Dec 182007
Let’s see if yesterday’s hot posts have dulled your usually razor-sharp minds. Not just tossed-off allusions to literary works or authors (eg, Van Morrison’s frequent shout-outs to his favorite authors), but songs actually written around the main ideas of said works. And yes, songs with lyrics taken directly from a poem, such as Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair”, do count!
Simon and Garfunkel’s “Richard Cory”
Also, Jarvis Cocker’s “Big Julie” is based on Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding.
Jefferson Airplane, Re-Joyce
I think an obvious winner here would be Divine Comedy’s 1993 album ‘Liberation’, which contains not one, but three of these literarily-pretentious tracks:
‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ is based on a F. Scott Fitzgerald story.
‘Lucy’ is three Wordsworth poems set to music.
‘Three Sisters’ is based on the Anton Chekhov play.
For whatever reason, The Police’s “Friends” comes to mind here. It’s an Andy Summers-penned and sung ditty based upon the book Stranger in a Strange Land, which extols the virtues of cannibalism.
XTC’s “Scissor Man” comes from one of the stories in Der Struwwelpeter – the tailor who uses scissors to cut off the thumbs of thumb-sucking children. Snip.
“The Ghost of Tom Joad”
“Grow Old With Me” – Lennon/Browning
By my criteria does Eno and Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts or The Police’s Ghosts in the Machine albums count, or are the artists just lifting names of books? I actually read the former but can’t recall if the album is in any way indebted to it.
Neal, Jack and Me, as well as a lot of other songs on Beat by King Crimson are heavily inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.
When it comes to shout outs, Andrew Bird and Of Montreal come to mind.
Don’t anyone deny that I Bring The Rock on a regular basis. But I am gonna go with Ambrosia’s Nice, Nice Very Nice from their first album, which I still have and still listen to when I need to turn Th e Rock down a bit (every eighteen monts or so). It actually gives author credits to Kurt Vonnegut. I think the song is inspired by Cat’s Cradle if I remember correctly.
I think Mama Frog uses a narration from Alice in Wonderland. The Jabberwock part.
So that’s two songs on a classic rock album from 1975, which puts me squarely in eighth grade. It’s apparent that I have never been cool.
I thought we were just talking about songs, not albums. Don’t know about the Police album, but obviously My Life… can’t be a literal interpretation of the book, since the “vocals” are all found sounds.
Moby Dick by Led Zep with no lyrical apologies to Melville.
White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane is pretty much ripping off Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, right?
sting: “nothing like the sun”. yuck. or wait, album titles don’t count, right? ah well…
I think since the Jeff Airplane’s reference to “Alice” and other characters in “wonderland” and “looking” glass is so frikkin’ obvious, it’s a shame to call it a “rip off”. It’s not like they were trying to fool anybody into thinking they’d invented those characters.
I personally have written dozens of songs using poems as lyrics, but none of you have heard any of them.
Richard Buckner did a whole album (The Hill) using poems from the Spoon River Anthology as lyrics. It’s probably better than you’d think. I’m a big fan of Buckner’s, and it’s better than I thought it would be.
Blur’s “Strange News From Another Star” is named after and built thematically around the Hesse short story.
Sympathy for the Devil was ‘inspired by’ Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita.
I had no idea about “Sympathy…” I LOVE that book!
Good stuff, so far. I bet you can go all night!
Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights is based on a book, but I can’t recall the name of it.
Randy Newman’s Faust. Also Newman’s song The Great Nations of Europe was inspired by the book (history, not exactly literature, I guess, but still a book) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
How about near misses, such as David Bowie’s original intention to base the ‘Diamond Dogs’ album around ‘1984’ until he was refused the rights by George Orwell’s estate?
Or the refusal of James Joyce’s estate to grant the rights forcing Kate Bush to rewrite ‘The Sensual World’, the original lyric of which was Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy from ‘Ulysses’?
Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ “Rattlesnakes” is copped directly off Joan Didion’s PLAY IT AS IT LAYS.
Van Morrison recorded a version of the Yeats poem Crazy Jane on God. The Yeats estate originally denied permission to use the poem, but the song eventually came out on the collection of unreleased tracks called The Philosopher’s Stone.
Townspeople, you are on fire! I can see who held out during the other day’s festivities. I had no idea about “The Sensual World”, but it makes a lot of sense. I’d forgotten about the Bowie tie-in to 1984 as well.
“Turn! Turn! Turn!” came from some best-seller, I think.
Of course I first thought of Sister Janet Mead’s “The Lord’s Prayer”, but funny you should ask, probably my favorite record of the year is the San Francisco band Ray’s Vast Basement’s third release, STARVATION UNDER ORANGE TREES. Songwriter Jon Bernson composed and performed a score for a stage version of Steinbeck OF MICE AND MEN which morphed into this CD, which is more inspired by the landscape of the story more than the story itself. It’s a pretty masterful record, filled with beautiful little touches and memorable heartfelt tunes. It’s as good as I always wanted those M. Ward and Calexico records to be.