List of songs based on literary works

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This is a list of songs that retell, in whole or in part, a work of literature. Albums listed here consist entirely of songs retelling a work of literature.

Contents

Albums

AlbumMusical artistLiterary workAuthorCommentsCitations
An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, and The End Of All Songs - Part 1 Spirits Burning & Michael Moorcock The Dancers at the End of Time Michael Moorcock Three albums covering the three books of the trilogy.
The Black Halo Kamelot Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Black Halo is a concept album based on Faust, Part Two. It is a follow-up to Epica , which was based on Faust, Part One . [1]
Cacophony Rudimentary Peni Various works of H. P. Lovecraft H. P. Lovecraft All 30 tracks are related to Lovecraft or his work. [2]
The Chronicle of the Black Sword Hawkwind Various works of Michael Moorcock Michael Moorcock Based on aspects of the works of Moorcock, including Elric and Jerry Cornelius. Moorcock, who has appeared with the band on numerous occasions, does the narration on Live Chronicles . [3] [4] [5]
Dust and Dreams Camel The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck [6]
Epica Kamelot Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Epica is a concept album based on Faust, Part One . It was followed by The Black Halo , which was based on Faust, Part Two . [1]
The House of Atreus Act I and The House of Atreus Act II Virgin Steele Oresteia Aeschylus Two-part concept album based loosely on the Oresteia of Aeschylus [7]
Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds Jeff Wayne The War of the Worlds H.G. Wells [8]
I Robot The Alan Parsons Project I, Robot Isaac Asimov [9]
Journey to the Centre of the Earth Rick Wakeman Journey to the Centre of the Earth Jules Verne [10]
Leviathan Mastodon Moby-Dick Herman Melville [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]
La Leyenda de la Mancha Mägo de Oz Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes [16]
The Machine Stops Hawkwind "The Machine Stops" E. M. Forster [17] [5]
Moby Dick or The Whale Caleb Hayashida Moby-Dick Herman Melville Concept album from written from the perspective of various characters in the novel [18] [19]
Music Inspired by The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe The Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis [20]
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son Iron Maiden Seventh Son Orson Scott Card [21]
Shakespeare's Macbeth – A Tragedy in Steel Rebellion Macbeth William Shakespeare [22]
Smallcreeps's Day Mike Rutherford Smallcreep's Day Peter Currell Brown [23]
The Snow Goose Camel The Snow Goose: A Story of Dunkirk Paul Gallico [24]
The Songs of Distant Earth Mike Oldfield The Songs of Distant Earth Arthur C. Clarke [25]
Tales of Mystery and Imagination The Alan Parsons Project Various works of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe [26] [27]
A Tragedy in Steel Part II: Shakespeare's King Lear Rebellion King Lear William Shakespeare [28]

Songs

SongAlbumMusical artistLiterary workAuthorCommentsCitations
"7th Step" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter One Deborah Pardes Angela's Ashes Frank McCourt [29]
"40" War U2 The 40th Psalm of the Book of Psalms from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament [30]
"1984" Diamond Dogs David Bowie Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell One of several songs that Bowie wrote about Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; Bowie had also hoped to produce a televised musical based on the book. [31]
"2112" 2112 Rush Anthem Ayn Rand Song shares themes with the novel, such that Neil Peart recognized Rand in the album's liner notes. [32]
"Abigail" Creatures Motionless in White The Crucible Arthur Miller [33]
"Achilles, Agony and Ecstasy in Eight Parts" The Triumph of Steel Manowar The Iliad Homer A retelling of the fight between Hector and Achilles [34]
"Adam's Apple" Toys in the Attic Aerosmith The Book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament Retells the biblical story of the Fall of man through the perspective of Adam and Eve's discovery of their own sexuality. [35]
"Afternoons and Coffeespoons" God Shuffled His Feet Crash Test Dummies "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" T.S. Eliot Adapts elements of the T. S. Eliot poem. [36]
"Ahab" The Graduate MC Lars Moby-Dick Herman Melville Retells the story of Moby-Dick from the perspective of Captain Ahab. [37]
"Alice" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills Go Ask Alice Beatrice Sparks [38] [39]
"All I Wanna Do" Tuesday Night Music Club Sheryl Crow "Fun" Wyn Cooper [40]
"All Is Not Well" The Thing That Feels Hannah Fury Wicked Gregory Maguire [41]
"All Nightmare Long" Death Magnetic Metallica "The Hounds of Tindalos" Frank Belknap Long [42] [43]
"All Quiet On The Western Front" Jump Up! Elton John All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque [44]
"Alone" Acoustic Verses Green Carnation Alone Edgar Allan Poe [45]
"Among the Living" Among the Living Anthrax The Stand Stephen King [46] [47]
"The Ancient Ones" Blessed Are the Sick Morbid Angel The Call of Cthulhu H. P. Lovecraft Based on The Call of Cthulhu, as well as the rest of the Cthulhu Mythos. An earlier version of this song, named "Azagthoth", appeared on the band's demo album, Abominations of Desolation . [43]
"And Your Little Dog Too" The Thing That Feels Hannah Fury Wicked Gregory Maguire [41]
"Animal in Man" Let's Get Free dead prez Animal Farm George Orwell [48]
"Anthem" Fly by Night Rush Anthem Ayn Rand Loosely based on the Rand novel; The band would produce a fuller version in 2112. [32]
"The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy Leonard Nimoy The Hobbit J. R. R. Tolkien [49] [50]
"The Ballad of Poker Alice" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter Two Larry Kenneth Potts Nothing Like It in the World Stephen Ambrose Relates the story of "Poker" Alice Ivers [51]
"The Ballad of Skip Wiley" Barometer Soup Jimmy Buffett Tourist Season Carl Hiaasen A song about the character Skip Wiley from Hiaasen's 1986 novel. [52]
"Banana Co." Radiohead One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez [53] [54]
"Las Batallas" Café Tacuba Café Tacuba Las batallas en el desierto José Emilio Pacheco [55]
"The Battle of Evermore" Led Zeppelin IV Led Zeppelin The Lord of the Rings J. R. R. Tolkien [56] [50]
"Behind the Wall of Sleep" Black Sabbath Black Sabbath "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" H. P. Lovecraft [57] [58] [43]
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" Liberation The Divine Comedy Bernice Bobs Her Hair F. Scott Fitzgerald [59]
"Big Brother" Diamond Dogs David Bowie Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell One of several songs that Bowie wrote about Orwell. [31]
"Billy Liar" Her Majesty the Decemberists The Decemberists Billy Liar Keith Waterhouse [60]
"Birthing Addicts"Unreleased Melanie Martinez Go Ask Alice Beatrice Sparks [61]
"Black Blade" Cultösaurus Erectus Blue Öyster Cult Elric of Melniboné Michael Moorcock [62]
"Black Corridor" Space Ritual Hawkwind The Black Corridor Michael Moorcock [63] [4]
"Bloodbath & Beyond" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills Dracula Bram Stoker [38] [39]
"Bob's Country" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter Two Deborah Pardes Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight Alexandra Fuller [51]
"Brave New World" Brave New World Iron Maiden Brave New World Aldous Huxley [64]
"The Call of Ktulu" Ride the Lightning Metallica The Call of Cthulhu H. P. Lovecraft "Written from the point of view of the sea nymph who helps Odysseus after he is shipwrecked." [57] [58] [42]
"Calypso" Solitude Standing Suzanne Vega The Odyssey Homer [65]
"The Cask Of Amontillado" Tales of Mystery and Imagination The Alan Parsons Project "The Cask of Amontillado" Edgar Allan Poe [26] [27]
