Semicolon

Music Inspired by Classic Fantasy Stories

The list, care of Flavorwire.

If I Possessed a Printing Press

The Labatt Employee Drinking Songs Booklet

Cheers!

Nicholson Baker - Protest Song Songwriter

The 10 Most Mentioned Songs in Books

The list, care of Publisher's Weekly.

11 Songs Inspired by Literature

The list, care of Mental Floss.

Vintage Recordings of Patti Smith's Poetry

Awesome.

One of Smith's poems...

seventh heaven

Oh Raphael. Guardian angel. In love and crime

all things move in sevens. seven compartments

in the heart. the seven elaborate temptations.

seven devils cast from Mary Magdalene whore

of Christ. the seven marvelous voyages of Sinbad.

sin/bad. And the number seven branded forever

on the forehead of Cain. The first inspired man.

The father of desire and murder. But his was not

the first ecstasy. Consider his mother.

Eve's was the crime of curiosity. As the saying

goes: it killed the pussy. One bad apple spoiled

the whole shot. But be sure it was no apple.

An apple looks like an ass. It's fags' fruit.

It must have been a tomato.

Or better yet. A mango.

She bit. Must we blame her. abuse her.

poor sweet bitch. perhaps there's more to the story.

think of Satan as some stud.

maybe her knees were open.

satan snakes between them.

they open wider

snakes up her thighs

rubs against her for a while

more than the tree of knowledge was about

to be eaten...she shudders her first shudder

pleasure pleasure garden

was she sorry

are we ever girls

was she a good lay

god only knows

10 Great Shakespeare Inspired Songs

The list, care of Paste.

A Book You Can Smoke?

Thanks, Snoop Dogg.

Songs about Books

The Guardian has a playlist, here.

Six Authors Who Moonlighted as Lyricists

The list, care of the L Magazine.

The Ten Best Songs Based on Books

The list, care of the Guardian.

Shakespeare and Country Music

There's a tie between them? Indeed!

From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...

Why haven’t Shakespeare and country music come together more often?

“Country music deals so unabashedly with big feelings — just like tragedy,” Chalsma said. “I thought the audience would connect to the song.”

Country music has long been a place where songwriters explore romantic tragedy using language as compact and colorful as the Bard of Avon’s. Clever couplets, vivid imagery and unexpected turns of phrase are the stock in trade of both.

In modern times, Shakespeare’s work is often placed among the pinnacles of high art in the Western world; just the opposite of country music, which is strongly rooted in the lives and concerns of regular folk. But the two are, historically speaking, closely connected.

“It’s always ironic to me when people start talking about Shakespeare as being so highfalutin’,” said Thomas Bradac, founder of Shakespeare Orange County and a theater professor at Chapman University in Orange. “The poetry was always considered high art, and the sonnets, but the plays themselves were the dime novels of their day. That’s why the royalty didn’t go to them, and why they got kicked out of London and moved to the South Bank, next to the whorehouses.”

Some directors have set productions of “Taming of the Shrew” in the Old West to help audiences connect better with Shakespeare’s treatise on gender stereotypes, while the Bard’s best-known themes and characters have occasionally surfaced as country song fodder.

Taylor Swift’s hit “Love Story” may be the most recent example, one in which the young singer-songwriter cast herself and her would-be love as Shakespeare’s star-crossed couple. Except she added a happy ending.

A Clockwork Orange - The Musical?

Indeed and the author, Anthony Burgess, even wrote some songs for it.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Burgess, who died in 1993, started working on a stage version of A Clockwork Orange a decade after Stanley Kubrick's controversial 1971 film adaptation. "The reason why Burgess wanted to make his own stage adaptation, quite a long time after Kubrick made the film, was to assert his ownership of the story," Dr Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, told BBC News. Although the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered a production based on Burgess's script in 1990, his songs were replaced with compositions by U2's Bono and The Edge.

Despite his dark tale of delinquency, Burgess's songs aren't so grim. "It's pretty close to West Side Story," Biswell said. "That's one of the obvious influences." It's a sinister image: droogs snapping their fingers and singing about Maria. "There's this scene in prison, where one of the prisoners is kicked to death, which is throwaway and jolly," Biswell explained. "That's completely different from the corresponding episode in [Kubrick's] film, which is gloomy and depressing."

Jarvis Cocker on Writing

Jarvis Cocker on Writing and Publishing his Lyrics from FaberBooks on Vimeo.

And, Jarvis Cocker singing:

The Five Best Books on Protest Songs

The list, care of the Browser.

A little John Lennon for you, here:

Sarah Jarosz's "Annabelle Lee" - Inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe Poem

Kate Bush and James Joyce

The New York Times makes brief note of Kate Bush and a song in which she's officially allowed to use the words of one James Joyce.

Ah, Kate Bush:

The Ben Folds/Nick Hornby Collaboration

NPR discusses their new album, Lonely Avenue, here (complete with a few tracks you can listen to!).

Pop Matters interviews Folds about the project, too.