Partly Truth, Partly Fiction

On Normies, Songwriters, Books & Literary Allusions

I was casually chatting songwriting with my songwriter daughter the other day, specifically about how songs can be a grab bag of true and not true and partly just cool words that rhyme or imagery that feels right or feelings that feel meaningful and how other people can read deep meanings into these same songs that simply aren’t there.

‘Normies’ she called them, these people that didn’t write songs but were curious enough to analyse or judge them. Or you know, if they happen to be romantically involved with said songwriter, to get jealous or paranoid. And though I’ve spent my entire life being anti-discriminatory or separationist in any form, I kinda really dug the idea that there are songwriting people and then there are ‘normies’. Maybe its just because I’ve spent my life feeling like an outsider (which is fine with me) and for the first time ever I felt like I was part of the important group and everyone else was in the a little bit incomprehensible ‘normie’ group.

We songwriters find ideas for songs in puddles, in trees, in feelings, in clouds, in reflections, in nonsensical phrases, in greetings and farewells and passing conversations, in confusing emotions, in things that can’t be quantified or justified - or as we shall explore ahead, within other creator’s works of art - and then we run with that germ of an idea and fashion it or wrestle it or pound it into something perfect and palatable.

I recall many many years ago reading an interview with a Nashville songwriter (I know I go on about them a lot, a girl’s gotta have her obsessions) talking about how she vanquished any dips in the inspiration tap by going to the library and reading book spines for titles until something sparked an idea.

I relate, as I used to read a ton of vintage crime fiction and fabulously trashy pulp fiction novellas and wrote a song for my 90s band Automatic Cherry called ‘No Bed To Call Her Own’, the song idea ignited simply from seeing a picture of this 1931 book cover. The album hasn’t been digitised yet but the rather tragic lyrics went something along the lines of ‘if you want me to I’ll make you forget it all, I’m just trying to forget, yeah I’m starting to regret, that I’ve got no bed to call my own…’

I didn’t know what the story was then, although I’ve now discovered that its a Depression era tale from a female perspective (fascinating), of a stenographer who loses her job and soon becomes homeless and then turns to sex work, with the hope of finding herself a warm bed for the night. Obviously a very evocative title, because my song was similarly about a woman trying to survive via her wits and her attractiveness. It was written by Russian author Val Newton, who also wrote Cat People, and ended up becoming the head producer of the horror unit at RKO studios.

There is another version of a book published with the same title and a similar theme by author Cicely Schiller - this book was also variously published under various other catchy titles including The Harlot, Maybe Next Year and Element of Shame.

I am certainly not the first writer or songwriter to take inspiration from someone else’s written work.

Perhaps the most well known song directly inspired by a novel is Kate Bush’s 1978 masterwork ‘Wuthering Heights’, evolving from catching the last 5 minutes late at night of the BBC TV adaption of the book, where Cathy is clawing at Heathcliff’s window. She describes the image of it as being ‘really freaky, like this hand coming in the window and I’ve always been into this sort of thing and it just hung round in my head’, until she finally read the book - which she’d always meant to do since discovering she and author Emily Bronte were born on the same date - just before writing the epic ballad in a single night at the age of 18.

She utilised lines taken directly from the text “Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy. I've come home, I'm so cold. Let me in your window”. But unlike the book, Kate’s version of the story is written from Cathy’s perspective, which deeply connects the listener with her emotional plight.

Her record label wanted a more uptempo song for her debut single and she had to fight hard to convince them this was the right song to launch her career. Well played Kate. ‘Wuthering Heights’ went to number 1 on the UK charts - the first song written and performed by a woman in the UK to do so - and the rest is history. An event titled The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever now takes place annually at multiple locations throughout the world where participants dress like Kate in the ‘Wuthering Heights’ video and dramatically recreate her self devised iconic dance moves together.

