20. Katy Perry – Firework (2010)
The oeuvre of Katy Perry occasionally has some profoundly unexpected inspirations: California Gurls is spelt in homage to Big Star’s September Gurls, while Firework was based on, wait for it, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, specifically the line about how his favourite people “burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.
19. Japanese Breakfast – Magic Mountain (2025)
A bestselling author herself, Michelle Zauner’s latest album as Japanese Breakfast referenced Virginia Woolf, John Cheever and, on its sweet but sad acoustic closing track, Thomas Mann’s sanatorium-based door-stopper Magic Mountain. It’s a song that seems to reflect Zauner’s reaction to the book, and deploy its imagery to explore her own relationship with fame and creativity.
18. Bomb the Bass – Bug Powder Dust (1994)
Bug Powder Dust certainly isn’t the only song inspired by the oeuvre of William Burroughs – he’s the link between Duran Duran’s Wild Boys and Throbbing Gristle’s An Old Man Smiled – but it’s definitely the funkiest. Justin Warfield delivers a Naked Lunch-themed rap, over a writhing bass line and immense breakbeat.
17. Taylor Swift – The Bolter (2024)
Taylor Swift has described herself as “your favourite English teacher”, a nod to the literary references in her songs. The expanded The Tortured Poets Department featured The Bolter, based on a recurring villain in Nancy Mitford’s novels (in turn based on five-times-married British aristocrat Idina Sackville) who Swift identified with.
16. Killer Mike – Willie Burke Sherwood (2012)
There are plenty of literary allusions in hip-hop, but Willie Burke Sherwood – Killer Mike’s first collaboration with El-P, with whom he’d later form Run the Jewels – skilfully entwines references to Lord of the Flies through its autobiographical saga of growing up “addicted to literature” in the wrong part of town.
15. The Cure – Charlotte Sometimes (1981)
The obvious choice for literary Cure is the Camus-inspired Killing an Arab, but let’s instead plump for marvellous goth-pop set text Charlotte Sometimes, its title and theme taken from Penelope Farmer’s splendidly creepy 1969 children’s novel. It clearly lived rent-free in Robert Smith’s head, also inspiring the Cure’s 1984 album track The Empty World.
14. Black Star – Thieves in the Night (1998)
In the sleeve notes of Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s first album as Black Star, the latter wrote about discovering Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. The chorus of Thieves in the Night – a musically mellow, lyrically barbed exploration of racial identity and hip-hop’s perpetuation of stereotypes – is essentially a passage from the novel.
13. Nirvana – Scentless Apprentice (1993)
At the height of his unhappy celebrity, Kurt Cobain obviously identified with the anti-hero of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, who’s devoured by his own acolytes. Should you doubt Cobain meant it, listen to the frankly terrifying way he repeatedly sings “go away” – it’s the sound of someone at the end of their tether.
12. Radiohead – Street Spirit (Fade Out) (1995)
Ben Okri’s Booker-winning novel The Famished Road – about a child trapped between the spirit world and life in Nigeria – inspired the drift of disturbing, dream-like images on The Bends’ closing track, an artistic breakthrough that pointed the way to OK Computer, and struck a rare optimistic note at its conclusion: “Immerse your soul in love.”
11. Rosalía – Pienso en Tu Mirá (2018)
As if to prove from the start that she was noticeably different to your average 21st-century pop star, every track on Rosalía’s first album of original material was based on a chapter from the 13th-century Occitan romance Flamenca: Pienso en Tu Mirá’s amazing confection of flamenco rhythms, dancefloor bass and spectral pop is chapter three.
10. David Bowie – We Are the Dead (1974)
Bowie famously wanted to write a musical based on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the writer’s estate refused permission. Of the fragments that made their way on to Diamond Dogs, We Are the Dead is the pick, not least because it’s the most thrillingly diseased, decadent-sounding five minutes that the glam era produced.
9. The Normal – Warm Leatherette (1978)
The influence of JG Ballard’s dystopian science fiction hung heavy over post-punk, from Gary Numan to Joy Division, but never seemed more pointed than on Daniel Miller’s groundbreaking single inspired by 1973’s Crash. Unsettling but danceable, the awesome Warm Leatherette perfectly captures the novel’s disturbingly cold treatment of violence, horror and sexual arousal.
8. Kendrick Lamar – King Kunta (2015)
A lesson in African American literature bound up in four minutes of firecracker rapping set to a superlatively funky backing. The title comes from Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots, but the lyrics of King Kunta divert into references to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Bildungsroman Invisible Man, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
7. Magazine – A Song From Under the Floorboards (1980)
Some songs are only tangentially linked to their literary inspirations, but Magazine’s masterpiece of tense, brooding post-punk existential dread is so clearly inspired by Dostoevsky’s novella Notes From Underground – check out their respective opening lines! – that the Russian author possibly deserved a co-writing credit.
6. Kate Bush – The Sensual World (1989)
Wuthering Heights is better known, but its brilliance in rendering a classic novel is equalled by The Sensual World, inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses. Bush was denied the rights to use Joyce’s actual text, so she translated Molly Bloom’s reverie into a song that’s beautiful, drowsy, amatory and better than the subsequent version that did use Joyce’s words.
5. Joni Mitchell – Both Sides Now (1969)
The lyrics were sparked by Mitchell reading Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King while on a plane; a passage about clouds inspired the opening verses. Both Sides Now is a song Mitchell has grown into. If you want the most emotionally impactful version, hear her singing it, aged 79, on her Live at Newport album.
4. Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit (1967)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland transformed into one of the jewels of parent-scaring American psychedelia, White Rabbit is effectively the Merry Pranksters’ challenge – Can YOU pass the acid test? – in musical form. In a slightly foreboding tone, it jumbled Lewis Carroll’s imagery to evoke a jarring, brain-scrambling departure from normality.
3. Joy Division – Dead Souls (1980)
The late Ian Curtis’s library ranged from Sven Hassel to Kafka, Burroughs and Ballard: all made their way into his songs. On Dead Souls, the titular deceased of Nikolai Gogol’s satirical novel crowd into his Curtis’s head, “calling” him against his will. “Someone take these dreams away,” he pleads, to desperate, chilling effect.
2. The Velvet Underground – Venus in Furs (1967)
Lou Reed’s stated aim was to invest rock’n’roll with the quality of literature: he never achieved it more successfully than when inspired by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s infamous 1870 novel. A wall of detuned guitar and scraping, droning viola, Venus in Furs is both menacing and hypnotically alluring: a perfect musical embodiment of its subject matter.
1. The Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
Marianne Faithfull’s suggestion that Mick Jagger read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita may well be the most fortuitous literary recommendation in rock history. The resulting song was fantastic, the malevolence and amorality of Jagger’s lyric amplified by the music: with its samba-derived rhythm and ecstatic whoops, it sounded not ominous but inviting. Moreover, it was timely: the psychedelicised optimism of the summer of love had begun to erode; the world seemed to be getting darker – Jagger pluralised a line about President Kennedy’s assassination to reflect the news of his brother Bobby’s murder – and attitudes were hardening. Sympathy for the Devil was the perfect soundtrack to the curdling of the 60s. Fifty-eight years on, it still sounds incredible.
