Epic Rocking: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

 

{{quote|''14. The longer a song is, the more epic it is.''|[http://www.metalstorm.net/pub/fun_comments.php?fun_id=6&page=&message_id= The 101 rules of Power Metal].}}

[[I Thought It Meant|No, relax,]] someone hasn't [[Renamed Tropes|renamed]] [[Autobots Rock Out]]. [[Biting the Hand Humor|Yet, anyway.]]

 

 

 

Done right they maintain the listener's attention, and sound really cool, sometimes [[Crowning Music of Awesome|downright awesome]]. Done poorly they just ramble, cause yawning, suffer chronic [[Ending Fatigue]] and fall squarely into [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?]] territory. Of course, it was this being done poorly that led to the awesome consequence that was the birth of Punk Rock in the 70s. Which songs are which is the source of endless [[Fan Wank|debate]]. [[Dave Barry]] advances the theory that a major purpose for these songs is that they give radio DJs time to go to the bathroom.

 

 

Contrast [[Miniscule Rocking]].

 

== Psychedelic Rock, Blues-Rock, early Heavy Metal ==

** And their live material, too. I mean, just look at the track listing for [[wikipedia:Dickchr(27)s Picks Volume 4#Track listing|Dick's Pick's Volume 4]] (Widely regarded to be the band's [[Crowning Music of Awesome]]).

** "Dark Star" in particular gets expanded a lot in live performances. The version on the aftermentioned Dick's Picks Vol. 4 is over a half-hour long, and longer versions do exist (Such as the 41 Min. version performed at the Cleveland Convention Center).

** What about "Money for Nothing" or "Love Over Gold"?

** Queen: full stop. Though the songs usually are epics with many changes of rhythm with less than 5 minutes!

** "Tenement Funster / Flick of the Wrist / Lily of the Valley" from ''Sheer Heart Attack''. Though it's listed as three separate tracks on the album, many fans consider it to be one 8-minute song.

** Bowie also has Width of a Circle which could be 15+ minutes live.

*** Never forget Cignet Committee proof that not all rockers liked the sixties.

** Also, you can't leave out live versions of "Wooden Ships", "The Other Side of This Life", and "The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil"

* Quicksilver Messenger Service: "The Fool", "Mona" (a [[Bo Diddley]] cover), "Calvary", "The Hat".

* Rainbow: "Stargazer", "A Light in the Black"

** Special mention must be given to "Catch the Rainbow", which is a not-at-all-short six and a half minutes in the studio, and gets expanded into a fifteen minute epic live song, featuring Ritchie Blackmore and Cozy Powell trying to out-awesome each other while Ronnie James Dio screams his head off. Most of their live material is like this.

* Jethro Tull: ''Thick as a Brick'' and ''A Passion Play'' each had an entire album dedicated to the eponymous songs, and both ran for over forty minutes, filling a whole LP each.. Live versions of 'Thick as a Brick' run up to 90 minutes, leading to the band opening with an epic take on 'Thick as a Brick' and, an hour and a half later, Ian Anderson saying, "And now, for our second number..." While not full-album epic, 'Baker St. Muse' clocks in at 16 minutes, and they have a number of songs in the seven or eight minute range.

* Equally surprising is the absence of Peter Frampton. "Do You Feel Like We Do" clocks in at 14:15, and he makes the guitar talk to you.

* Mountain. While classics like ''Mississippi Queen'' is up there, special mention has to be made to ''Nantucket Sleigh Ride''. The live version found on ''Twin Peaks'' is 31:42. So long it took up two sides on the LP.

** On the other end of the spectrum, there's "Jailbreak" from the ''Live at Donington'' DVD. All 14-odd minutes of it (compared to the 4:40 from the '''74 Jailbreak'' album).

** On the ''AC/DC Live'' album, "High Voltage" and "Let There be Rock" also pitch in with respectable times of 10:33 and 12:17 respectively.

** Don't forget other songs such as "Night on the Sun" and "Other People's Lives".

* George Thorogood and the Destroyers: "One Burbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (11:25 for the extended version. Bonus points for being a [[Covered Up|cover]].)

