Literature in Music

This place being primarily about lit I thought it might be good to work the subject in. There's quite alot of literary reference in popular music.

Kate Bush- Wuthering Heights

Rush- Xanadu (poetry counts)

Byrds- Pete Seeger's Turn, Turn, Turn (sure, the bible counts)

Al Stewart- The Sirens of Titan

Steppenwolf named their band after the Herman Hesse novel. Not sure that's acceptable.

The Beatles put dialogue from (I think) Richard III at the end of I Am the Walrus.

Michael Penn- No Myth

Elvis Costello- Every Day I Write the Book (OK, I'm pushing it.)

Rush, I forget (brain fart) which song ends with Absalom! Absalom! A two-fer evoking William Faulkner and the Bible.
Oh, and Tom Sawyer.

David Bowie, 1984

Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost of Tom Joad.

The Police, Don't Stand So Close to Me.

Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit

Dar Williams, When I Was A Boy

I have a vague memory of some song mentioning Tropic of Cancer. And one about Capt. Nemo. Or is it... Oh!

They Might Be Giants- Birdhouse in Your Soul (something about screaming Argonauts)

Bob Dylan- Desolation Row, Ballad of A Thin Man (and plenty of others)

What else?

Nice list that you have compiled. The Shakespeare excerpt from I am the Walrus was from King Lear.

Elvis Costello - The Julliet Letters
XTC - Jason and the Argonauts

Dire Straits--Romeo and Juliet (okay there are probably a lot of Romeo and Juliet references)

T Rex--Spaceball Ricochet (not a specific book)

The Cure - Killing an Arab

Leonard Cohen's "Alexandra Leaving" is a reworking of C. P. Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony". Beautifully done.

The Decemberists - Myla Goldberg

Old 97s - Rollerskate Skinny (from Catcher in the Rye)

I had a whole list of these, too. I'll have to look for it.

The doors are certainly missing. Just from their first album.

Break on through references William Blake, Alduos Huxley, Andre Gide.

Soul Kitchen was Morrison's Kerouac song.

Alabama song--Bertholt Brecht.

End of the night--Louis Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the end of the night.

And of course there was the End--a retelling of Sophocles Oedipus tale.

I'm probably missing something or two.

Anyway I'd like to also mention the Velvet Underground who were definitely inspired by literature.

Led Zeppelin references The Lord of The Rings in The Battle of Evermore, and Ramble On.

Edited to add:

Oh, and how could I forget- Jefferson Airplane has White Rabbit.

Keep going. I knew I was missing some obvious ones.
I'll see what it looks like when I'm back in the new year.

The Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs
Son House: John the Revelator

Has anyone mentioned Sting's poppy cliff's notes to the heavy books?

Didn't Sting once do a hatchet job on Brecht? I can't remember if it was a film or what - I just remember him as a narrator figure, standing on a boat or something. "Song of the Inadequacy of Man's Higher Nature."

Speaking of which, I have an EP of Bowie doing "Baal". I actually sort of liked it.

Dylan claims to have once done an album based on Chekov's short stories. I have no idea what the hell he was referring to.

Modest Mouse has a song called "Bukowski."

Paul Kantner, of Jefferson Airplane, in Crown of Creation paraphrases John Wyndham's line from "The Chrysalids":
“But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature."
as:
"Life is change; how it differs from the rocks."

Frankly, one can ferret out bits and pieces of various post-apocalyptic dystopian literature in a lot of Kanter's lyrics, but he never seemed to want to do a "re-imaging" (ala Grace Slick's previously noted White Rabbit) of various literary sources as much as give his (drug-fueled) themes some sort of "academically admirable" base.

I'm sure hundreds of term papers were cranked out in the 70's analyzing the various snippets woven through his Blows Against The Empire project!

 

Don't know if this counts...

Joe Strummer wrote "The Right Profile" on London Calling after reading a biography of Montgomery Clift (I think it's this one).

He was also very into Lorca and may have included some references in "Spanish Bombs."

Good background on Strummer.

#16 -- I helped a friend write a paper on "Lucy in the Sky..." which, although I thought it was brilliant, only got him a D... the teacher must've been a country music fan...

Don't forget Rush's 2112 which was based on Anthem by Ayn Rand.

Phil Ochs set to music:

The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe, and

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

Didn't Lou Reed do "The Bells" also, along with "The Raven" more recently?

There's a U2 song that quotes Reed's mentor Delmore Schwartz: "in dreams begin responsibilities".

Really? I didn't know Schwartz had any Reed association.