"Cassandra" ABBA The Iliad Homer [66]
"Catcher in the Rye" Distortland The Dandy Warhols The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger [67]
"Cent'anni di solitudine" Terra e libertà Modena City Ramblers One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez [54]
"Chapter 24" The Piper at the Gates of Dawn Pink Floyd I Ching [68]
"Chapter Four" Waking the Fallen Avenged Sevenfold The Book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament The title refers to the fourth chapter of Genesis. [69]
"Charlotte Sometimes" Faith The Cure Charlotte Sometimes Penelope Farmer [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75]
"Child of the Jago" The Future Is Medieval Kaiser Chiefs A Child of the Jago Arthur Morrison [76]
"Children of the Damned" The Number of the Beast Iron Maiden Midwich Cuckoos John Wyndham Also based on two of the film adaptations of that book: Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned [77] [78]
"Christabel" No Kinda Dancer Robert Earl Keen Christabel Samuel Taylor Coleridge [79]
"Cometh Down Hessian" Blessed Black Wings High on Fire "The Hound" H. P. Lovecraft [2]
"Communion of the Cursed" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills The Exorcist William Peter Blatty [38] [39]
"Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)" Fully Completely The Tragically Hip The Watch That Ends the Night Hugh MacLennan [80]
"Crown of Creation" Crown of Creation Jefferson Airplane The Chrysalids John Wyndham [81]
"Curse of Athena" Atavism The Lord Weird Slough Feg The Odyssey Homer About Odysseus's return to Ithaca. [82]
"Dalai Lama" Reise, Reise Rammstein Erlkönig Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [83]
"Damnation Alley" Quark, Strangeness and Charm Hawkwind Damnation Alley Roger Zelazny [63] [5]
"Dante's Inferno" Burnt Offerings Iced Earth Inferno Dante Alighieri [84]
"The Dark Eternal Night" Systematic Chaos Dream Theater "Nyarlathotep" H. P. Lovecraft [58]
"The Dawn of a New Age" Nemesis Divina Satyricon The Book of Revelation from the Christian New Testament [85]
"Dead" Doolittle Pixies The Book of Samuel from the Hebrew Bible; II Samuel from the Christian Old Testament Refurbishes the biblical legend of David and Bathsheba. [86]
"Dixieland" The Mountain Steve Earle & The Del McCoury Band The Killer Angels Michael Shaara [51]
"Don Quixote" Don Quixote Gordon Lightfoot Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes [87]
"Doublespeak" Beggars Thrice Nineteen-Eighty-Four George Orwell [88]
"The Drowning Man" Faith The Cure Gormenghast Mervyn Peake [89]
"Dunwich" Witchcult Today Electric Wizard "The Dunwich Horror" H. P. Lovecraft [57]
"Edema Ruh" Endless Forms Most Beautiful Nightwish The Kingkiller Chronicle Patrick Rothfuss [90]
"Einstein's Brain" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter One Lynn Harrison Driving Mr. Albert Michael Paterniti [29]
"Elvenpath" Angels Fall First Nightwish The Lord of the Rings J. R. R. Tolkien [91]
"End of the Night" The Doors The Doors Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Céline [92]
"Envoi"Absynthe Minded Absynthe Minded "Envoi" Hugo Claus [93]
"Eumaeus the Swineherd" Atavism The Lord Weird Slough Feg The Odyssey Homer [82]
"Eveline" Why Should the Fire Die? Nickel Creek Eveline James Joyce [94]
"Exit Music (For a Film)" OK Computer Radiohead Romeo & Juliet William Shakespeare [95]
"Fable" Volcano Gatsbys American Dream Lord of the Flies William Golding [96]
"Flower of the Mountain" Director's Cut Kate Bush Ulysses James Joyce The 1989 Kate Bush song The Sensual World was based on the closing paragraphs of Ulysses. However, the Joyce estate was unwilling to allow direct use of Joyce's words at that time, so she altered the lyrics. By 2011, the Joyce estate was open to licensing his work to her, so she re-worked that song as Flower of the Mountain, using Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Ulysses. [97] [98] [99]
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" Ride the Lightning Metallica For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway [42]
"Frankenstein" Horror Show Iced Earth Frankenstein Mary Shelley [100]
"Franz Kafka"Scäb The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka A fictional rock opera by the fictional band Scäb from the cartoon series Home Movies . [101]
"From the Underworld" Paradise Lost The Herd Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice Loosely based on the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice [102]
"The Future Is Now" Days Go By The Offspring Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell [103]
" The Ghost of Tom Joad " The Ghost of Tom Joad Bruce Springsteen The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck [60] [104]
"The Giant's Laughter" Vansinnesvisor Thyrfing "Jätten" Esaias Tegner [105]
"Golden Hair" The Madcap Laughs Syd Barrett "Golden Hair" James Joyce [98]
"Grandpa's Groove" Parov Stelar The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway [106] [107]
"Grendel" Marillion Grendel John Gardner A retelling of John Gardner's 1971 novel Grendel , which is a retelling of Beowulf. [108]
"Hallelujah" Various Positions Leonard Cohen The Book of Samuel from the Hebrew Bible; II Samuel from the Christian Old Testament Based on the biblical story of David and Bathsheba. It also incorporates elements of the story of Samson and Delilah [86]
"Haunted" Haunted Poe House of Leaves Mark Danielewski "Haunted" by Poe and the novel House of Leaves by her brother, Mark Danielewski, both draw heavily on their difficult experiences growing up with their father, Tad Danielewski. [109] [110]
"He Can't Come Today" The Golden Scarab Ray Manzarek Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett [29] [111]
"Hedda Gabler" Animal Justice John Cale Hedda Gabler Henrik Ibsen [112]
"Hell in the Hallways" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills Carrie Stephen King [113] [38] [39]
"Hey (rise of the robots)" Black and White The Stranglers I, Robot Isaac Asimov [114]
"Hey Ahab" The Union Elton John & Leon Russell Moby-Dick Herman Melville Based on the character Captain Ahab. [115]
"Hey There Ophelia" This Gigantic Robot Kills MC Lars Hamlet William Shakespeare [116]
"High Rise" PXR5 Hawkwind High-Rise J. G. Ballard [63] [5]
"Home at Last" Aja Steely Dan The Odyssey Homer Retells Ulysses' encounter with the Sirens. [117]
"Horrorshow" Scars A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess [118]
"House at Pooh Corner" Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy Nitty Gritty Dirt Band The House at Pooh Corner A. A. Milne This song, written by Kenny Loggins, was later performed by Loggins and Messina on their 1971 album Sittin' In . In 1994, Loggins added additional lyrics and re-recorded it with Amy Grant as Return to Pooh Corner for his album Return to Pooh Corner . [119] [120]
"House of Leaves" Juturna Circa Survive House of Leaves Mark Danielewski [121]
"How Beautiful You Are" Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me The Cure "Les Yeux des Pauvres" Charles Baudelaire [122]
"Hug Me til You Drug Me" Here, Here and Here Meg & Dia Brave New World Aldous Huxley [123]
"I Can't Let You In" The Thing That Feels Hannah Fury Wicked Gregory Maguire [41]
"I Robot" U.K. Subs I, Robot Isaac Asimov [118]
"In Every Dream Home a Heartache" For Your Pleasure Roxy Music "Dead As They Come" Ian McEwan [124]
"In Like a Lion (Always Winter)" Apathetic EP Relient K The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe C. S. Lewis [125]
"The Inner Light" The Beatles Tao Te Ching [126]
"The Insect God" The Insect God Monks of Doom The Insect God Edward Gorey [127]
"The Iron Dream" Quark, Strangeness and Charm Hawkwind The Iron Dream Norman Spinrad [63]
"It Was Her House That Killed Nessarose" The Thing That Feels Hannah Fury Wicked Gregory Maguire [41]
"Jack of Shadows" Hawkwind Jack of Shadows Roger Zelazny [63] [5]
"Jamaica Inn" The Beekeeper Tori Amos Jamaica Inn Daphne du Maurier [128]
