Songs Based on Books...

Got a favorite song based on a book?

How about The Stand by The Alarm..based on the Steven King bok of the same name.

Sting's Moon Over Bourbon Street is the only one that comes to mind at the moment...

I am not much of a reader but I am going to say Soma by the Strokes-from a Brave New World

Yeah, there are a bunch of them, but I always loved what David Bowie did with George Orwell's 1984 on his Diamond Dogs album. I think about half of it was inspired by that novel. And the Eurythmics "soundtrack" for the movie based on that same novel is great, although I don't think hardly any of it actually made it into the film since the director had his own idea of who should do the soundtrack. Funny, but I believe it was originally offered to Bowie, but he wanted too much money. Oh well, I think the Eurythmics album is outstanding at capturing the feel of the novel.

Of course, Bowie was also involved in another great sci-fi film based (somewaht loosely at times) on Walter Tevis' classic The Man Who Fell to Earth, and he later used images from the film on the covers of Station to Station and Low. Both albums also apparently have fragments of the soundtrack music he wrote for the film, which wasn't used. But as a tiny bit of trivia, because it is a pretty cool movie, toward the end one of the characters walks past a display for Bowie's Young Americans album in a record store :)

The Gates of Delirium by YES, based on the book War and Peace

The best I can do right now is "Books About UFOs" by Husker Du.

Pretty Girls Make Graves- Dada

Killing an Arab - The Cure

"Amazing Grace" based on The Bible.

Iron Maiden did a lot of these:

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner" - same

"To Tame a Land" - Dune by Frank Herbert

"Phantom of the Opera" - I'm not sure what the source of this one is.. anyone know if the original story is from a book?

"Quest for Fire" - Not sure if it was based on the movie or the book: (wikipedia: The movie was adapted by Gérard Brach from the novel by J.-H. Rosny..)

"Where Eagles Dare" - movie/book. (wikepedia: Where Eagles Dare is a 1968 film directed by Brian G. Hutton and starring Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, and Mary Ure. The screenplay and the subsequent best-selling novel were written at more or less the same time by Alistair MacLean; it was his first of several screenwriting efforts that he would take on. Both film and novel are often considered classics.)

Iron Maiden certainly turned me onto some good books! :)

-jar