlement that took me years and years to pay off.

I totaled my car on an icy bridge & I was pretty sure the car was going to go right through the bridge rails. Thanks to the slow-mo car crash head space I had plenty of time to imagine how I would be caught under the icy surface of the Snake River & drown/freeze to death. The song playing was "100 Years" by The Cure.

I was once in the backseat of a car that got clipped head-on by a drunk driver. One moment it was an amber-lit dashboard and "Take It Easy" by the Eagles, and the next moment it was headlights followed by silence and darkness. Just like Tony Soprano and Journey.

Archers of Loaf - Wrong

I was waiting to pull out onto a main road from a sidestreet. As the intro of the song was building, I was looking both ways for traffic. There was a pack of cars approaching from the left, but I thought I had enough time to get out ahead of them. Once I started to go, a car pulled ahead of the pack and just as the song kicks into full blast, he hit me on the left front quarterpanel and spun me around across the whole road and into the front yard of the house on the other side.

I wasn't hurt and my car survived, but the fact it was totally synched up with the song was amazing.

never gotten into an accident, but i do have way too many sudden moments of thinking to myself "oh god, this song would make way too nice of a soundtrack for a crash/death" or wondering if i would be happy dying to whichever song was playing (and the weird moments where i come to peace with the possibility because of the song) or asking myself if this is REALLY a song i could tolerate dying to. this probably makes it sound like driving is much more morbid for me than it is

also, i don't remember which episode but there was a radiolab where they were discussing the possibility of your perception of music slowing down in the midst of a crash, please verify y/n

Roisin Murphy - Cry Baby

A car in front of us braked suddenly to right across the traffic. My partner braked in time, the taxi behind us didn't. The taxi driver then sped off leaving only a few traces of yellow paint on the boot. However, he'd pushed us into the front car's tow bar - which slipped straight through the engine block like a stiletto. The car was totaled and a couple of weeks later I got a bunch of hair bands, a Referdex and a very scratched copy of Murphy's Overpowered in the mail - straight from the wreckers.

Big Star - The Ballad of El Goodo

rear ended at a stoplight. fucker was on his way to a nursing home to perform in a barbershop quartet Christmas concert. lost his bumper and smashed my taillight. he later tried to blame it on me even though my car wasn't even moving at the time.

but I still <3 this song and it always makes me happy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oErrWE2ZdZk

I also remember being pulled over for speeding (45 mph in a 30 mph zone, a quarter mile from my house and a quarter mile down the road from where a schoolmate had inexplicably crashed into a telephone pole and died a few years earlier) while listening to something by the Shop Assistants. "Nature Lover", maybe? but I didn't fear for my life and didn't get a ticket.

lesson: janglepop is bad for you, kids.

i recall tearing up durham's north duke street in 1994 on my way home from the cradle at 3am, listening to superchunk's 'swallow that' and kind of wishing i would crash

for better or worse i did not

slippery winter night, totaled my car to a live version of Jane Says. i distinctly remember it playing in the weird quiet after we all piled out in to the intersection. kind of ruined the song.

R.E.M. - "Driver 8"

Election day 1987. I was doing 45 on the way out on Laguna Canyon Road and saw a box truck waiting to make a left turn. I could see the guy - he could see me, but me decided to pull out directly in front of me. I locked up the brakes, noted that I was going to hit him (time really does slow down!) and t-boned the truck. Awful heavy impact but I walked away. "Take a break" indeed.

Still miss the car...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3589/3369140343_269f383b6b.jpg

ugh.. "he" instead of "me" (can't proofread for shit)

Timbaland and Fall Out Boy - One and Only. It was playing when I had my rollover. I couldn't listen to it for a long time after that but I just recently listened to it again. Song isn't as good as I remember it being back when Shock Value came out.

i was spinning james blackshaw's o true believers album when i had an accident a few years ago

first track on disk 2 of leaves turn inside you by unwound. driving my girlfriend's acura legend west, into the sun. first time i heard the track, i was surprised at the semi-prolonged, laser-y drone-intro.. ended up rear-ending somebody in an intersection. girlfriend wasn't wearing a seatbelt, she rolled up into the windshield, cracking it. spring of 2000, or so. haven't really listened to the album again, since then

Early 1990s, unexpected braking cars in front of us, four or five mild pile-ups in a row, (I hit the car in front of me, who had done the same himself, and I was hit by the one behind me, virtually no damage to the cars, nobody hurt, until weeks later, when they claimed that those happy smiling running playing kids had been hospitalised with whiplash just because that is an easy insurance scam), Big Black compilation tape.

first accident was a rear end collision, where it was raining, and I was hit by a lady who worked for the Sheriff's Office. I was playing The Coup's "Everythang" at the time and was mad that she made the cd skip.

She actually claimed her brakes didn't work and asked "do you think it's becuz it's raining that I wasn't able to stop?". she thought she wasn't going to get a ticket cuz she worked for the Sheriff's Office, but...she did!

Bobby Smith & The Dreamgirls - now he's gone
(actually caused it)

how did it cause it?

You know the lyrics: "I was yours/you were mine/drive your car/into a tree"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0tOLG92XUM&feature=related

Monday morning at 8am I was on my way to get my car fixed and I was sitting at a stop light and some car crashed into 3 cars behind me, then me, then ended up smashing into the back of a school bus in front of me. My car was totaled. Right before this happened this song was playing and I got rear ended right after "Bad luck, it can happen twice".

4 fucking years later I was at a stop light on the same road and someone rear ended my car and totaled it.