"Jean Val Jean" Edison Glass Les Misérables Victor Hugo [129]
"Killing an Arab" The Cure The Stranger Albert Camus [130] [60] [75]
"Land" Horses Patti Smith The Wild Boys William S. Burroughs [118] [131]
"The Last Temptation of Odysseus" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter One Justin Wells The Odyssey Homer [29]
"Lay Down" Bursting at the Seams Strawbs The 23rd Psalm of the Book of Psalms from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament [132]
"The Legend of Enoch Arden" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter One Diane Zeigler "The Legend of Enoch Arden" Alfred Lord Tennyson [29]
"Let it Show" The Thing That Feels Hannah Fury Wicked Gregory Maguire [41]
"Listen (The Silences)" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter Two Michelle Bloom Raids on the Unspeakable Thomas Merton [51]
"Lolita" The Black Magic Show Elefant Lolita Vladimir Nabokov [133]
"The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" Somewhere in Time Iron Maiden The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner Alan Sillitoe [134]
"The Longest Day" A Matter of Life and Death Iron Maiden The Longest Day Cornelius Ryan [135]
"Lord of Light" Doremi Fasol Latido Hawkwind Lord of Light Roger Zelazny [63] [5]
"Lord of the Flies" The X Factor Iron Maiden Lord of the Flies William Golding [136]
"Lost Boy" Ruth B Peter Pan J. M. Barrie [137]
"Love and Death" Dream Harder The Waterboys Love and Death William Butler Yeats [138]
"Love and Destroy" Franz Ferdinand The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov [139]
"Lucy" Liberation The Divine Comedy The Lucy poems William Wordsworth [59] [140]
"The Machine Stops" Standing in the Light Level 42 "The Machine Stops" E. M. Forster [5]
"Macondo" Óscar Chávez One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez Based on the fictional town Macondo, used by Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude and other of his works. [54]
"Martin Eden" Billie Hughes Martin Eden Jack London [141]
"Magnu" Warrior on the Edge of Time Hawkwind "Hymn of Apollo" Percy Bysshe Shelley [142]
"Matilda" Harry's House Harry Styles Matilda Roald Dahl [143]
"Me, Myself & Hyde" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson [38] [39]
"The Melting Point of Wax" The Artist in the Ambulance Thrice Myth of Icarus Retells the story of The Fall of Icarus [144]
"Misery Loves Company" State of Euphoria Anthrax Misery Stephen King [145]
"Moi... Lolita" Gourmandises Alizée Lolita Vladimir Nabokov [146]
"Moon over Bourbon Street" The Dream of the Blue Turtles Sting Interview with the Vampire Anne Rice About the character Louis de Pointe du Lac. [147]
"Mr. Raven" MC Lars "The Raven" Edgar Allan Poe [148]
"The Mule" Fireball Deep Purple Foundation series Isaac Asimov Based on the character "The Mule" from the Foundation series. [149]
"Murders in the Rue Morgue" Killers Iron Maiden "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" Edgar Allan Poe [150] [78]
"My Antonia" Red Dirt Girl Emmylou Harris with Dave Matthews My Antonia Willa Cather Told from the perspective of the character Jim Burden. [104]
"Narcissist" The Libertines The Libertines The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde Loosely based on the character of Dorian Gray. [151]
"Narnia" Please Don't Touch! Steve Hackett The Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis [152]
"The Nature of the Beast" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills Animal Farm George Orwell [153] [38] [39]
"The Necromancer" Caress of Steel Rush The Hobbit J. R. R. Tolkien [50]
"Nescio"Omsk Nits De uitvreter Nescio Song is mainly inspired by the novella's ending, when protagonist Japi jumps off the Waalbrug. In the song, however, Japi does not drown but is implied to have ended up in Italy. [154]
"Nice, Nice, Very Nice" Ambrosia Ambrosia Cat's Cradle Kurt Vonnegut Lyrics taken almost verbatim from the poem in chapter 2 (and the bridge from the one on chapter 58) [155]
"No Love Lost" An Ideal for Living Joy Division The House of Dolls Ka-tzetnik 135633 [156]
"November Rain" Use Your Illusion I Guns N' Roses "Without You" Del James The video for "November Rain" is loosely based on the short story "Without You". Axl Rose wrote the introduction to James's 1995 collection The Language of Fear , which included "Without You". [157] [158]
"The Odyssey" The Odyssey Symphony X The Odyssey Homer A seven-part song based on Homer's The Odyssey [159]
"Of Unsound Mind" Blessing in Disguise Metal Church "The Tell-Tale Heart" Edgar Allan Poe [150]
"Off to the Races" Born to Die Lana Del Rey Lolita Vladimir Nabokov [160]
"Ol' Evil Eye" Riddle Box Insane Clown Posse "The Tell-Tale Heart" Edgar Allan Poe [161] [48]
"One" ...And Justice for All Metallica Johnny Got His Gun Dalton Trumbo [42]
"Oor Hamlet" The Words That I Used to Know Adam McNaughtan Hamlet William Shakespeare [162]
"Orestes" Mer de Noms A Perfect Circle The Libation Bearers Aeschylus [163]
"Owen Meaney" Let's Talk About Feelings Lagwagon A Prayer For Owen Meany John Irving [164]
"Ozymandias" Jean-Jacques Burnel "Ozymandias" Percy Bysshe Shelley [118]
"Pantagruel's Nativity" Acquiring the Taste Gentle Giant Gargantua and Pantagruel François Rabelais [165]
"Patrick Bateman" Manic Street Preachers American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis [166]
"Pattern Recognition" Sonic Nurse Sonic Youth Pattern Recognition William Gibson [167]
"Paula Ausente (Absent Paula)" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter Two Marta Gomez Paula Isabel Allende [51]
"Pennsylvania" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter Two Dee Adams Songmaster Orson Scott Card [51]
"Pennywise" Pennywise Pennywise It Stephen King About the character Pennywise. [118]
"The People in the Attic" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank [38] [39]
"Pet Sematary" Brain Drain Ramones Pet Sematary Stephen King [118]
"The Phantom of the Opera" Iron Maiden Iron Maiden The Phantom of the Opera Gaston Leroux [168]
"A Pict Song" William Bloke Billy Bragg "A Pict Song" Rudyard Kipling [118]
"The Plot Sickens" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors Piers Paul Read [38] [39]
"Popular" High/Low Nada Surf Penny's Guide to Teen-Age Charm and Popularity Gloria Winters [169]
"Prince Caspian" Billy Breathes Phish Prince Caspian C. S. Lewis [170]
"Quelque chose de Tennessee" Rock'n'Roll Attitude Johnny Hallyday Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Tennessee Williams [171]
"Ramble On" Led Zeppelin II Led Zeppelin The Lord of the Rings J. R. R. Tolkien Mentions characters and places from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , including "Mordor" and "Gollum". [53] [104] [50]
"Rebecca" Something Real Meg & Dia Rebecca Daphne du Maurier [172]
"ReJoyce" After Bathing at Baxter's Jefferson Airplane Ulysses James Joyce [98]
"Richard Cory" Sounds of Silence Paul Simon "Richard Cory" Edwin Arlington Robinson [173]
"Rime of the Ancient Mariner" Powerslave Iron Maiden The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge [174] [175]
"Rivendell" Fly by Night Rush The Lord of the Rings J. R. R. Tolkien The song is about the fictional valley Rivendell from Tolkien's works. [176]
"The River" PJ Harvey The River Flannery O'Connor [177]
"Robot" Hawkwind The Robot series Isaac Asimov Refers to the Three Laws of Robotics. [178]
"Romeo and Juliet" Making Movies Dire Straits Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare The Dire Straits songs makes use of certain aspects of Shakespeare's play, as well as elements of some of the play's stage and screen adaptations. It also purposely diverges from the play's plot and characterizations in certain respects (such as Juliet's reaction to being approached by Romeo). [179]
"Rusty James" ¡Uno! Green Day Rumble Fish S. E. Hinton The song is named for the protagonist of the novel. [118]
"Sailing to Philadelphia" Sailing to Philadelphia Mark Knopfler Mason & Dixon Thomas Pynchon [180]
