Playlist of the week: songs inspired by literature

After Emerald Fennel’s take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, soundracked by Charli XCX, was released in cinemas on Friday, we revisit the very best of pop’s long-standing love affair with the literary canon, from tragic heroines to Byronic antiheroes. The results range from reverent adaptations to gleeful theft.

Listen to the Observer’s Playlist of the Week here.

Cassandra by Florence + the Machine

This is not the only song inspired by the prophetess of Greek myth, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but it is the best. There’s a notably underrated Abba track with the same name, but on Cassandra, Florence Welch is uniquely bombastic, wounded and furious. The song reframes the cursed seer – doomed to utter true prophecies that no one believes – as a patron saint of the lovelorn. Ancient myth has rarely sounded so contemporary.

The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen

The Grapes of Wrath ends with Tom Joad heading underground, promising his mother that he’ll be “wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat”. Springsteen picked up that promise six decades later with this song, which transplants Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl despair to late 20th-century America. In Springsteen’s telling,  Joad is a spectral witness to a new generation of dispossession. His spare lyricism brings new life to the literary classic.

Body Electric by Lana Del Rey

“Whitman is my daddy,” sings Lana Del Rey on Body Electric, a song which isn’t just inspired by the poet Walt Whitman, but steals from him. The chorus lifts lines from his 1855 poem I Sing the Body Electric, from his classic, Leaves of Grass, turning Whitman’s celebration of the human soul into a glitzy, modern ode to Americana. Lyrically, Del Rey channels the poet’s exuberant sensuality, but filtered through her signature glamour. The result is a striking fusion of 19th-century poetry and 21st-century pop, where classic literature feels both revered and reinvented.

Tolerate It by Taylor Swift 

Swift’s Love Story – her teenage update on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – is well known for good reason, it’s a fantastic song. But her devotion to Daphne du Maurier is more unexpected. In her 2020 lockdown album, Evermore, Swift drew inspiration from her quarantine reading, and the 1938 gothic novel Rebecca inspired this soft heartbreaker of a song. “I made you my temple, my mural, my sky,” sings Swift, envisioning a woman who elevates a man to god-like status, while he just “tolerates” her.

Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush

Amid the flurry of interest in the Wuthering Heights film, we cannot forget the brilliance of this 1978 song. Charli XCX’s soundtrack is  fun – but nothing beats Kate Bush. Her helium-high vocal and wind-lashed choreography turn Victorian melodrama into avant-pop delirium. It’s faithful and wildly idiosyncratic at once. Every year, around 30 July – Brontë and Bush’s shared birthday – people gather across the world and dance in homage to the song’s landmark music video. Bush’s otherworldly voice has brought the spirit of Cathy to new generations: this is more than just an adaptation, it’s magic – a séance in song form.