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"(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was written and sung by Blue Öyster Cult's lead guitarist, Donald Roeser, also known as Buck Dharma. It was rumored to be about suicide, but it actually deals with the inevitability of death and the belief that we should not fear it. When Dharma wrote it, he was thinking about what would happen if he died at a young age and if he would be reunited with loved ones in the afterlife.
Dharma was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat, which got him thinking about his mortality and inspired the song. "I thought I was going to maybe not live that long," he said in a Songfacts interview. "I had been diagnosed with a heart condition, and your mind starts running away with you - especially when you're young-ish. So, that's why I wrote the story. It's imagining you can survive death in terms of your spirit. Your spirit will prevail."
Buck Dharma described this as "a love song where the love transcends the actual physical existence of the partners." He was taken aback when he learned that many listeners heard it as a song encouraging suicide; it advocates courage in the face of death but in no way suggests we should actively bring it about. In his Songfacts interview, he explained: "It's not about suicide, although people kind of get that from the Romeo and Juliet reference. But BÖC's lyrics have always been… not obtuse, but deep. They're certainly open to interpretation, and everybody seems to have their own thoughts about what stuff means. We purposely let people do that - draw their own conclusions from the lyric."
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