FUCK Memorial Drive and Atlanta drivers.

how did it cause it?

at the time i havent listened to it for about 6 years. so i auctioned 'Big Top Soul Cellar' for *this* song.
as it came, it went instantly from the postman hands to the car cd (yes, was i in a hurry).
then started driving while fast forwarding to track 27 - and crashed at a parking car with about 25 mph.
i still love that song. can not remember the car.

Monster Magnet - Bummer. Deiver also once cut himself quite badly while chopping vegetables to this song and despite liking it, sees it as a harbinger.

Monday morning at 8am I was on my way to get my car fixed and I was sitting at a stop light and some car crashed into 3 cars behind me, then me, then ended up smashing into the back of a school bus in front of me. My car was totaled. Right before this happened this song was playing and I got rear ended right after "Bad luck, it can happen twice".

― Telephoneface (Adam Bruneau), Sunday, May 15, 2011 10:38 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

in my early 20s, while listening to the pixies "debaser" and driving home on rockville pike in a light rain, i decided to go digging for a different tape on the passenger seat floor. when i looked up, i was about 50 feat away from a long line of cars stopped at an upcoming traffic light. i tried to slow and or steer off into the median, but being young & dumb, i succeeded only in locking my wheels and plowing into the car in front of me, which plowed into the car in front of it, which, etc. no one seriously hurt (tfg), but three cars more or less totaled.

it didn't change the way i feel about the pixies or their song, but left me feeling pretty ambivalent about my mastery of the automobile.

great thread.
never been in a car accident, so I don't have a story.

in 'The Black Brook' by Tom Drury, there's a character who always buys celebrity mags to read on the plane cos she reckons the irony of dying in a crash while in the middle of reading one of them would just be too much to actually happen. have had that thought re music in the car.

I was about a minute into Louis Armstrong's 'Melancholy Blues' this morning when I skidded on I-495 and got stuck in a snowbank (I had to get towed out, but everything went better than expected)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSqf61e8zdg

trivia: this song was included on the Voyager Golden Record, which is now 12 billion miles away from Earth.

Better than expected = no fysical harm, I hope?

Have had two car crashes, but can't recall what was playing when they occurred.
Had one train accident - it broke in half during a ride back home from a nearby town where I'd bought Time for a Witness by The Feelies.

Izzy Straddlin & the Juju Hounds "Shuffle it All" was playing on the classic rock radio iirc

Birdbrain by Buffalo Tom whilst driving out of Glasgow after seeing Teenage Fanclub at King Tuts.

On the corner of Wellington St and Waterloo St a taxi ploughed straight into the passenger (my) side, luckily going fairly slowly, we were okay a bit bashed up and cut but the poor guy in the back of the cab got bounced around like a pinball.

This reminds me that the only time I ever got pulled over by the cops for speeding, I was blasting KRS-One, which seems very appropriate. Can't remember what I was listening to during my bad crash though.

The brakes of my 1988 Honda Civic went out on the way home from the Cleveland Public Library and I plowed into the car in front of me while listening to "Perfect Blue" by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions on cassette.

listening to underworld's 'second toughest in the infants' while I spun out on a busy freeway across three lanes of traffic and in front of a semi and right into the side of a car, coming to a rest in a lane in front of a car, whose driver honked at me because I was blocking him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv7Y7F-Q2KE

ha i've crashed whilst listening to ok computer,
could have been so sweet, but it was a few tracks after 'airbag'

my engine once caught fire while I was listening to "Stanky Legg" by the G-Spot Boyz

i caused a (pretty minor) accident while changing the station to get away from "black hole sun" circa 1996.

lol crüt
that is a classic sentence, should go on an exam!

I've only been in a couple of minor accidents and I don't remember what was playing but many years ago I had a really terrifying near miss on I-95 while Amy Grant's "Baby Baby" was on the radio and I remember thinking how pissed I would be if the last sound I heard on earth was "Baby Baby" by Amy Grant.

This isn't my story or an accident but:

I was reviewing security camera footage of a hotel clerk who was robbed at gunpoint, roughed up, and locked in a bathroom (it was evidence in a worker's compl claim I was reviewing) and the sound on the footage was the radio playing "Black and White" by Michael Jackson and it was so surreal.

I once crashed listening to Curve, iirc. More recently, about 10 years ago, my car was totalled by a La Ley radio van (does that count?) that ran a red light. I ended up on the lawn on the east side of the Art Institute, where the Film Center used to be.

i caused an accident while looking for a doolittle cassette that had fallen to the floor

Crashed listening to Mew's And the Glass Handed Kites in 2009 ("Apocalypso" maybe?). I think it actually increased my love for the album.

Better than expected = no fysical harm, I hope?

yup, I wasn't injured, and my car is fine as far as I can tell

I've never heard "Stanky Legg" by the G-Spot Boyz, crüt, but I feel that must have been a beautiful moment for you (car fire notwithstanding)

'lovely butterfly" by the Melvins was playing on my walkman while my bus crashed in Laos. The overloaded (furniture, rice, coconuts, chickens) and crowded bus had to cross a dry river bed because the bridge was under construction, didn't make it back up and flipped. No one was seriously hurt fortunately, scratches and bruises. While I was sitting by the road coming to my senses, there was not a butterfly, but a walking stick on my cheek

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEI_zg9Gqz4

fake plastic trees. was in high school and turned too fast at a corner, losing control of the car and smashing into the curb, which effed up the alignment of my chassis

'Mavis, quick put the Primitives on, I'm about to lose control of the car and drive into a tree'

I don't remember the specific song, but the time I hit a cyclist I was listening to Sublime Robbin' the Hood.

That's karma