"Saint Veronika" Billy Talent III Billy Talent Veronika Decides to Die Paulo Coelho [181]
"Samson" Songs
Begin to Hope
Regina Spektor The Book of Judges from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament References the biblical story of Samson and Delilah. [182]
"Scentless Apprentice" In Utero Nirvana Perfume: The Story of a Murderer Patrick Süskind [104]
" The Sensual World " The Sensual World Kate Bush Ulysses James Joyce The 1989 Kate Bush song The Sensual World was based on the closing paragraphs of Ulysses. However, the Joyce estate was unwilling to allow direct use of Joyce's words at that time, so she altered the lyrics. By 2011, the Joyce estate was open to licensing his work to her, so she re-worked that song as Flower of the Mountain, using Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Ulysses. [97] [98] [99]
"Shadows and Tall Trees" Boy U2 Lord of the Flies William Golding [183]
"Sigh No More" Sigh No More Mumford and Sons Much Ado About Nothing William Shakespeare [184]
"Sirens of Titan" Modern Times Al Stewart The Sirens of Titan Kurt Vonnegut [185]
"A Skeleton in the Closet" Among the Living Anthrax Apt Pupil Stephen King [46]
"So Said Kay" Coastal The Field Mice Desert of the Heart Ann Rule The song is based on Donna Deitch's 1985 film Desert Hearts , which is an adaptation of Rule's novel. [186]
"Soma" Is This It The Strokes Brave New World Aldous Huxley Refers to the fictional drug used in Brave New World. [187]
"Song For Clay" A Weekend in the City Bloc Party Less than Zero Bret Easton Ellis [53]
"The Stand (Prophecy)" Declaration The Alarm The Stand Stephen King [188]
"Star-Crossed Enemies" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare [38] [39]
"Steppenwolf" Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music Hawkwind Steppenwolf Herman Hesse [63]
"Still Life" Piece of Mind Iron Maiden "The Inhabitant of the Lake" Ramsey Campbell [189]
"The Stranger" Tuxedomoon The Stranger Albert Camus [190]
"Such a Shame" It's My Life Talk Talk The Dice Man Luke Rhinehart [191]
"Sweet Thursday" Songs We Sing Matt Costa Sweet Thursday John Steinbeck [192]
"Sympathy for the Devil" Beggars Banquet The Rolling Stones The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov [53] [139] [104]
" The Tain " The Tain The Decemberists "Táin Bó Cúailnge" [193]
"Tales of Brave Ulysses" Disraeli Gears Cream The Odyssey Homer [104]
"Tea in the Sahara" Synchronicity The Police The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles King Crimson also has an instrumental called "The Sheltering Sky", named for the same book. [194] [195]
"Tell Your Story Walking" A Bird Flies Out Deb Talan Motherless Brooklyn Jonathan Lethem [196] [197]
"Tess-Timony" Every Trick in the Book Ice Nine Kills Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy [38] [39]
"Thieves in the Night" Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star Black Star The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison Talib Kweli wrote in the album's liner notes that The Bluest Eye "...struck me as one of the truest critiques of our society, and I read that in high school when I was 15 years old. I think it is especially true in the world of hip-hop, because we get blinded by these illusions." [48]
"The Thing That Should Not Be" Master of Puppets Metallica The Call of Cthulhu H. P. Lovecraft [42]
"Three Sisters" Liberation The Divine Comedy Three Sisters Anton Chekhov [59]
"Time to Dance" Panic! at the Disco Invisible Monsters Chuck Palahniuk [198]
"To Tame a Land" Piece of Mind Iron Maiden Dune Frank Herbert [53]
"tolerate it" Evermore Taylor Swift Rebecca Daphne du Maurier [199]
"The Tomahawk Kid" Alex Harvey Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson [200]
"Tread Softly" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter Two Eileen Laverty "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" W. B. Yeats [51]
"The Trooper" Piece of Mind Iron Maiden "The Charge of the Light Brigade" Alfred, Lord Tennyson [201] [175]
"Turn! Turn! Turn!" Pete Seeger The Book of Ecclesiastes from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament Notably covered by The Byrds; Takes its lyrics from chapter three of the Book of Ecclesiastes [202]
"T'Was Her Hunger Brought Me Down" Songs Inspired by Literature, Chapter One Anny Celsi Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser [29]
"United States of Eurasia" The Resistance Muse Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell [203]
"The Veldt" Album Title Goes Here Deadmau5 The Veldt Ray Bradbury [204]
"Venus in Furs" The Velvet Underground & Nico The Velvet Underground Venus in Furs Leopold von Sacher-Masoch [60]
"Walking on the Chinese Wall" Chinese Wall Philip Bailey Dream of the Red Chamber Cao Xueqin [205]
"We Are the Dead" Diamond Dogs David Bowie Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell One of several songs Bowie wrote about Nineteen Eighty-Four [53] [31]
"When the War Came" The Decemberists Hunger Elise Blackwell [206]
"White Rabbit" Surrealistic Pillow Jefferson Airplane Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll [207]
"William, It Was Really Nothing" Hatful of Hollow The Smiths Billy Liar Keith Waterhouse [208] [209]
"Willie Burke Sherwood" R.A.P. Music Killer Mike Lord of the Flies William Golding [48]
"Windmills" Dulcinea Toad the Wet Sprocket Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes [210]
"Winston Smith Takes It on the Jaw" Oblivion Utopia Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell [211]
"Wuthering Heights" The Kick Inside Kate Bush Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë [53] [60]
"Wonderland" 1989 Taylor Swift Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll [212]
"Xanadu" A Farewell to Kings Rush "Kubla Khan" Samuel Taylor Coleridge [213]
"Yes!" Naked Amber Ulysses James Joyce Lyrics include part of Molly Bloom's soliloquy [214] [97]
"Don Quixote" Face the Sun Seventeen Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes

See also

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References

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  6. Peacock, Tim (September 10, 2021). "'Dust And Dreams': How Camel Found The Promised Land". uDiscoverMusic. Retrieved June 26, 2022. Perhaps influenced by his new surroundings, the song cycle Latimer conceived was for a concept album evoking the spirit and themes of John Steinbeck's Pulitzer (and later Nobel) Prize-winning 1939 novel, The Grapes Of Wrath... ...Inspired by these universal themes, Latimer penned Dust And Dreams: an introspective masterpiece, which... ...was based primarily upon evocative instrumental music... ...Fans thirsting for Camel at their virtuosic best, however, were rewarded by the album's four fully-fledged songs. The stirring "Go West" reflected the Joad family's optimism as they arrived in California, but by the time Dust And Dreams hit the elegiac "Rose Of Sharon" ("What we gonna do when the baby comes?"), their hopes had fallen apart at the seams. Elsewhere, the seven-minute "End Of The Line" and the dramatic, shape-shifting "Hopeless Anger" contained flash and flair redolent of mid-70s Camel classics The Snow Goose and Moonmadness.
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  9. Houle, Zachary (3 December 2013). "The Alan Parsons Project: I Robot (Legacy Edition)". PopMatters. Retrieved May 1, 2020. The group's 1976 debut Tales of Mystery and Imagination was focused on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and, for a follow-up, the duo turned their attention to science-fiction author Isaac Asimov's 1950 book of short stories, I, Robot. Although Asimov was encouraging of the project, the book was already optioned to a film and television company, so Woolfson had to fudge the concept a little by making a set of songs that was more generally about the relationship between man and machine, and, though the group used the title of Asimov's book, they had to drop the comma for copyright reasons. And, thus, I Robot was born.
