said the raven: “tick tock, don’t stop”.
since ancient greece, when melanippides staged a 6-hour epic rock opera chronicling homer’s odyssey (and the oracle), complete with iron maiden eddie-style giant cyclops mascot, music has looking for inspiration in the printed pages. here are some of my favorites. sorry I didn’t include the maiden’s “quest for fire”, but no.
You are reading: Songs based on books
songs inspired by books
1. tea in the sahara by the police
it makes sense that sting fills his songs with literary references since he started out as an english teacher (“don’t stand so close to me” about a young girl falling in love with her teacher, hmmm, it has a reference to lolita from nabokov). This song was based on a story told in the Paul Bowles novel The Sheltering Sky. the story is about three sisters who want to have a few drinks in the desert with a prince. the prince never appears and the sisters appear dead, their glasses full of sand. it’s an absolutely beautiful song.
2. blue oyster cult black leaf
In the early 80’s there was something called chu-bops. you’d get a small reproduction of the album cover with the lyrics to one of the songs on the back cover and a record made out of bubble gum. I thought they were amazing! one i got was cultosaurus erectus from blue oyster cult. the printed lyrics were for a song called “divine wind” and they were super creepy so i took the actual album. “black blade” was the first song and it blew me away! I found out that it was a series of books by Michael Moorcock about Elric, a weak prince with a magical sword that sucked the souls out of people (enemies, friends, lovers, it didn’t matter) to give its user extra power. I went to the library and took out the first novel and devoured it. this song gave me a love for fantasy novels that continues to this day. To say that he was a huge influence on me would be an understatement.
3. tomorrow you never know about the beatles
an absolute mark for music, this song, written by john lennon, appeared on revolver. He based it on lines from Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Experience (which in turn was based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Lennon told producer George Martin that he wanted it to sound like a thousand monks were singing it from the top of a hill. It doesn’t sound like that, but it still sounds pretty amazing, from lennon’s voice recorded through a rotary speaker to the backwards guitar, the noise of a seagull created by a sped-up tape of paul mccartney laughing, and the absolutely hypnotic drum track. by ringo starr. . I can’t imagine many pop songs sounded like this in the middle of 1966. The throbbing version of Take 1 of The Beatles Anthology 2 is also pretty bossy.
4. wuthering heights by kate bush
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I love kate bush. her album hounds of love is one of my five favorites. “Wuthering Heights,” from her first album, The Kick Inside, was written when she was eighteen. The lyrics sometimes directly quote Emily Brontë’s classic novel. the song was the first self-penned single by a female artist to reach number one on the UK charts, a position it held for four weeks. kate bush is an absolute freaky amazing genius!
5. venus in fur by the velvet meter
The fourth track on what is arguably the most influential album of all time, “Venus in Furs” was based on the 1870 novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The book was about some fun things Leo liked to do. The song is a hypnotic five-minute buzz with John Cale’s viola and Lou Reed’s guitar playing beautifully.
6. marillion’s grendel
As much as I love short punk songs, I also have a soft spot for pretentious prog epics. and i love marillion from the fish era. “grendel”, adapted from beowulf, clocks in at an average of 17 minutes. It was the first release of the band, which is quite brave. gangs usually wait until they settle down before showing their weird side. I like the song but it’s not one of my favorites. the reason you’re here is the video. taken from a live show, it’s a pretty straightforward performance until minute 13 when fish (the lead singer) puts on an old battle helmet/mask. he sings for a while, but at 16:30 he attacks! him waving his hands, then pulls a helpless asshole out of the crowd and proceeds to falsely mutilate him. the guy actually looks horrified (the fish is about 6’5 and schlubbo doesn’t come close to that). This is going on for a while and it’s the best it’s ever been! youtube this fool! again, i love marillion and i don’t want it to seem like i’m taking advantage of them. but it’s super dumb.
7. goodbye sky port by jimmy eat world
Jimmy Eat World singer Jim Adkins once said, “Anthrax always had a Stephen King song. I thought why not go with something I was reading?” So he wrote a song based on a sentence by owen meany by john irving. it’s long too! the fade is about thirteen minutes. hypnotic and beautiful.
