Books and Music Collide: A World Book Day Rate-A-Record

Happy World Book Day

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Today is World Book Day, but I wrote about that a day early and thus needed something literature-related for the holiday. Since I haven’t yet done my weekly Rate-A-Record installment, it seemed like a fine time to kill two birds with one stone.

Rock artists have been finding inspiration from books for as long as the genre has existed, and sometimes the resulting song is as good or even better than the book that inspired it. Some great ones that come immediately to mind are Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” Iron Maiden’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” The Bangles’ “Bell Jar” (from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar), Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). Led Zeppelin had three songs that referenced Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: “Misty Mountain Hop,” “The Battle of Evermore,” and “Ramble On.” And, of course, Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” was inspired by John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.

The three songs I’ve chosen for World Book Day Rate-A-Record are some of my favorites that were inspired by books. You surely know one of them, may know a second, and have probably never heard the third. As always, rate them in the comments using the Terry Barr/American…