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  13. Pementel, Michael; Kaufman, Spencer (August 31, 2019). "15 Years Ago, Mastodon's Leviathan Took Fans on a High Seas Metal Adventure". Consequence of Sound. Retrieved May 5, 2020. Speaking to the Leviathan's concept, Dailor shared, "We had the big idea about the Moby Dick thing, which we all we excited about for the aesthetics, and the ability to do our own concept album that was based off this amazing piece of literature."
  14. Bennett, J. (December 1, 2013). "Mastodon's 'Leviathan': The Story Behind the Cover Art". Revolver. Retrieved May 5, 2020. At one fateful point during the time when Atlanta's Mastodon were gathering ideas for what would become their 2004 breakthrough album, Leviathan, drummer Brann Dailor found himself on a hellish 30-hour plane trip with nothing to pass the time except a copy of Moby-Dick. He already had a water motif in mind for the disc—Mastodon's previous record, Remission, was fire-themed—but before he read Herman Melville's 1851 maritime classic about Captain Ahab's hunt for the "salt-sea mastodon," Dailor admits that his ideas for what eventually became Leviathan were "pretty fucking vague."
  15. Mardell, Oscar (August 2019). "Sage of Discord; Or, Melville at 200: A Revenge Tragedy in 24 Sections" (PDF). 3:AM Magazine. Retrieved July 2, 2022. Perhaps my favourite attempt to make Melville "sin" again is the Moby-Dick-inspired concept album Leviathan by the American metal band Mastodon. Far more than any scholarly analysis, Leviathan is sensitive to the anger and disillusionment which permeates virtually every page of Melville's whaling epic. The album has inspired a surprising amount of critical discourse, almost all of which has focussed on its lyrics; what has not been properly acknowledged, however, is how close the album's rhythms come to the anarchic time signatures of early jazz, whose initial listeners were the first to recognise in Melville an apocalyptic vision of their own era.
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  32. 1 2 Bulger, Adam (January 24, 2020). "Struggling With Rush's Ayn Rand Influence". BTRtoday. Retrieved April 15, 2020. The 20-minute epic "2112" relates a dystopian science fiction story so similar to Rand's novella Anthem Peart felt obligated to acknowledge the influence.
  33. Daly, Joe (September 24, 2014). "Chris Motionless on writing Reincarnate". Metal Hammer. Retrieved April 15, 2020. Lyrically, Chris prefers writing songs through the eyes of characters from movies and literature, as on the song Abigail, a single from their 2010 debut, that he wrote about the Salem witch trials from the perspective of the John Proctor character in The Crucible.
  34. Brouwers, Josho (1 October 2015). "Heavy metal Iliad". Ancient World Magazine. Retrieved 16 April 2020. The song, as befitting a musical rendition of Homer's epic, is nearly 29 minutes in length and, as indicated in the title, consists of eight distinct parts (though this doesn't include the prelude and part VII consists of two parts in itself, so it's actually ten parts). The song focuses on the confrontation between Achilles, the Greek champion, and Hector, the Trojan leader, and follows the story in Iliad books 12 through 22.
  35. McPadden, Mike (April 7, 2015). "'Toys in the Attic' Turns 40: Ranking The Songs On Aerosmith's Classic Album". VH1. Archived from the original on June 9, 2022. Retrieved April 16, 2020. It's certainly one of the most "Aerosmith" of all Aerosmith anthems: a peacocking take on the Biblical creation myth that recreates the fall of humanity as the inevitable byproduct of just how tempting a certain "sweet and bitter fruit" is by its nature, and how just one taste ignites a particular form enlightenment to the point of madness.
  36. Dolen, John (May 1, 1994). "CELEBRATING THE NEW CROP OF GREAT MUSIC-MAKERS". South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Retrieved April 16, 2020. Not too many other rock bands mention Jean-Paul Sartre or go head-to-head with T.S. Eliot. (Compare Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and their Afternoons and Coffeespoons. Eliot: I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Dummies: Someday I'll have a disappearing hairline/Someday I'll wear 'jamas in the daytime.)
  37. McCracken, Edd (March 9, 2015). "A Simple Tale About Man Who Hates An Animal: MOBY-DICK in Pop Culture". Book Riot. Retrieved April 16, 2020. MC Lars uses the power of hip-hop to pry open Ahab's inner monologue. For a man who skilfully leapt between narrative styles, if rap had been around in the 1850s, Melville would probably have used it. Choice couplets include: "Call me Ahab, what, monomaniac /Obsessed with success unlike Steve Wozniak"; and "The first one to stop him gets this gold doubloon/Now excuse me while I go be melancholy in my room!"
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  41. 1 2 3 4 5 "Hannah Fury: The Thing That Feels". Muruch. November 8, 2006. Retrieved September 9, 2022. "Let It Show", "I Can't Let You In", "And Your Little Dog Too", "All Is Not Well", and "It Was Her House That Killed Nessarose" are the songs based on Gregory Maguire's novel about Elphaba, the so-called Wicked Witch... ...The lyrics are heavy with references to the novel, so I'm not sure how they translate to those who haven't read it. I suspect that the otherworldly vocals and harmonic music are enough to carry the songs even if you are unfamiliar with the strange characters Hannah sings about.
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  49. Matthews, Dylan (February 27, 2015). "Remember Leonard Nimoy with "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins," his greatest musical moment". Vox. Retrieved April 18, 2020. The song — essentially a musical recapitulation of the plot of The Hobbit, but with much better choreography — was originally released as a single in 1967, and it grew into an internet phenomenon long before streaming video became ubiquitous.
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  80. McGinnis, Ray (April 27, 2019). "#906: Courage by The Tragically Hip". Vancouver Pop Music Signature Sounds. Retrieved April 20, 2020. It was MacLennan's final award winning novel that earned his place in the song title "Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)". The song included lines from The Watch That Ends The Night, where MacLennan states "There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them." The Tragically Hip stated MacLennan's thought this way: "There's no simple explanation for anything important any of us do. And, yeah, the human tragedy consists in the necessity of living with the consequences under pressure."
  81. Sutherland, Steve (March 5, 2019). "Jefferson Airplane: Crown Of Creation". Hi-Fi News & Record Review. Retrieved April 20, 2020. The album's title is taken directly from The Chrysalids. 'Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled – they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from rocks. Change is its very nature.' And the title track quotes liberally from its text. The book has 'In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise – in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction'. The song goes: 'In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our minds...'. It's strident, punchy, fist-in-the-air Airplane in all their righteous indignant fury and sets the tone for the rest of the album.
  82. 1 2 Korn, Mike. "Interview with Mike Scalzi of Slough Feg From 2005". Music Street Journal. Retrieved April 20, 2020. [Scalzi:] I'd rather talk about real history and mythology. MSJ: That segues pretty neatly into two more songs I had questions about. "Eumaeus the Swineherd" and "Curse of Athena". Are those songs strictly about Homer's Odyssey? [Scalzi:] Absolutely, yeah. One of the newest infatuations I have is The Odyssey. Anybody who wants to read where the songs come from, open up the Odyssey and turn to the chapter about Eumaeus the Swineherd. Odysseus returns to Ithaca after being gone for 20 years and he returns disguised as a slave. Athena puts a curse on him because the suitors are trying to marry his wife Penelope and he has to win her back. Odysseus is welcomed into the humble home of Eumaeus the Swineherd who has no idea who he really is.