Re: Reed's song "My House"

This is something I found on the web:

This song is from the album The Blue Mask, one of Lou Reed's bona fide masterpieces. Sparse and unflinching, the album takes on such harrowing themes as self-abuse, mental decay, powerlessness, and heroin addiction; and yet still manages to find some tranquil moments of beauty amidst the chaos. "My House" is the first track, and is written as a heartfelt hommage to the poet Delmore Schwartz, a man whom Lou considered something of a mentor. The Joyce reference in in a comparison to Stephen and Bloom.

Lou Reed himslef had this to say about the song: "Delmore Schwartz was my teacher and friend. He was the smartest, funniest, saddest person I'd ever met. He had a large scar on his foregead he said he got dueling with Nietzsche. I was Dedalus to his Bloom. On a good day Delmore was buried next to his mother, something he would have hated almost as much as he hated his brother for having a vasectomy. Unless he was lying. Or writing out loud."

I believe the Reed/Schwartz connection is referenced in the liner notes to the "Between Thought and Expression" anthology and/or Delmore Schwartz's biography that I haven't gotten around to cataloging yet.

Further info should be easy to find...

Reed went to Syracuse Uni where he was taught by Schwartz, later to become friends. He recently announced a Reed-Schwartz scholarship as well.

Reed did do "The Raven", an album (single - songs only; double - spoken word also) that combines material based on Poe's work (Reed refers to him as a kindred spirit) and reworkings of earlier Reed songs. In many ways it is the culmination of his move from rock'n'roll rebel to pretentious twat. Although his new Tai Chi album could top it.

Cream - Tales of Brave Ulysses

There's also the gray area of folk story, for example the use of traditional ballads by Nick Cave (Murder Ballads), Tom Waits, and so many others. I heard a lecture on balladry in the 18th century that emphasized the fluidity between folk, popular, literary, and antiquarian traditions of the stories and songs.

#s 24 & 25. Thanks.

"In many ways it is the culmination of his move from rock'n'roll rebel to pretentious twat."

Hilarious! My sentiments exactly!

I also think the marriage to Laurie Anderson had an impact as well.

Sufjan Stevens - "Saul Bellow"

Not that this is likely to help anybody (as their album is very hard to find), but there IS a rather obscure band called "rops 56" whose CD The Other Upriver is chock-full of literary references ... from Antonin Artaud, Rimbaud, and Nietzche to William S. Burroughs and Robert Graves.

I only know about this album because they're old friends from the 80's Chicago punk scene (they used to be called "Stations" and were initially something of a Gang of Four cover band). Currently living in Portland (OR), they're mainly restaurateurs these days, but claim on their web site that "we still write and record music when we have time", although I've not heard a peep from them (musically) since this disc in about 2000.

 

Of course Tom Waits has the stamp of the beats all over him..."Jack and Neal/California Here We Come" is the obvious one I suppose...

Or "Spanish Bombs" by the Clash,despite my not knowing what the spanish lines translate to in english...

The Smiths, Cemetry Gates ('Keats and Yeats are on your side, while Wilde is on mine')

Half Man, Half Biscuit's songs abound in literary references, many of them to the works of Thomas Hardy, but there are more up to date references:
'I drank too much black coffee, read too much Bill Burroughs' and
'Cause when you're in Matlock Bath, you don't need Sylvia Plath'

Re the Lou Reed/Delmore Schwartz connection, there's a song on the first Velvet Underground LP entitled 'European Son (for Delmore Schwartz)'

Simon & Garfunkel tend to reference literature - the one popping out at me right now is in A Simple Desultory Philippic, which references Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, and then goes on to one of my favorite verses...

I know a man whose brain's so small
He couldn't think of nothing at all
Not the same as you and me,
He doesn't dig poetry...
He's so unhip, that when you say, 'Dylan'
He thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas... whoever he was.
The man ain't got no culture!

edited to fix song title :|

There's another S&G song (The Dangling Conversation) with the lines:
'And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we've lost'

Tuxedomoon's L'Etranger supplies another Camus reference.

And then of course, Jim Morrison of The Doors was a great literature fan - he paraphrased Freud when he sung about killing his Dad and taking over marital duties with his Mom. Also, in this vein, The Anti-Nowhere League must have read Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis before they came up with "So What".

Elvis Costello wrote a musical about Hans Christian Anderson a few years back. I'm not sure if any of it has been recorded on any of his albums, but he played some of the songs when I saw him live a few years ago.

Oh, and the Bare Naked Ladies make references to the comic book character Aquaman in one of their songs but for the life of me I cannot remember which one it was.

Ben Folds Five - Kate - They mention the Bhagavad Gita in this song.