Elton John’s enduring 1972 classic ‘Rocket Man’ was based on a Ray Bradbury short story The Rocket Man, narrated by 14 year old Doug, whose astronaut father has trouble reacclimatising to Earth and his family every time he returns and eventually his rocket explodes on what is meant to be his final excursion to Space. Like Kate Bush with ‘Wuthering Heights’ John and Bernie Taupin’s song similarly employs a different perspective to the original book, casting the father as the protagonist. Interestingly, Kate performed her own ethereal reggae tinted version of the song in 1991.

PJ Harvey explained to The Guardian in 2011 “With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It's almost like watching a scene from a film, and that's what I go about trying to catch in a song.”

Her song ‘The River’ powerfully condenses the short story of the same name that directly inspired it, written by Southern Gothic queen Flannery O’Connor, which details the tragic loss of a young boy who returns to the river after his baptism there the day before. The transformative experience had given him a sense of optimism and hope that there something beyond the hard existence he endured at home with his alcoholic, neglectful parents, something he thought he could tap into again by entering the river that then sweeps him away to his death.

The River in the Sewanee Review, Summer 1953

PJ Harvey’s ‘It’s A Perfect Day Elise’, the lead single from 1998’s Is This Desire? incorporates some sentences and is seemingly partially inspired by J.D. Salinger’s devastating short story A Perfect Day For Bananafish, although the story is not totally clear within the song. She also directly quotes from another Salinger story (‘Pretty mouth and green my eyes’) for the song ‘Angelene’ on the same album, which sounds as though characters from books have been unleashed to run wild together through the songs.

Laura Marling

describes in her Substack around songwriting

Patterns in Repeat

how her song ‘The End of the Affair’ emerged from an earlier version she had been toying with that found its way forward thanks to bookish inspiration, using the last lines of the 1951 novel by Graham Greene The End of the Affair - ‘I love you, goodbye. Now let me live my life’ - as a kind of lingering final mantra at the end of her song: “In the time between the two versions I had read The End Of The Affair (Graham Greene), and it had clearly educated the developmentally arrested emotion within me that had attempted to write the first one.” Its a seamless and exquisite melding.

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud's
But there's no way I can compare
All them scenes to this affair
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go

(‘You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ by Bob Dylan)

Literary allusions are woven all through the threads of Bob Dylan’s back pages. In Highway 61 Revisited (1965) the narrator in ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ snarls You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books/You’re very well-read, it’s well-known and in ‘Desolation Row’ we have Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower. ‘You’re Gonna Me Lonesome When You Go’ references the tragic romance between Verlaine and Rimbaud and in his memoir Chronicles Volume One Dylan describes the effect discovering Rimbaud had on him; ‘I came across one of his letters called “Je est un autre,” which translates into “I is someone else.” When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier.’

He also wrote in Chronicles Volume One, ‘I would even record an entire album based on Chekhov short stories. Critics thought it was autobiographical – that was fine’ which was generally understood be talking about his 1975 masterpiece Blood On The Tracks, an album that appears to be devastatingly personal - which Dylan has oft denied. In a great 1985 conversation with Cameron Crowe for the Biograph box set, while talking about the generally held belief that Blood On The Tracks was about his divorce, Dylan said ‘Stupid and misleading jerks these interpreters sometimes are…I don’t write confessional songs. Emotion’s got nothing to do with it. It only seems so, like it seems that Lawrence Olivier is Hamlet…’

Of course my favourite literary nod in Dylan’s songs is the hilariously withering waitress who seems to have his number in Time Out Of Mind’s epic ‘Highlands’ and wryly notes “You don’t read women authors do ya?”.

The Velvet Underground took their very name from a book of the same name, published in 1963 by journalist Michael Leigh, that explored what was soon termed the Sexual Revolution, conducting interviews with people about their various kinks and unusual sexual interests. Lou Reed’s friend, filmmaker Tony Conrad, found a copy of the book discarded in the street, and the band decided it was an evocative and perfect title for their band - they had been calling themselves The Warlocks and The Falling Spikes prior to that. It seemed especially fitting as Lou Reed had already written ‘Venus In Furs’ inspired by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel Venus in Furs about sexual domination, servitude and humiliation that inspired Freud to coin the term ‘sadomasochism’ in 1905.

Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather
Whiplash girl child in the dark
Severin, your servant comes in bells, please don't forsake him
Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

(‘Venus in Furs’ by Lou Reed)

Don't Stand So Close To Me, the 1980 hit by The Police, references Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, the comparison between the teacher failing to fight his growing attraction for the ‘provocative’ schoolgirl made explicit with the lines ‘he starts to shake and cough, Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov’.

Sting told Q Magazine in 2011 the song drew inspiration from the time he spent as a teacher pre-fame with The Police and the fact that they were now surrounded by teenage female fans. ‘Then there was my love for Lolita, which I think is a brilliant novel …That opened the gates, and out it came: the teacher, the open page, the virgin, the rape in the car, getting the sack, Nabakov, all that.’

During an interview with Gold Radio in 2020, Sting said ‘…in the current climate, I don't sing that live. People with a sort of puerile sensibility will say, 'Oh it's about you'. And of course it's not, but it's an interesting situation.’

Led Zeppelin went deep on J.R Tolkien, with ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ inspired by The Hobbit and ‘Ramble On’ explicitly referencing Lord Of The Rings.

Kurt Cobain was motivated to write ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by his love for Patrick Suskin’s novel Perfume, stating in a 1993 interview “I've read Perfume by Patrick Süskind about ten times in my life, and I can't stop reading it. It's like something that's just stationary in my pocket all the time, it just doesn't leave me. And every time I'm bored, like when I'm on an airplane or something, I read it over and over again.” He describes how its the first time he has used outside inspiration for a song, half joking that he’s ‘running out of ideas’ and that with his songs people ‘always want to read into it’ and how annoying it is to always have to come up with explanations for his songs so he enjoyed writing something inspired by someone else’s work. Its a really lovely interview.

‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ from Ride The Lightning by Metallica was viscerally inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel of the same name, painting a specific scene from Chapter 27 in the book where five soldiers are killed during the Spanish Civil War. The novel’s title was taken from a 1624 John Donne meditation that contained the phrase - imagine if Donne could hear how it evolved over time!

According to songwriter Robert Smith, ‘Killing an Arab’ by the Cure, from their 1980 album Boys Don’t Cry, ‘was a short poetic attempt at condensing my impression of the key moments in the 1942 novel L'Étranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus’. Horrified to hear that the song had been adopted as a racist anthem in 1987, Smith requested radio stations stop playing the song. Record label Electra stickered CDs with a statement 'The song ‘Killing An Arab’ has absolutely no racist overtones whatsoever. It is a song which decries the existence of all prejudice and consequent violence. The Cure condemn its use in furthering anti-Arab feeling.'

In a 2020 Apple Music interview Taylor Swift explained how she was surprised while reading Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca by how much the husband just barely tolerated his new wife who was trying desperately to impress him and how she really related to the feeling of trying to love someone that didn’t love her as much in return, leading her to write the song ‘Tolerate It’ for her album 2020 album Evermore.

Although I’ve been digging into this for days now, I have no doubt there are a ton of great songs inspired by literature I’ve missed - elucidate me!

If today’s missive got you thinking or inspired to read a book or write a song or listen to some lyrics, my work here is done!

I wish you a day ahead that contains some reading/listening/lounging/thinking on stuff, always the best kind of days in my book, and not always easy to come by!

Lo x

If you are so inclined, please go ahead and gimme a little love by pressing the heart button, sharing your thoughts or sharing this post with a pal who might enjoy - all of these little things go a long way towards helping me grow Loose Connections and working towards a probably ridiculous but dearly held dream of one day making a humble living from wrangling words.

PS Thanks for all the research in this great article in QZ by Sarah Todd “Every one of them words rang true”: The best Bob Dylan lyrics about reading, writing, and literature” and also to this helpful Buzzfeed article 19 Songs You Might Not Know Are Based On Books by Kat Pickhardt.