  83. Döing, Laura (16 August 2019). "Rammstein: Just what's in those lyrics?". Deutsche Welle . Retrieved 22 April 2020. Not all of the horror comes from Lindemann's pen. Some of the frontman's lyrics are inspired by classical German literature, exemplified by the most prominent poet in the language, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe's famous ballad Erlkönig, for example, translated: Who rides so late through the night and the wind? It is the father with his child. He holds the boy safely in his arms; he holds him tight, he keeps him warm. The mood, rhythm and content of Goethe's poem are echoed in Rammstein's "Dalai Lama": An airplane lies in the evening wind / On board is a man with a child / They sit safely, sit warm / And are lulled into falling asleep. In Goethe's poem, a ghostly apparition, the King of the Elves, whispers seductively to the child and seeks to abduct him into his realm. At the end of the ballad, the son dies in the arms of his father on horseback. In the Rammstein song, the "King of the Winds" endeavors to claim the boy, who finally dies in his father's arms, held too tightly in anticipation of an airplane crash.
  84. Irizarry, Katy (August 15, 2018). "11 Metal Songs Inspired by Dante's 'Inferno'". Loudwire. Retrieved April 23, 2020. There is perhaps no song that portrays such a detailed and comprehensive retelling of Dante's 'Inferno' as this one. Not only does it follow the epic format with 16-and-a-half minutes of music, but it takes the listener on a musical journey to each layer of hell, just as Dante did for his readers.
  85. Cotterell, Joel (April 9, 2013). "This Is Armageddon: The Dawn Motif and Black Metal's Anti-Christian Project". Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory (1). punctum books: 98. ISBN   978-0-615-75828-2 . Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  86. 1 2 Koenig, Sara M. (November 15, 2018). Bathsheba Survives. University of South Carolina Press. pp. 108–110. ISBN   978-1-61117-914-9 . Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  87. Stam, Robert (February 18, 2019). World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media: Towards a Transartistic Commons. Routledge. p. 143. ISBN   978-0-429-76739-5 . Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  88. Johnson, Dan (13 September 2009). "Thrice: Beggars". PopMatters. Retrieved 24 April 2020. From humble musings on human nature, Thrice licks into the next track "Doublespeak", an obvious homage to Orwellian realities where insidious totalitarian hegemony controls consciousness.
  89. "The Cure: Beyond The Hits". The Quietus. June 12, 2019. Retrieved April 24, 2020. 'The Drowning Man' is a perfect example. Drawing lyrically from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, specifically the fraught mental state and accidental death of the character Fuschia and the reaction of her devastated brother Titus, Robert Smith's anguished vocal rises and fades into distances like air bubbles in murky water, his skittering guitar and the spare rhythm section work of Simon Gallup and Lol Tolhurst an audio portrait of utter desolation.
  90. Åkerlund, Pauliina (March 30, 2015). "Nightwish – Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Album Review)". Cryptic Rock: Your Entertainment Odyssey. Retrieved April 24, 2020. The beautiful and melancholic "Edema Ruh" was inspired by fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss' group of strolling musicians and actors from his books Kingkiller Chronicle, called the Edema Ruh.
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  94. House, Silas (September 1, 2005). "Nickel Creek – It's about the music". No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music. Retrieved April 25, 2020. ...And they're performing songs that sound more like poetry than money, especially the one about Joyce's heartrending character. "Eveline" is one of fourteen tracks on their new album, Why Should The Fire Die?
  95. Flory, Tyler (April 23, 2013). "Radiohead's "Exit Music (For a Film)" as a Romeo and Juliet teaching tool". City Pages. Retrieved April 25, 2020.
  96. Smith, Eric (March 18, 2013). "Gatsby's American Dream: The Most Literary Band You've Never Heard Of". Book Riot. Retrieved April 25, 2020. The song fifth song on Volcano, Fable, is one of the catchiest on the record, and retells the story of Lord of the Flies. "We came here on a plane, Just a bunch of little boys. Dance around the fire, then we strike him down. We'll burn the island down. Kill the pig pig, kill the pig pig…"
  97. 1 2 3 Max, D.T. (April 10, 2011). "Kate Bush's Rewrite: Reason to ReJoyce?". The New Yorker. Retrieved April 15, 2020. Kate Bush... ...has gotten permission to quote some part of Molly's famous soliloquy in the reissue of a song first released in 1989 as "The Sensual World" and now appropriately renamed "Flower of the Mountain." "Flower of the Mountain" is a phrase in the soliloquy, the most famous part of which goes: "And first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
  98. 1 2 3 4 ""A Man of Genius Makes No Mistakes": A Joycean Playlist Just in Time for Bloomsday 2015". Flood Magazine. June 16, 2015. Retrieved June 23, 2020. Kate Bush's musical homage to James Joyce and Ulysses's Molly Bloom was a twenty-two-year journey in the making. Originally planned as a musical interpretation of Bloom's last speech in the novel, Bush had to alter the lyrics after Joyce's estate wouldn't allow her to use his words. That track became 1989's "The Sensual World," but in 2011 (after the Joyce estate finally realized how amazing the singer-songwriter is) she was granted a license and rereleased the track in its true form as "Flower of the Mountain." It is more than worth the wait... ...True to its name, the entirety of "Rejoyce" is Jefferson Airplane's psychedelic four-minute retelling of the story of Ulysses. Grace Slick sets scenes from the novel against one of the world's grooviest bass lines.
  99. 1 2 Dunston, Tyler (November 16, 2019). "Kate Bush Steps Out of the Pages of James Joyce and into The Sensual World". Consequence of Sound. Retrieved June 28, 2020. For the opening, title track of The Sensual World, Bush had originally planned to take an excerpt of Molly Bloom's final soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses — a continuous, un-punctuated mass of text — and put it to music. However, unable to get the rights from the Joyce estate, she wrote her own version of Molly Bloom's speech, incorporating elements of the original text while making something that was her own. (In 2011, the Joyce estate actually did grant Bush's request, and you can hear another version of the song, which quotes Ulysses verbatim, on the 2011 record Director's Cut.) The song unfolds from Bush's words. It is rhythmically punctuated by Bush singing, "Mmm, yes," evoking Molly Bloom's repetition of yes near the end of the book. Adorning these words, Davy Spillane plays the uilleann pipes, a traditional Irish instrument, the melody adapted from a Macedonian dance. By recontextualizing language in song, Bush gives form to a piece of text by Joyce that is, by its nature, formless (insofar as it lacks punctuation). Bush characterizes this form in terms of moving from text to the real world: "Stepping out of the page into the sensual world."
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  130. Bradshaw, Calum (20 July 2018). "Killing an Arab: The Cure try to reclaim their most controversial single". New Statesman. Retrieved April 15, 2020. The song draws its inspiration from the central action of Albert Camus's novel L'Étranger (The Stranger), which follows a protagonist who murders an Algerian man on a beach after a love dispute involving the victim's sister.
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  156. Fox-Bevilacqua, Marisa (January 14, 2015). "An Unlikely Tribute: How Cult U.K. Band Joy Division Found Inspiration in Auschwitz". Haaretz . Retrieved May 24, 2020. ...Joy Division's greatest enigma may have been its name — a reference to the brothel at Auschwitz as depicted in the book "House of Dolls" by Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (Yehiel De-Nur)... ...it was Curtis' sense of compassion that enabled him to come up with the relentless lyrics of "No Love Lost," about a sex slave's forced sterilization or abortion: "In the hand of one of the assistants, she saw the same instrument which they had that morning inserted deep into her body, She shuddered instinctively. No life at all in the house of dolls. No love lost. No love lost." The song also contains a spoken-word part entirely lifted from "House of Dolls." In "So This Is Permanence," Curtis' handwritten notes for the song begin with the heading "House of Dolls."
  157. Draper, Jason (February 18, 2020). "How 'November Rain' Became One Of Rock's Greatest Ballads". Rolling Stone. Retrieved May 25, 2020.
  158. Dombal, Ryan (April 15, 2016). "Revisiting the Magnificent Excess of Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion Video Trilogy". Pitchfork. Retrieved May 25, 2020.