>38 inkdrinker: - would anyone know if the songs were on a recent Costello album? I think most people buy them, listen once, go "mmmmm", and then file them away. The problem with Costello is that ever since he decided he wanted to be Stephen Sondheim he has been out of the depth - the songs are ok but he can't sing them; his voice just isn't good enough.

>37 Randy_Hierodule: - I think that sums up my problem with Jim Morrison: the "I'm a serious poet" stance. We know that if he lived, he'd be rivalling Lou Red for pretentiousness - doing spoken-word albums about his journeys on the astral plane, and so forth.

Actually the Elvis Costello concert was the best concert I've ever been to. It was just him and a guitar... that's it. And he was GREAT! (However, I would say that I haven't been too excited by his albums in recent years... which makes me very very sad.)

What I remember reading about Morrison is that there was a lot of concern towards the end of his life that his voice was going to be ruined by his chronic alcoholism. Morrison's was not the ragged kind of a voice of a Tom Waits or a Shane McGowan. I don't know if Morrison took himself all that seriously and somehow I don't see Morrison being a born again either. Too iconoclastic. He was always heading for the disaster that eventually hit him head on.

Re: Morrison
Probably would have joined the Navy - always liked to follow in Dad's footsteps. Submarine Corps, no doubt.

That would have spared us the poetry, most likely.

Yeah, unless you were one of the poor buggers cooped up in a confined space with him.

Just listening to Syd Barrett singing Golden Hair by James Joyce

Right. I can only imagine he'd tell whether he was asked or not - the dead-Indian-lodger/muse factor.

Alan Parsons did an lp about Edgar Allen Poe. Rick Wakeman did Journey to the Center of the Earth and an lp about King Arthur.

Lou Reed did an album on the Raven.

Costello also did that "Juliet Letters" album with the Brodsky Quartet, based on a Verona Professor answering peoples letters to the characters in the infamous Shakespearean epic.

Meaulnes by Palace Music or Palace Brothers or just Palace (hard to keep track)

The song These Words by Natasha Bedingfield mentions Byron, Shelly, and Keats.

The Alan Parsons Project The Cask of Amontillado.

The Golden Palominos did This is How It Feels, a reworking of one of my favorite novels, End of the Affair by Graham Greene.

The Smiths make a joke reference to the play Equus in the song "Is it really so strange?"

The Fall/Mark Smith have a song called "Dr. Buck's Letter" which is supposed to be a tribute to Charles Bukowski, though most of the song seems to Mark Smith ranting about a DJ. The Fall is named after Albert Camus' The Fall.

In the song "Clash City Rockers", Joe Strummer references the nursery rhyme "London Bells" which was a motif in "1984". Joe Strummer's previous band The 101ers is an allusion to the torture chamber in 1984.

Shane McGowan's entire career is a "tribute" to Brendan Behan.

THe Beatles song "Golden Slumbers" borrows quite a bit from Thomas Dekker's poem/lullaby of the same name.

Both Nurse With Wound and Current 93 have referenced Maldoror.

The Cocktails's song "Waiting for Godot" is a passage from the play set to 60's garage punk.

Frank Zappa in the liner notes of the Mothers of Invention album "We're Only in it for the Money", directs listens to read In the Penal Colony before listening to the track "Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny".

Three more that just came to me while I was washing the dishes:

The Pogues song "Lorca's Novena" from the album Hell's Ditch references Federico García Lorca's poem, Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias.

Cat Steven's hit "Morning has broken" is a direct lift of the hymn "A Morning Song (For the First Day of Spring)" from the poem of the same name by Eleanor Farjeon.

And the band names Steely Dan and Soft Machine both reference William S. Burroughs stories.

Re:Message 54: Current 93's David Tibet also runs The Durtro Press which has republished the works of 19th century flake and decadent, Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock. In fact, one of Stenbock's short stories is included in the booklet accompanying one of the band's cds (though I cannot recall which).

The band Coil, associated with the C93 touchstone, was a sort of dance-house occult act. Many of their songs contain literary references: Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder: "Ostia (The Death Of Pasolini)" - which also contains a line from the Book of Judges (used by Goethe, too, in Novelle); William Blake ("Oh Rose, thou art sick"...) in "Love's Secret Domain" - and, of course, Aleister Crowley pops in fairly frequently (e.g.: "The Vision and the Voice").

Re #54: I've always read that the 101ers name referred to the address of the squat they all lived in when they formed the band. Where did you find that other reference? Just curious since I'm kind of a Strummer-phile.