** As with many '70's [[Hard Rock]] bands, they liked to expand their songs live. Just look at the [[wikipedia:Made in Japan chr(28)albumchr(29)|lengths of the songs on this album]] and then compare it to the originals.

** Also ''April'' , at a whopping 12:03.

** The album version of "Twilight Zone" is nearly 8 minutes long

** They do this a good bit, though not to an extreme extent. On one of their compilation albums, a third of the songs are over 7 minutes.

* Traffic: "Glad", "Dear Mr. Fantasy", "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" (the latter just shy of 12 minutes and one of the longest songs This Troper has personally heard on the radio)

* Amon Duul II's album ''Yeti'' contains a whopping FOUR examples: "Soap Shop Rock" is 13 minutes, 47 seconds and sectioned, "Yeti (Improvisation)" is 18 minutes 12 seconds, "Yeti Talks To Yogi (Improvisation)" is 6:18, and "Sandoz in the Rain" is exactly 9 minutes.

 

== Hard Rock ==

** "The Song is Over" deserves special mention. It's the one song that Pete Townshend has sworn he'll never play at concert, because it would simply be impossible for four people to play all the parts it requires.

** The Live At Leeds versions of My Generation and Magic Bus clock in at 15:47 and 7:48, despite being 3 minute songs originally.

** "Paradise City" from ''Appetite'' is a possible example, considering it gets faster and faster as it goes.

* [[X Japan]]: "Dahlia," "Silent Jealousy," "Forever Love," "I.V.", "The Last Song," "Tears", "Rose of Pain".

** And then there's "Art of Life". 30 minutes studio version, 33 minutes performed live. This song can also be seen as a [[Love It or Hate It]] since, while it is the band's [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]], performing it again at 43 when injured has possibly ended Yoshiki's career as a drummer.

** Is that the [[Chessmaster]], or the [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Cheesemaster?]]

* Mother Love Bone: "Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns"

* [[Neil Young (Music)|Neil Young]]: "Cortez the Killer", "Down By The River", "Pocahontas". He and Crazy Horse stretched a live version of "Cinnamon Girl" out to over 12 minutes. He's been known to do the same with the live versions of "Sedan Delivery", "Like a Hurricane", and "Barstool Blues".

** The studio version of "Ordinary People" clocks in at 18:13. That's eighteen minutes ''without'' extended guitar solos.

* The Runaways' "Dead End Justice" and "Johnny Guitar" relative to the rest of their output: both are a little over seven minutes long. "Johnny Guitar" owes most of it's length to extensive jamming, but "Dead End Justice" has multiple sections and is almost a self-contained mini-[[Rock Opera]].

 

 

*** Compressed into an 85 kb archive. In other words, the mother of all zip bombs. The files in the archive are all identical, so its just the same piece repeated a gazillion times over.

*** Like Mel's ''Olitsky'' mentioned below, those tracks consist of several tape loops of different lengths, so the length of the song is the LCM of the loops.

** Indeed, the entire "In the Court of the Crimson King" (1969) classic album should be considered epic rocking.

** How about the B-side of the 1970 album "Lizard"? It's 23 minutes long and even has Jon Anderson of Yes.

** Also, from their later albums: "The ConstruKction of Light" (2000) - the titular song and "Lark's Tongues In Aspic Pt.4" - and "Level Five", "EleKtriK" and "Dangerous Curves" from "The Power to Believe" (2003) qualify just as well as the earlier compositions.

** "Lark's Tongues In Aspic" is actually an ongoing rock epic, spanning nearly thirty years and featuring segments on the albums ''Lark's Tongues In Aspic'', ''Three of a Perfect Pair'', and ''The ConstruKction of Light''.

** The short-lived four-piece era (1976-78) has "Mad Man Moon", "One For The Vine", "Ripples" and "Inside And Out".

** ''Animals'' has a lot of this, excluding the "Pigs on the Wing" [[Book Ends]]. "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is more like a regular song that just happens to be 11 minutes long than true [[Epic Rocking]], but "Dogs" and "Sheep" certainly qualify.