  159. Brouwers, Josho (6 May 2017). "Symphony X's Odyssey". Ancient World Magazine. Retrieved May 25, 2020.
  160. Hogan, Marc (December 20, 2011). "Lana Del Rey Plays a 'Hood Lolita in 'Off to the Races'". Spin. Retrieved May 26, 2020. "Lolita gets lost in the 'hood."... ...this self-description she gave to a Guardian reporter remains a pretty good way of approaching her music as Lana Del Rey. Especially if you keep in mind that, as critic Nitsuh Abebe pointed out in a Pitchfork column, Del Rey appears to be talking about the actual literary Lolita, from Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel, rather than the term's much broader common usage. "Off to the Races," the latest track to emerge from Del Rey's upcoming full-length debut, interprets the 'hood-Lolita angle fairly literally, with results that are intriguing if unlikely to end many arguments... ...the studio version of a song Del Rey has been performing live cleverly combines tropes straight out of Nabokov with those straight outta gangsta rap, though its reach may outstretch its grasp. "Light of your life, fire of your loins," Del Rey purrs, just like Lolita's Humbert Humbert, mixing the old-school Hollywood glamor of her vocal with mixtape-ready nods to cocaine and Riker's Island…
  161. Watson, Elijah (October 23, 2017). "I listened to all of Insane Clown Posse's albums, and now I understand". Daily Dot. Retrieved May 26, 2020.
  162. Duncan, Lesley (23 March 2016). "Poem of the Day: Oor Hamlet by Adam McNaughtan". The Herald. Retrieved May 26, 2020.
  163. Crain, Caemeron. "Thanks for All the Fish: A Perfect Ten from A Perfect Circle" . Retrieved August 27, 2022. The lead singer, Keenan, talks about, in his song, that, like in the play, he feels he must separate himself from his mother to 'keep me from killing you', similar to the plotline of the play.
  164. Caffrey, Dan (November 21, 2008). "Instant Indie Classic: Lagwagon – Let's Talk About Feelings". Consequence of Sound. Retrieved May 26, 2020. The album's standout track is "Owen Meaney", the closer that describes the fall of John Irving's title character from A Prayer For Owen Meaney... ...Like the novel, the song is told from the viewpoint of protagonist John Wheelwright as the death of his pint-sized friend causes him to question his faith.
  165. Armstrong, Sam (November 23, 2015). "Acquiring The Taste Of Prog Icons Gentle Giant". udiscovermusic. Retrieved May 27, 2020. Indeed, the only thing blatant about Acquiring The Taste was the group's refusal to compromise... ...choosing to open the record with 'Pantagruel's Nativity', a seven-minute excursion built around primitive Moog and Gregorian chants, and taking for its inspiration series of 16th-century French novels written by François Rabelais, was hardly a moderate start. (In fact, the song seems to have been so perplexing to some that it's mis-spelt as 'Pentagruel's Nativity' on the original A-aide label.)
  166. Power, Martin (April 5, 2018). Nailed to History: The Story of Manic Street Preachers. Omnibus Press. p. 149. ISBN   978-0-85712-776-1 . Retrieved June 5, 2020.
  167. Smith, Rod (October 9, 2006). "Infinite Variety". Seattle Weekly. Retrieved June 5, 2020. At first, album-opening rocker and undeclared diptych "Pattern Recognition" reads like more of the same new thing. Sneaky guitars wriggle around bassist-turned-guitarist/singer Kim Gordon's anxious vocal like electric snakes as she coos and yelps through a skeletal synopsis of William Gibson's latest novel.
  168. Horning, Nicole (December 15, 2018). Metal Music: A History for Headbangers. Greenhaven Publishing. p. 35. ISBN   978-1-5345-6527-2 . Retrieved June 6, 2020.
  169. Davis, Allison P. (March 8, 2016). "Teens Have So Much to Learn From This One-Hit Wonder". The Cut . The New Yorker. Retrieved June 6, 2020. "Popular," a '96 sprechgesang/alt-rock hit, stands out because the video, by Girls director Jesse Peretz, is particularly good. The plot: A high-school cheerleader two-times some quarterbacks at the advice of her nerdy, manic teacher, who appears to teach only one subject, Inappropriate Advice for Teenage Girls 101. The teacher is played by Nada Surf's lead singer, Matthew Caws, who recites actual text from Penny's Guide to Teen-Age Charm and Popularity, a 1964 teen advice book by Gloria Winters.
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  173. Donaldson, Scott (2007). Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life. Columbia University Press. p. 137. ISBN   978-0-231-13842-0 . Retrieved June 23, 2020.
  174. Smith, Rosa Inocencio (September 17, 2016). "Track of the Day: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Iron Maiden". The Atlantic. Retrieved June 23, 2020. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 626-line tale of a cursed sailor's sin and redemption is a lot to take in... ...Luckily, bass player Steve Harris's lyrics provide a pretty straightforward summary, and the music—shifting from shouted lyrics and frantic guitars as Death descends on the mariner's ship, to a spooky, atmospheric section that recalls a glassy sea—helps to dramatize the mariner's story.
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  176. Burdge, Anthony; Burke, Jessica (2007). Drout, Michael D. C. (ed.). J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. Taylor & Francis. p. 540. ISBN   978-0-415-96942-0 . Retrieved June 23, 2020.
  177. "Greatest Hits: The 23 best PJ Harvey songs". Treble. October 10, 2019. Retrieved June 23, 2020. 'The River,' in contrast to '50 Ft. Queenie,' is a song that's best shared a little once newcomers dive a little deeper into Harvey's catalog. It's not an outlier per se, but it feels like a genuine haunting in a way that few of her other songs do. That's in part because it's based on a story by Flannery O'Connor, famed for her own uniquely macabre storytelling, and part of it is due to the very sound of the song.
  178. Butler, Andrew M. (October 16, 2012). Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s. Liverpool University Press. p. 36. ISBN   978-1-78138-922-5 . Retrieved June 24, 2020.
  179. Buhler, Stephen M. (2007). "Musical Shakespeares: attending to Ophelia, Juliet, and Desdemona". In Shaughnessy, Robert (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture. Cambridge University Press. p. 157. ISBN   9780521844291 . Retrieved October 25, 2023. The song deftly combines materials from Shakespeare's play, Zeffirelli's film, West Side Story , and youth-oriented pop. When Knopfler's 'lovestruck Romeo sings a streetsuss serenade,' he interrupts Juliet's own rendition of the Angels' 1963 hit 'My Boyfriend's Back' - and apparently Romeo is no longer the boyfriend. Despite their present estrangement, Romeo persists. Though he claims to 'forget the movie song,' Romeo echoes words prompted by the Zeffirelli version of the play and by the musical: he insists 'it was just that the time was wrong,' suggesting that for this pair there will not be another 'Time for Us'; he also asks Juliet to remember another song, one that announces 'There's a place for us.' Knopfler adds further complexity to the lyrics by having Romeo repeat this Juliet's words back to her: 'I love you like the stars above, I'll love you till I die.'
