Rock musicians have always been big readers, even if the genre’s image suggests otherwise. Plenty of guitar riffs have been built around plots, characters and settings first written down on paper.
Some of these songs retell a story, while others borrow a mood or a single scene. The five below each trace back to a well known novel, and the connections are documented rather than guessed.
Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Grace Slick wrote “White Rabbit” and the band released it in 1967 on the album Surrealistic Pillow. The song draws on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass. Slick has said she grew up with these books, and their characters appear throughout the lyrics.
Musically, the track builds slowly over a marching, bolero style rhythm. Slick has cited Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain as an influence on that approach. The result is a song that feels like a gradual descent down the rabbit hole rather than a quick pop single.
Led Zeppelin, “Ramble On” (The Lord of the Rings)
“Ramble On” appeared on Led Zeppelin II in 1969, and Robert Plant wrote the lyrics. They include nods to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, including Mordor and the creature Gollum. Tolkien’s trilogy, published in the mid 1950s, was hugely popular with young readers in the late 1960s.
The song is mostly about wandering and searching, so the Tolkien references work as flavor rather than a full retelling. John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page give the track a gentle acoustic opening before it turns heavy. It remains one of the band’s best known examples of fantasy imagery in hard rock.
Metallica, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
Metallica’s song opens side two of Ride the Lightning, released in 1984. It shares its title with Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel about an American fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The novel’s own title comes from a meditation by the poet John Donne, so the phrase has a long literary history.
The track is credited to James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Cliff Burton. It begins with a distorted bass line from Burton, followed by a slow, heavy riff that suggests marching and war. The lyrics deal with the grim reality of battle, which fits the themes of Hemingway’s book.
Iron Maiden, “To Tame a Land” (Dune)
“To Tame a Land” closes Iron Maiden’s 1983 album Piece of Mind. Bassist Steve Harris wrote it after reading Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune, first published in 1965. It follows the desert planet setting and the idea of a hard land shaping its people.
The band originally planned to call the song “Dune.” Herbert reportedly declined permission to use the name, so Iron Maiden changed the title while keeping the story’s imagery. The change is well documented and is a common example of how copyright can shape a song’s final form.
The Cure, “Killing an Arab” (The Stranger)
The Cure released “Killing an Arab” in 1978, and it later appeared on their debut album’s American edition, Boys Don’t Cry. Robert Smith wrote it after reading The Stranger, Albert Camus’s 1942 novel. The song summarizes a pivotal scene in which the main character, Meursault, kills a man on a beach in Algeria.
Because of its title, the song has often been misunderstood as endorsing violence. The band has long said it is a response to the novel’s themes of absurdity and detachment, not a statement about any group of people. Its lean, post punk sound mirrors the cold, distant tone of Camus’s narrator.
