- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
This week Gordon and I hit the books. Music has been a literary subject for centuries: Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night famously suggested music to be “the food of love”; Maya Angelou described music as her “refuge”; and Kurt Vonnegut called music “the only proof he needed for the existence of God”. On tonight’s show, we reversed the trade, and explored musical odes to literature from songwriters. I should say that this week’s show was particularly difficult to shortlist – there are just so many great literary songs! In the Spotify playlist we’ve included all 22 from our longlist, so you can enjoy what we didn’t have time for.
Hozier‘s 2023 album Unreal Unearth is entirely inspired by Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century narrative poem The Divine Comedy. Francesca, the album’s third single, is a dedication to Francesca da Rimini who appears in Canto V of Dante’s poem. The narrator finds Francesca and her lover Paolo in the second circle of Hell, which is reserved for the lustful. Francesca da Rimini was married to Gianciotto (or Giovani) Malatesta, but fell in love with her husband’s brother, Paolo. The two were caught by Gianciotto, who murdered both his wife and brother. Because of the sudden murder, she has no time to repent her sins, showing up in that second circle, telling her story as Dante and Virgil pass through. Hozier’s song is written from Paolo’s perspective who, despite what happened, would do it all again given the chance: “If someone asked me at the end/ I’d tell them put me back in it”.
Lyrics, lyrics everywhere…
Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Iron Maiden, from their fifth studio album Powerslave (1984), is a musical re-telling of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge’s longest poem recounts the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage, and Iron Maiden’s musical homage matches the scale of the original – at 13 minutes and 45 seconds in length it was the band’s longest song for over 30 years until surpassed by the 18-minute Empire of the Clouds from The Book of Souls (2015).
The song tells the story of the poem pretty faithfully, taking a few lines verbatim (relax everyone – the poem has been out of copyright for about 190 years):
“Day after day, day after day, / We stuck, nor breath nor motion; / As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean”
“Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.”
“And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I.”
King Kunta is the third single from Kendrick Lamar‘s seminal 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly. It was co-written by Lamar and Thundercat, and features interpolations and references to lyrics written by Michael Jackson, James Brown, Fred Wesley, John Starks, Ahmad, Redfoo, and Johnny Burns, who are all credited as songwriters. The character “King Kunta” is a reference to the archetypal rebellious slave Kunta Kinte, who is the basis of the main character from Alex Haley‘s 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The song also references both Chinua Achebe‘s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart and Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man (1952) with the line: “The Yam is the power that be/You can smell it when I’m walking down the street”. Lamar uses the metaphor of the yam, prominent in both Achebe and Ellison’s novels, to articulate his own struggles with authenticity while juggling the rigid expectations of other people and the arbitrary rules of an anti-Black society.
Alice (literally) on Acid…
Grace Slick reportedly wrote White Rabbit after an acid trip, and before actually joining Jefferson Airplane. It was created for her previous band The Great Society, but she eventually recorded it with Jefferson Airplane for their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow. White Rabbit draws on imagery from Lewis Carroll‘s 1865 book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and references several of Carroll’s characters including Alice, the White Rabbit, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the White Knight, the Red Queen, and the Dormouse. Slick has said that the music itself was heavily inspired by Miles Davis’ 1960 album Sketches of Spain (in particular Davis’ interpolation of the Concierto de Aranjuez (1939)), as well as Maurice Ravel‘s Boléro.
Joni Mitchell recorded Slouching Toward Bethlehem for her fourteenth studio album Night Ride Home, released in 1991. The song’s lyrics are based heavily on Irish poet William Butler Yeats‘ 1919 poem The Second Coming. Yeats’ poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to describe allegorically the atmosphere of post-war Europe; it was written in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916. It’s considered one of the most important of the 20th Century, and has influenced numerous artists since; Achebe‘s novel Things Fall Apart (discussed above) takes its name from the poem’s third line, for example.
[guitarists – go to Joni’s official website and learn to play Slouching Towards Bethlehem in Joni’s original DAEGAD tuning]
Romeo and Juliet – what if it had all worked out?
Thom Yorke wrote Radiohead‘s Exit Music (For a Film) for Baz Luhrmann‘s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, and the song was included on the band’s third album OK Computer (1997). Luhrmann’s film is a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s classic story, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes starring in the respective titular roles. Yorke’s song also represents something of a retelling – the track reflects Romeo and Juliet’s hope to leave Verona together (“Today we escape, we escape”), and for Yorke this is exactly what the star-crossed lovers should have done: “I first saw the [1968] movie when I was 13. I just couldn’t believe why Romeo and Juliet, after they had made love, didn’t run away together. Romeo should have packed his bags, jump out of the window and eloped with her!”.
Shakespeare’s couple also make an appearance in Peggy Lee‘s 1958 single Fever. The song was originally written by Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell, who used the pseudonym “John Davenport“, and first recorded by American R&B singer Little Willie John for his debut album, Fever (1956). Lee’s version contains rewritten lyrics and an altered musical arrangement, and references both Romeo and Juliet, as well as Captain Smith and Pocahontas.
It’s a Bitter/Sweet Copyright Battle
Our soundslike this week details the intriguing story behind The Verve‘s huge 1997 hit Bitter Sweet Symphony. While writing the song, The Verve sought permission to sample a short, staccato string sequence from the (heavily adapted) symphonic version of The Rolling Stones‘ The Last Time, recorded in 1965 by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra. The Rolling Stones agreed to license a five-note segment in exchange for 50 percent of the royalties, but erstwhile Stones manager Allen Klein – whose company ABKCO Records owned the copyright for The Last Time – claimed the Verve voided the agreement by using a larger portion of the song. Klein agreed to let The Verve use the sample, but on the condition that songwriter Richard Ashcroft surrender 100% of the royalties (yes you read that right) to the Stones’ copywriters. The band reluctantly agreed, which meant that when Bitter Sweet Symphony went to number one in the charts and was nominated for a best song Grammy, it was Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ names on the ballot. In 2019, however, and ten years after Allen Klein’s death, Jagger and Richards (and Klein’s son) ceded the rights back to Ashcroft.
Literature Quiz!
For our quiz this week you had to guess six songs inspired by works of literature. We gave you a short snippet (reversed), and a small clue about the literary relationship.
As always, find the show and blog at joebennett.net/5live, with occasional Instagram extras at @joebennettmusicology. And you can find our Spotify mega-playlist, which contains all songs ever featured on the show, here:
- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
- Audio production: Joe Bennett, Rafi Waters
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