8. many metallica songs
and we’re talking early metallica here, not the afterload business. There are probably some songs on there that would fit, but I haven’t listened to them much. their wonderful second and third albums, although they have a lot! Ride the Lightning, the second album, has “For Who The Bell Tolls” based on Hemingway, “Creeping Death” based on the Bible, and “The Call of Ktulu” which was a misspelled reference to H.P. lovecraft. The next album, The Puppet Master, has “What Shouldn’t Be” (Lovecraft again!) and “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”, which was inspired by Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And they’re all great songs. what happened?
9. dusk in the blind guardian middle earth album
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I was a big fan of metal in high school, but when I got to college, I dropped out and prefer punk, post punk, and hip hop. When I started dipping my toes in the water, I went to my friend Keith’s store on the east side called Hole in the Wall Music. I recently fell in love with an album called heartwork by carcass (to whoever played the title track on a summer day, thank you so much!), so I asked him for something like that, and he gave it to me. It was all pretty brutal, which is amazing, but I also asked for something more epic. I played “into the storm” from nightfall in middle earth by the german power metal band blind guardian. it was brilliant! soaring, catchy, and, let’s face it, cheesy as heck. The entire album is a retelling of Tolkien’s Silmarillion, complete with dramatic spoken bits between songs. it’s perfect for waving a mug of ale over a roaring fire, waiting for tanis half-elf to show up at the last house inn. I know it’s a completely different fantasy series, but I was never a big Tolkien fan.
10. def with one per pop it will eat itself
In the late 1980s, a scene was spawned in England called “grebo music.” it was a combination of hip hop, electronic and punk and was short lived. the acts included wonder things, carter usm, and ned’s atomic dump (who i thought were cool), but the scene itself was started by pop will eat itself (at least i’m pretty sure they did. if there is some greedy scholar out there, fix me). pwei were a blur of bright colors, catchy songs, and pop culture references. his biggest hit, can u dig it?, solo, movies with references (dirty harry, terminator and the warriors, which gave the song its title and is featured throughout), music (run dmc, the fall, sonic youth and salt n pepa’s spinderella) and comics (freak brothers, batman, and especially the writer alan moore, who knows the score). moore was the writer of watchmen on which “def con one” is based. many of the lyrics are direct quotes from the book (“downstairs is coming”) and they mention the doomsday clock a lot. it’s a wonderfully strange song. Pwei frontman Clint Mansell later became the composer for Darren Aronofsky’s films, creating the brilliant score for Requiem for a Dream, among others. I wonder what aronofsky heard in mansell’s previous work that made him want mansell to score his movies. whatever it was, he was right!
11. rhyme of the ancient mariner by iron maiden
As I said before, no “search for fire”. but had to include this gem. Nearly fourteen minutes long, “Rime” features Maiden’s fifth album, PowerSlave. Based on Samuel Coleridge’s 18th century epic poem, “Rime” tells the story of a cursed sea voyage and the sole survivor of it. the song quotes lines from the poem and some brilliant ship-cracking sound effects they used when I saw them on that tour, playing to the incredible acceptance at the sports stadium in June 1985 (one of my all-time favorite concerts). scream for me, toledo!”).
12. nantucket mountain sleigh ride
it’s no secret that herman melville’s favorite band was uriah heep. she drew her logo on all her folders and had her patch on her jean jacket. but few know that he was also a great fan of the mountains. he once described leslie west’s guitar work as transcendent in a letter to his publisher in england, richard bentley, discussing heavy prog. So when he heard the title track from Mountain’s second album, Nantucket Sleighride, he flipped his pumpkin. The song is the story of the Essex whaler, which was destroyed by his dam in 1820. The music was written by bassist Felix Papillardi and the lyrics were by his wife, Gail Collins (who would later kill Papillardi). The song moved Melville so much that he wrote a novel based on it called Moby Dick (the title was from a Led Zeppelin song). He thanked Mountain in the acknowledgments and actually put a line from the song right after the title page (oddly enough, the book was dedicated to early Heep vocalist David Byron). ron howard also made a movie about essex which melville described as “sucks”.
featured image credit: image by bruno glätsch from pixabay.
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