** "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast", from ''Atom Heart Mother'' also counts.

** More recent ones are "Sorrow" and "High Hopes" (from their two last albums).

** The Experience Version of "Wish You Were Here" contains a 20 minute version of Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (basically both halves played back to back). Other songs of notable length from the album are "Raving and Drooling" (12 and a half minutes) and "You've Got to Be Crazy" (18 minutes 10 seconds).

** Voyage 34 is split into 4 parts, so technically doesn't count. The 40 minute unedited version of Moonloop, however...

** What about the title song of their latest album "The Incident"? 55-minutes long, broken down into 14 parts and it takes up the ENTIRE first disc. Wow.

** And "Magnum Opus" on the Leftoverture album, which, despite being several songs in a medley, clocks in at 8:26.

* Magma has several songs that are at least 30 minutes long.

** Before [[Executive Meddling]] (of sorts) set in, "Cassandra Gemini" was supposed to be one 32 minute track. In fact, it might still count because the digital version of the album has it formatted as one track.

** The Willing Well songs. IV (and ''more'' especially with the unbelievably long Neverender Night Three version), can seem like this, but is mitigated by the fact that it is actually ''two'' songs: the second (Bron-Y-Aur) is hidden in the first.

*** The Neverender version is an hour. There's even a twenty minute long drum solo where everyone but the drummer goes backstage! "Ladies and Gentlemen, Chris Pennie!" indeed...

** The End Complete V, in a similar situation, except that the live versions aren't as long as the above

** It can be safe to call "Rudy", "Asylum", "School", "Child Of Vision", "From Now On", "Lover Boy", "Waiting So Long" and "Another Man's Wowan" mini-epics. Note that most of them are written by Rick Davies.

* Uriah Heep: "Salisbury", "The Magician's Birthday", "July Morning", "Why".

** "Paradise/The Spell", if you count both of them as one song, is 12:46. Although they are separated on the record, and the lyrics are separate for each.

** Indeed, quite a bit of material on Uriah Heep Live could count as well, such as "Gypsy", the "Rock and Roll Medley" and "Circle of Hands".

* Glass Hammer: Far too many to list. Special mention, however, has to go to "The Knight of the North," which clocks in at almost 25 minutes and required the addition of a string trio and a choir to the 9-person lineup for the most recent performance.

* Van der Graaf Generator's "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers"

* The Soft Machine's 1970 ''Third'' and Tangerine Dream's 1972 ''Zeit'' both kicked off a short-lived early-70s fad for double albums consisting of four songs, one per side. Tangerine Dream honed the concept by using just one note per song, for a total of four notes in the space of eighty minutes.

* ''Olitsky'' by Ian Mellish consists of four tape loops of slightly different lengths (around 44 minutes), that theoretically would take 1.6 million years to complete its cycle. Three excerpts of this ("Beginning Mix", "Middle Mix", and "End Mix") were compiled into a double album.

* Renaissance's average song length is probably something over seven minutes--this is including their shorter tracks. One classic, "Ashes Are Burning", clocks in at 11:21.

** The suite "Scheherazade" takes up an entire album side, and lasts 24:39.

** Utopia's "Singring and the Glass Guitar" clocks in at a modest 18:24.

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kte1mGTT-ZQ "The Greener Grass"] by Fair To Midland. It's said [[Word of God|by the band]] that it is the longest song they have written (so far), at over ten minutes.

 

== Metal ==

** By extension, the entire meta-genre of drone music almost always takes the cake in terms of length, such as pioneering drone band Earth, whose album ''Earth 2'' has two 30-minute tracks and one 15-minute track.

*** Also there's Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine, who have released only one album so far. One song is 18 minutes, the other is 7, and the first one is *deep breath* ''29 minutes long''.

* Black Metal band Sabbat usually has songs that only go from 5 to 7 minutes, but one of their tracks, The Melody of Death Mask, is ''59 minutes long''.

* French Progressive Metal band Kalisia definitely qualify, with their debut release Cybion consisting of a 70 minute epic song divided into 20 'pistes', which according to Kalisia was only done to give people some form of indexing the song, which they insist must be listened to as one huge piece.

