mixtape: songs about books/writing/reading/libraries/librarians
I noticed that lots of songs in my iTunes collection are related to the above-mentioned things and I figured I’d compile some of the best. If I knew how to put them on some sort of .zip file so that I could share this good stuff, I would. (If anyone knows how, educate me, please.) Enjoy and feel free to pass on!
The Magnetic Fields – Swinging London
“I read your manifestos and your strange religious tracts/You took me to your library and kissed me in the stacks.”
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart – Young Adult Friction
“Between the stacks in the library/Not like anyone stopped to see/We came they went our bodies spent/Among the dust and the microfiche.”
Final Fantasy – Library
“Anna, Gerald, Henry Waugh/Let this longing retire/I will purge my shelf of classics/Watch them fade upon the fire/I will burn my every book/To warm your cold, cold blood”
Talking Heads – The Book I Read
“I’m embarassed to admit it hit the soft spot in my heart/When I found out you wrote the/Book I read”
My Morning Jacket – Librarian
“It’s not like you’re not trying, with a pencil in your hair/To defy the beauty the good lord put in there/Simple little bookworm — buried underneath/Is the sexiest librarian/take off those glasses and let down your hair for me”
The Beatles – Paperback Writer
“Dear Sir or Madam will you read my book/It took me years to write will you take a look/Based on a novel by a man named Lear/And I need a job/So I want to be a paperback writer”
Modest Mouse – Bukowski
“Went to bed and didn’t see/Why every day turns out to be/A little bit more like Bukowski/And yeah, I know he’s a pretty good read/But God, who’d want to be/God, who’d want to be such an asshole?”
Camera Obscura – Books Written For Girl
“he likes to read books written for girls/he prides himself on being a man of the world/in the darkest of places he gets his thrill”
Tahiti 80 – Open Book
“Your eyes are like an open book/One can tell everything from the way you look”
Morrissey – Reader Meets Author
“You don’t know a thing about their lives/They live where you wouldn’t dare to drive/You shake as you think of how they sleep”
Ryan Adams – Sylvia Plath
“And maybe she’d take me to France/Or maybe to Spain and she’d ask me to dance/In a mansion on the top of a hill/She’d ash on the carpets/And slip me a pill/Then she’d get me pretty loaded on gin/And maybe she’d give me a bath/How I wish I had a Sylvia Plath”
Saint Etienne – Lost In The Library
(No lyrics, but a great composition anyway that has a bookish feeling.)
Sia – Academia
“But to you I’m just a novel that you wish you’d never wrote”