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Songs Inspired By Literature

Stewart said:
(I think John Self may like it)
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I'm guessing this is cross posted ;)

I think I will give it a listen when I get home.

In unrelated, but sortof similar news (in that we're talking about themed music), there is an American artist named Sufjan Stevens writing albumns based on states. His goal is to write one about each of the fifty american states. I've only heard one song, Chicago, but I thought it was worth looking for more songs.
 
I'm not sure if you're interested in individual songs or entire albums. However, assuming the former then the most obvious example would be the lyrics to Sympathy for The Devil by the Rolling Stones which are based on The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. If you check Bulgakov's wikipedia page you'll see they weren't the only ones.

The cross over from Russian Literature to orchestral work is also quite a well worn path, for example Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Shostakovich based on Leskov's short story of the same name.
 
mehastings said:
there is an American artist named Sufjan Stevens writing albumns based on states. His goal is to write one about each of the fifty american states. I've only heard one song, Chicago, but I thought it was worth looking for more songs.
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I heard one of his songs yesterday. Sufjan is such a funny name, by the way.
 
The only one i can think of atm is Bo Hansson. His album Lord of the rings is not surprisingly inpired by the book with the same name. He also has a album inspired by the book watership down, called Watership down.
 
I notice a number of Narnia inspired albums when I was looking for the one my dd has. I'd like to hear the one based on Watership Down..
 
I suppose one of the most famous for UK people would be Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. Iron Maiden have based quite a few songs on literary works; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner springs to mind.
 
If we dare call it literature... 2000AD's Judge Dredd inspired a song. I can't remember the band tho. I know it was a rock band.
 
I have a beautiful tape (copied for me by a friend) that came from a place called Woolgoolga. Where on earth is Woolgoolga?

This pirated tape features the most incredible music by a man named Chris James. One of the songs on it goes something like this:

"We are angels, we have forgotten these things. Trailing clouds of glory, we are remembering..." :)

Another track is his heartmelting version of "You Send Me" (anybody here remember Sam Cooke?)
 
abecedarian said:
I can't believe I've neglected to mention that old Loggins and Messina classic: House At Pooh Corner..
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I love that one. Every now and then, it will even make me tear up.
 
cajunmama said:
I love that one. Every now and then, it will even make me tear up.
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Its a favorite of mine too.

I'm suprised we don't have a thread about books inspired by songs...I bet we could find lots of those!

I mean books that come from a song, like The Rosewood Casket by Sharyn McCrumb..not where the book inspires the song, as in this thread..House at Pooh Corner was inspired by Pooh, who came first..
 
Canadian band The Tea Party have released songs that have been influenced by literature. Particularly the album The Interzone Mantras.

Inspiration for lyrics also came from Jeff's bookshelf and the Internet. The hard driving anthem "The Master And The Margarita" is based on a Russian novel from the 1920s in which Satan manifests himself in Moscow to tell everyone about the passions of life in the wake of the new Communist regime. The misplaced romanticism of "Apathy" and the hopeful pledge of "Soulbreaking" had their basis in emails Jeff Martin received from young fans.

The album title has its roots in literature as well. It is a reference to the William Burroughs book THE INTERZONE, a semi-fictional account of his time as a correspondent for a New York newspaper in Algiers in the 1940's. The Interzone was a square block section in the center of the French occupied city where all the papers from around the globe were based, a cross collateralization of cultures at the hub of a very cosmopolitan African city.
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Source.
 
Canadian folk singer Loreena McKennitt is known for her recordings of famaous poems. She has done The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes, The Lady of Shalott by Tennyson, Prospero's Speech by William Shakespeare, The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross and possibly one or two others. They are beautiful songs, and I used the Dark Night of the Soul one with a class of 12-year-olds during a unit on poetry when I was on teaching practice. We read the poem and talked about it, then we played the song and talked about such things as what changes she made in order to make it recordable (e.g. repeating one of the verses as a chorus) and why we think she made those choices, and how the presence of the music influenced our emotional response to the words. It was a highly successful lesson and we had a lot of fun with it.
 
Dare I mention Ralph Vaughn Williams's William Blake songs? Also Aaron Copland set 12 of Emily Dickenson's poems to music.
 
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