** Their latest album, ''Death Magnetic'', is a return to form. Not one song on Death Magnetic is under 5 minutes, and only 1 is under 6 minutes ("My Apocalypse" - 5:01).

** ''Load'' also has a pair of long ones - "Bleeding Me" runs 8 minutes and "Outlaw Torn" just short of 10 minutes (and originally, available as the "Unencumbered by Manufacturing Restrictions Version" - see Epic Albums below - was close to 11 minutes).

** Showing the bad side of this trope, Kirk Hammett said that they spent a long time without playing "...And Justice For All" because "I couldn't stand watching the front row start to yawn by the eight or ninth minute."

* Many post-metal bands are like this. Rosetta has songs averaging at about 8 or 9 minutes, the longest being the final track off their debut album which is 16 minutes long. Mouth of the Architect's longest song is 15:38, and Neurosis' longest is a bit longer than that (15:58).

* [[Anthrax]]'s fifth album, ''Persistence of Time'', has 3 songs clocking in at around 7 minutes long, and 5 more than 5 and a half minutes long. However, at the same time, they [[Covered Up]] Joe Jackson's "Got The Time" and made it last some 2 and a half minutes.

* [[Manowar]]'s 27-minute (!) epic "Achilles: Agony and Ecstasy (In Eight Parts)", also a case of [[Shown Their Work]] oddly enough.

* Stoner Metal band Ocean Chief has some long tracks. Galleons from the Sun (23:03), Oden, (25:24), and Tor, (25:34). As you may have guessed, these guys have a fetish for vikings.

* [[Tool]]: "Lateralus", "Parabol/Parabola", and "Pushit" all clock in around 10 minutes or longer. The majority of their songs are no shorter than 4 minutes, and feature constantly changing time signatures, heavily symbolic lyrics, and some of the most epic (and technically challenging) drumming in metal/art rock/music history.

** Rosetta Stoned? 11 minutes, 14 if you count Lost Keys (Blame Hoffman) before it. Wings for Marie/10,000 Days? 17. 17 mothertropin' minutes. And it WORKS.

* Fantômas, another [[Mike Patton]] band, has "Surgical Sound Specimens From The Museum Of Skin (Delirium Cordía)," which takes up an entire album on its own and clocks in at nearly an hour even if you don't count the 20 minutes of respirator noise at the end.

* UneXpect tend to have rather long songs, averaging around 6 or 7 minutes, and any one of those songs will easily be one of the craziest, most intricate, hyperactive and outright bizarre pieces of music you will ever hear.

** Their Twelve Step Suite clocks in at 56:57 and features 12 parts over five songs, each on different albums, and each being fairly lengthy and epic in their own right.

** Their live shows are even more like this, as they'll often just start jamming during the instrumental sections. A prime example is the ''Live at Budokan'' version of "Beyond This Life", which adds about 8 minutes to the song. "Beyond This Life" is eleven minutes long to begin with.

*** Even more impressively, "Three Minute Warning" was the result of bassist Tony Levin threatening to quit and leave if they "didn't start jamming in three minutes." They literally did the whole thing in one take, making it up as they went.

* [[Stratovarius]]: Several across all albums but the Song "Elysium" from the album of the same name really takes the cake clocking in at 18 minutes 6 seconds long.

* [[Dragon Force]]. They topped themselves with "Soldiers of the Wasteland", which is just shy of ten minutes long. Most of their songs run about six-and-a-half to eight minutes.

** "Rediscovery Pt. 2: The New Mythology" counts as well, as it is over twelve minutes.

** On ''Iconoclast'', there is "Reign in Madness" at 8:37, "When All is Lost" at 9:10 and the title track at 10:51.

* Shadow Gallery: "The Queen of the City of Ice", "Ghostship", "Cliffhanger 2", "First Light".

* Agalloch, who have a style pretty similar to Opeth.

