war of the worlds musical brave new world book

When The Beatles recorded “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the epochal closing track to their Revolver album, John Lennon had in mind a book by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, which advised readers to “turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.” Seven years later, while recording his fourth studio album, in 1973, Lennon had another consciousness-raising publication to hand, Robert Masters and Jean Houston’s Mind Games: The Guide To Inner Space, which would go on to inform his album’s title track.

By then, songwriters had widened their scope, moving away from religious mythology to retell folk stories and pass on the news – sometimes simply taking newspaper headlines and turning them into songs.Īs rock music came of age, so its ambitions grew, with big ideas in literature influencing big ideas on record.

Going back to the dawn of civilization, stories were songs: Homer’s celebrated epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were initially performed to the lute and serve as the bedrock of the oral tradition only later were they written down and printed in some of the world’s first books.

War of the worlds musical brave new world book