57
That's the story I heard too. I think it was in a Clash documentary, or a Mick Jones interview on Fresh Air.

From the Wikipedia entry for Van Morrison's album "Common One" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_One

In contrast to many of his previous albums, Common One ventures more into the realms of free jazz than the usual Van Morrison R&B, with the sax playing of Pee Wee Ellis coming to the fore. The songs are also somewhat longer than on his previous albums. Morrison said that the original concept was even more esoteric and was heavily influenced by his reading of nature poets.

The opening track, "Haunts of Ancient Peace" was named from a (1908) book by Alfred Alexander, and features the twin brothers of Morrison's voice against the answering saxophone of Pee Wee Ellis, with the trumpet of Mark Isham.

"Summertime in England" was the longest track and proved to be a successful live performance for some time to come. Morrison said it "was actually a part of a poem I was writing and the poem and the song sorta merged." The lyrics include images of Wordsworth and Coleridge smokin' up in Kendal (Brian Hinton says they are "smokin' with poetry not spliffs.")It ends with the music being brought down to nothing and the words, "Can you feel the silence?"

Blonde Redhead did an Equus too.

Shakespeare's Sister by The Smiths!

Fun list, thank you. I'm going to make a mix of songs that reference books, poems, and writers.

p.s. Also Faust Arp off the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows

#59 -- love Van the Man... a lot of his songs reflect images from William Blake's poetry/art as well...

Several Iron Maiden songs, if you'll forgive me for mentioning a heavy metal band, albeit a surprisingly highbrow -- yes, highbrow, metal band (I'm not trying to be ironic), whose chief lyricist, Steve Harris, adores macabre lit & science fiction: "Murders In The Rue Morgue," "Phantom of the Opera," "The Prisoner" (based on the 60s TV show), "Flight of Icarus" (Greek mythology); "Where Eagles Dare"; "Revelations," (G.K. Chesterton); "The Number of the Beast" (Book of Revelation); "To Tame A Land" (Dune), "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; "Powerslave" (Egyptian mythology); "Caught Somewhere in Time" (H.G. Wells); "Brave New World"; "The Wicker Man," to name a few.

Love this thread! Wish I'd found it a lot sooner.

#1--the "Absalom Absalom" lyric is from the Rush song "Red Sector A" on the Grace Under Pressure album, which also features a song called "The Body Electric," obviously based on I Sing The Body Electric!.

I think the most literary of Rush albums, besides the already mentioned 2112, would be their masterwork, Moving Pictures. Besides the previously mentioned "Tom Sawyer," the very next song, "Red Barchetta," is based on the sci-fi short story A Nice Morning Drive by Richard S. Foster. Two songs later, "Limelight" references more Shakespeare ("All the worlds indeed a stage"). Flip to side 2 (I'm old school lp lover) and you're immediately met with the 10 minute epic, "The Camera Eye," which pays homage to the work of John Dos Passos. Finish the album off with "Witch Hunt," tying together the Salem Witch Trials with the threat of Big Brother.

Worst song ever to ref. LOR would have to be, unfortunately, another damn Rush song, "Rivendell," from their otherwise excellent Fly By Night album.

Led Zepplin has "As I Lay Dying", same as the Faulkner. Tolkien's Mordor is mentioned in "Ramble On", though the narrator in the that song "Met A Girl So Fair" in Mordor, which strikes me as not quite in the spirit of Tolkien's Mordor.

Shriekback's song Everything That Rises Must Converge borrow's stylistic elements from the O'Connor story, but the Shriekback song is more or less a boy and girl "let's have sex" song, while O'Connor's story is, uh, not about that. It's as far away from that as possible, really.

The phrase, "everything that rises must converge" comes from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

John Zorn's composition, Spillane, is a homage to Mickey Spillane and lifts texts from Spillane's novels.

Heiner Goebbel's composition, Shadow/Landscape with Argonauts is based on a selection of Edgar Allan Poe texts.

As is Radio Birdman's "Descent Into the Maelstrom".

There was a 60s "garage" band, The Yo Yo's, that had a song called "The Raven" - basically Poe's lyrics to fuzz guitar and farfisa.

Does Scaramouche in "Bohemian Rhapsody" count?

Well I think Scaramouche should count, especially since for the past 30 freaking years I've thought the lyric went "got a mouche, got a mouche".

One more Rush song: "Losing It" off the Signals lp, partially inspired by Hemingway's suicide. The lyric, assuming I'm hearing it right, goes: "The writer stares with glassy eyes/defies the empty page/his beard is white/his face is lined/and streaked with tears of rage./Thirty years ago how the words would flow/with passion and precision/but now his mind is dark and dulled/by sickness and indecision./And he stares out the kitchen door/where the sun will rise no more....

