In my staggering, prodigious music collection there are a few songs I’ve noticed with literary references strewn about. I am really not about the genre of song-with-literary-reference-in-title, or the brutally-beat-you-over-the-head-with-my-metaphor-allusion-or-synopsis genre. What I really adore is a poem that’s been crafted into a song so well you wouldn’t know it didn’t come with the music, or the reference that bleeds into the song so’s it doesn’t feel contrived.
To illustrate,
The Bright Eyes song ‘Four Winds’ (makes my chest heave in splendor) contains the following line: “And it’s the son of man/Slouching towards Bethlehem/A heart just can’t contain all of that empty space/It breaks, it breaks, it breaks”
…mirroring William Butler Yeats’ “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Sixpence None the Richer (I know! Authors of that yucky saccharine chipper courting ballad ‘Kiss Me’ from the effervescent late nineties! But bear with me…) have, to the great surpise of at least me, a song (on that very same album), Puedo Escribir. It is unlikely that you’ll ever get over her voice after the kissy track, but it’s a heart-gouging rendition of Pablo Neruda’s poem by the same name in both Spanish and English: “I can write the saddest lines tonight… Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer/and these are the last lines I will write for her.” Burn.
Neutral Milk Hotel’s Album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is essentially an operatic homage written after lead singer/songwriter Jeff Magnum read the Diary of Anne Frank. Magnum was devastated [1] reading how the Holocaust impacted her: keeping her from falling in love or lust, the unreal disruption of growing up, the waste. He sings “I know they buried her body with others/ her sister and mother and 500 families/and will she remember me 50 years later/I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine.”
There are other, but I think those were my favorite to discover.
I am dedicated to learning and making. I love to teach myself new things, so you'll see my early and hopefully improving design work, artwork and great ideas I've stumbled upon. I write, and will give you as much as I can critically or creatively. I'm also intent on building up collaborative greatness with anyone who sees an opportunity to invent, interpret or interject.