  180. Harrington, Richard (April 20, 2001). "Knopfler's Soundtracks and Stories". Washington Post. Retrieved June 24, 2020. But on the title track of his recent album, "Sailing to Philadelphia," Knopfler's done a dramatic turnaround, in essence condensing Thomas Pynchon's 773-page novel, "Mason & Dixon," into a pop song in which Knopfler plays astronomer Jeremiah Mason to James Taylor's surveyor, Charles Dixon… …"It's a massive book [reduced to] four verses of a song, a two-minute take on a two-ton book," says Knopfler, who first read Pynchon's 1997 novel on one of his many transatlantic flights between London and Nashville. Knopfler's song -- which actually clocks in at 5 1/2 minutes -- addresses the more personal elements of the Mason-Dixon line while underscoring one of Knopfler's ongoing obsessions. " 'Mason & Dixon' is about America, which is one of the most fantastic stories of the last millennium and one that continues," he says. "When Mason and Dixon were in America, it was a turning point because there was the beginning of the rumbles of independence, a very exciting and interesting time. . . . America was a colony of England at the time and then it turned around and colonized the world with its music and films and a great many other things…
  181. Sperounes, Sandra (March 12, 2010). ""He's got more of a twisted mind ..."". Edmonton Journal. Retrieved June 28, 2020. For Billy Talent, Maxxis shot Saint Veronika, a dark, twisted clip starring a family of sock puppets. The song, and the video, are based on Paulo Coelho's novel, Veronika Decides To Die, about a 24-year-old woman who tries to kill herself. Maxxis admits he was slightly stymied by the concept — until he buried his face in a pillow in a fit of frustration. "You know when you close your eyes and start seeing colours and things?" he says. "I just started visualizing immediately this sock family in this old farmhouse and a sock girl running away from it."
  182. Rincón, Alessandra (August 7, 2018). "Regina Spektor Gives Chilling Performance Of 'Samson' On 'Late Show'". Billboard. Retrieved June 28, 2020.
  183. Calhoun, Scott (February 8, 2018). U2 and the Religious Impulse: Take Me Higher. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 136. ISBN   978-1-350-03255-2 . Retrieved July 3, 2020.
  184. Homan, Sidney (May 15, 2019). How and Why We Teach Shakespeare: College Teachers and Directors Share How They Explore the Playwright's Works with Their Students. Routledge. p. 113. ISBN   978-1-000-01165-4 . Retrieved July 4, 2020.
  185. Adamian, John (February 9, 2018). "Al Stewart brings his 'Year of the Cat' tour to High Point". Yes! Weekly. Retrieved July 4, 2020.
  186. Fitchett, Alistair. "The Field Mice \ Biography". LTM Recordings. Retrieved March 1, 2001. So Said Kay was written about the movie Desert Hearts, and by association therefore also Jane Rule's 'classic lesbian novel Desert of the Heart on which the movie was based; which essentially means that So Said Kay was a song of a film of a book, which is quite some going when you think about it. You don't need to know either film or book to appreciate the song, but the understanding of the source material certainly lends the song a particularly eloquent quality, makes it work so beautifully as their ultimate sexual political commentary.
  187. Craig, Alison (27 June 2020). "We've ranked every Strokes song from worst to best". The Forty-Five. Retrieved July 4, 2020. In Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World', Soma is the name of the imaginary, so-called "ideal pleasure drug" with "all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects". Putting his throaty howl to full use on their debut album paean to the substance, Julian might sound like he's supplemented it with some extras for good measure, but the track's deceptively chipper beginnings are fitting for a drug that makes all your worries go away.
  188. "Alarm". Trouser Press. Retrieved July 19, 2020.
  189. Wiederhorn, John (May 16, 2020). "37 Years Ago: Iron Maiden Release 'Piece of Mind'". Loudwire. Retrieved July 19, 2020.
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  191. Harnell, Steve. "Album by Album: Talk Talk". Classic Pop. Retrieved July 19, 2020. ...the downbeat Such A Shame sees Hollis turn to one of his favourite books for inspiration, The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. The subversive and controversial novel told the story of a psychiatrist who decides the course of his life on the roll of a dice. Hollis was intrigued by the chaos that methodology would bring to one's existence.
  192. "Matt Costa". Cleveland Scene. July 30, 2008. Retrieved July 13, 2020. Indeed, Steinbeck was as big an influence on Costa's nascent songwriting as any band - among his earliest tunes were "Sweet Thursday," named after the author's 1954 sequel to Cannery Row, and "The Ballad of Miss Kate," titled after one of the main characters in East of Eden (both songs appeared on Costa's 2005 EP, Elasmosaurus).
  193. Power, Ed (February 9, 2015). "The Decemberists are earning their stripes". Irish Examiner. Retrieved July 27, 2020.
  194. Deriso, Nick (September 24, 2015). "King Crimson moved far afield on Discipline, but didn't forget its roots". Something Else Reviews. Retrieved July 27, 2020.
  195. "King Of Pain, 12''". sting.com. Retrieved July 27, 2020. Paul Bowles has written very many books but he wrote a book called 'The Sheltering Sky' which became a film by Bertolucci, a few years ago. I read it long before it was a film. It's one of tho most beautiful, sustained, poetic novels I've ever read... ...There was a story within that story - that was a sort of Arab legend that was told in the story of three sister who invite a prince to a tea party out in the desert to have tea, tea in the Sahara. They have tea, and it's wonderful, and he promises to come back and he never does. They just wait and wait and wait until it's too late. I just loved this story and wrote a song called 'Tea In The Sahara'.
  196. Goodman, Frank (June 2008). "A Conversation with Steve Tannen of The Weepies" (PDF). Pure Music. Retrieved August 15, 2020.
  197. Rodgers, Jeffrey Pepper (June 22, 2007). "Telling the Truth As it Suits Her". Brown Alumni Magazine. Brown University. Retrieved August 16, 2020.
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  203. Semon, Craig (October 1, 2009). "UK's Muse puts up a spirited 'Resistance'". Telegram . Retrieved April 15, 2020. The album's most Orwellian moments come with the audacious arena rock anthem "United States of Eurasia (+Collateral Damage)." For this "Bohemian Rhapsody" for the new millennium (and potential national anthem for any new militant world power), Bellamy is at his army boot-stomping best, pledging his undying allegiance to the new authoritarian superpower, before shifting to Chopin's "Nocturne No. 2 in E Flat," which seals the deal.
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  207. Saunders, Luke. "LSD and 24-hour jazz: the story of Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit'". Happy Mag. Retrieved May 9, 2020. Unsurprisingly, Slick took open inspiration from Lewis Carroll's dreamscape masterpiece Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. The fluid surrealism and perceptive alterations imbued Carroll's work with a notoriety for being acid-laced. With character reference's to a spacey Alice, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the White Knight, Red Queen, the Dormouse, and of course the White Rabbit, the influence is clear.
  208. Luerssen, John D. (2015). The Smiths FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Most Important British Band of the 1980s. Backbeat Books. p. 201. ISBN   978-1-4803-9449-0 . Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  209. Rogan, Johnny (June 26, 2012). Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance. Omnibus Press. p. 440. ISBN   978-0-85712-128-8 . Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  210. Webber, Brad (June 16, 1994). "Toad the Wet Sprocket Dulcinea (Columbia)". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved March 2, 2021. Cervantes gets a predictable nod with "Windmills." Toad the Wet Sprocket sings of the futility weighing heavily upon their listeners, so they might just have something in pegging Don Quixote as the original Generation X-er.
  211. Feizlmayr, Fiona (2016). "Adapting George Orwell's Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to songs: a literary analysis of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four based' lyrics in songs of David Bowie and Muse" (PDF). University of Graz.
  212. Rusciano, Aly (September 2, 2021). "When Taylor Swift Fell Down Lewis Carroll's Rabbit Hole". PopMatters. Retrieved May 3, 2023. Taylor Swift's songs "Wonderland" and "long story short" reference Carroll's story and popularized idiom to metaphorically define the curious, maddening feelings of love.
  213. Greene, Andy (March 4, 2015). "Readers' Poll: The 10 Best Rush Songs". Rolling Stone. Retrieved April 15, 2020.
  214. Rule, Doug (September 11, 2002). "Getting "Naked" with Amber". Metro Weekly. Retrieved April 15, 2020. The first hit from Naked, "Yes," was inspired by and quotes from James Joyce's Ulysses as Amber rapturously talks of being alone with a man touching her breasts — not surprisingly, a stumbling block to getting radio play.