I've got another one: Marianne Faithfull's song "This Little Bird" is taken from Tennessee Williams's play Orpheus Descending. She often mentions it in interviews, so I thought for once I'd do it for her. Just a teeny-tiny song, but still sweet after all those years.

In her more recent songs there are a lot of literary references, but I cannot pinpoint them right now. Have to go back and re-listen to them. One thing I know for sure: She recorded Bertolt Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins and recited an excerpt from The Tempest by Shakespeare in one of her records.

First song that popped into my head was "Stuck Between Stations" by the Hold Steady.

"The Devil and John Berryman, they took a walk together
And they ended up on Washington, talking to the river.
He said, 'I surrounded myself with doctors and deep thinkers,
But big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers!'

"There was that night that we thought that John Berryman could fly,
But he didn't, so he died.
She said, 'You're pretty good with words, but words won't save your life,'
And they didn't, so he died.

"And he was drunk and exhausted, but he was critically acclaimed and respected.
He loved the Golden Gophers, but he hated all the drawn-out winters.
He likes the warm feeling, but he's tired of all the dehydration.
Most nights are kind of fuzzy, but that last night he had total retention.

"And these Twin City kisses, they sound like clicks and hisses.
They all come down and drown in the Mississippi River...
We drink and we dry up and now we crumble into dust.
We get wet and we corrode and now we're covered up in rust."

What of rock and roll music in literature? Don DeLillo used with each novel to explore some prominent aspect of American culture (or use as a synecdoche thereof). In Great Jones Street he had his rock 'n' roll novel (with its ridiculously named hero, Bucky Wunderlich).

Somewhere (Chick for a Day?), Alexander Theroux, seemingly interested in (if not elated with) everything, references the early 1980's UK art-punk band, Delta 5. This I find curious given that Theroux nears, if is not already in, his seventh decade. This is likely explained by the fact that he has kept in close contact with the student body. Theroux has also mentioned he is working on a study of rock 'n' roll lyrics

Stephen Fry (the famous IT consultant) references The Damned and a bit of the music-based subculture of the early 80s in the UK in his first novel, The Liar.

This is more than exciting! I wanted to make a clever gift for my friends in my book group for Christmas. I thought, "I know, I will burn some CDs of songs that reference literature." My homework is already done for me! This is so great that I have so many ideas to choose from. Thanks all!

Does it mean that we have collectively completed our first LT music compilation? Exciting, indeed! By the way, Marianne Faithfull reciting Shakespeare's The Tempest is on "The Secret Life".

>71 Sutpen: God damn, do I love the Hold Steady. But ... I always thought it was CHUCK BERRY who couldn't fly. I'm familiar with Berryman, too, it just never occurred to me!

>72 Randy_Hierodule: A guest blogger (IIRC) on Bookslut once posted a query for people to submit the great rock & roll novels: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_09_006577.php. Impressive list there.

In a recent read of Ulysses I caught these: Sonic Youth borrowed "i am the boy who can enjoy invisiblity" for Secret Girl. Foetus borrowed the "snotgreen sea" and "the scrotum tightening sea" for Water Torture. Nick Cave's Saint Huck is born in the everchanging neverchanging murky water of the Mississippi. That is almost certainly borrowed from Joyce's "neverchanging everchanging water."

From my list of authors mentioned in songs:

Some Al Stewart mentions: {Kerouac} in Modern Times.

{Artaud's} Anthology in The Love Chronicles.

{Somerset Maugham} in Life Between the Wars.

{Edward Lear} in Mr. Lear.

The poets {Wilfred Owen} & {Siegfried Sassoon} in Somewhere in England.

Also Midnight Oil mentions {Henry Lawson} in Shakers and Movers.

Crash Test Dummies mention {T.S. Eliot} & {Sartre} in Afternoons & Coffeespoons.

{Norman Mailer} mentioned by the Plastic Ono Band in Give Peace a Chance.

By Neil Diamond, {Longfellow's Seranade}.

{Nabokov} mentioned by the Police in Don't Stand so Close to Me.

has anyone read Amplified: Fiction from Leading Alt-Country, Indie Rock, Blues and Folk Musicians ? I'm curious - but - well, curious.

songwriters include: Mary Gauthier, Chris Smither, Maria McKee, Patty Larkin, Jim White and Rennie Sparks.

I recently stumbled across Greg Brown's Rexroth's Daughter. I understand it may previously have been done by Joan Baez.

Laurie Anderson's "Gravity's Angel" references Gravity's Rainbow in the chorus.