* Technical metal group Meshuggah ''only'' make music that embodies this trope... detuned guitar lines lance through each other at breakneck pace, and the drumming, while inhumanly symmetrical, never settles down for long. Their EP ''I'' is composed of a single, 21 minute song. The following full-length album, ''Catch Thirtythree'' is broken into tracks, but {{spoiler|at more or less arbitrary intervals... the entire album is essentially a single epic rock, ''sans'' any jamming whatsoever.}}

** And not to mention practically all of ''A Matter of Life and Death'', not just "The Longest Day". Only two of the 10 songs clock in under six minutes.

*** They seem to be taking a liking to this trope. ''Brave New World'' (before A Matter Of Life And Death) had long songs, and their latest album, ''The Final Frontier'', only has one song under 5 minutes (at 4:29). Further proof that [[Tropes Are Not Bad]].

** Even on their first album, where most of the songs were four minutes and under, they had "Phantom of the Opera".

** Used to a great extent on most recent album "The Great Misdirect" three tracks clock in at over ten minutes long ("Disease, Injury Madness" is 11:03, "Fossil Genera - A Feed From Cloud Mountain" is 12:11 and the truly epic "Swim to the Moon" is 17:54).

** And yet again on their new EP "The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues", three songs, thirty minutes.

* [[Moonsorrow]] from Finland has slowly made this their specialty in the past few years, with Verisäkeet (2005) featuring 5 songs for a total of 70 minutes, then Viides Luku - Hävitetty (2007) being only two songs but totalling 56 minutes, and finally Tulimyrsky (2008), which is officially an EP, however the title track is nearly half an hour by itself (10 minutes longer than most EP's) and with the 4 other lengthy tracks following it, it reaches 68 minutes.

** Their 2011 album ''Varjoina Kuljemme Kuolleiden Maassa'' ("As a shadow I walk the land of the dead") tones the [[Epic Rocking]] down quite a bit, but the shortest non-interlude track is still almost 12 minutes long.

* Opeth contemporaries and sometime collaborators Edge of Sanity's ''Crimson'' album is one, 40-minute long track.

** It's sequel (''Crimson II'') is longer by three minutes.

* Equilibrium gifted us with "Mana", an epic 16-minute instrumental song.

* Devil Doll's songs ''average'' around 40 minutes. Their longest is a staggering 79 minutes.

** By far their longest song is "A Pleasant Shade of Gray", which is split into 12 parts and takes up its entire album. It clocks in at 55:46.

* Lost Horizon, who sound a lot like Dream Theater, naturally have several long songs, including "The Kindgom of My Will", "Cry of a Restless Soul", and "Highlander (The One)".

* [[Gothic Metal]] band [[Type O Negative]] often reach the ten minute mark, though it's usually a parody, such as in "Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty of Infidelity," "Christian Woman," and "Black No. 1," the last two of which much shorter "radio" versions have been released.

** "Haunted", at 10:08. A much shorter instrumental version was featured in ''[[Descent]] II'' and the PSX ''Descent'' games. A longer instrumental (but still only half the length of the original) was in the ''Descent II'' [[Expansion Pack]] ''Vertigo''.

* Finnish Folk-Metal band Ensiferum does this from time to time, most notably with "Lai Lai Hei", which changes musical styles and tempos many times times in its 7:15 run.

* [[Fan Nickname|Djent]] band Periphery chose to close their 73-minute debut album with a 15-minute epic titled "Racecar". LOTS of guitar solos, high singing and technical riffage.

** Just barely beating "Pigs Of The Roman Empire" by 30 seconds is "Hands First Flower", which is technically a solo piece by one-time member Joe Preston (as a tongue-in-cheek nod to [[Kiss]] doing the same thing, they had put out 4 solo EP's under the Melvins name in one year): It's much more in line with drone metal than the rest of their material, which makes sense because Joe Preston had joined the band just after leaving the already mentioned Earth.

* Pelican, as a post-metal band, has song lengths averaging around 8 minutes, with outliers like the EP version of "March Into The Sea" (which clocks in at 20:28).

* Slough Feg's Ape Uprising clocks in at 10:02 and half of the track consists of guitar duels.

* [[Gamma Ray (Music)|Gamma Ray]] has Insurrection at 11:33 and Heading for Tomorrow at 14:32

** Also, Edguy frontman Tobias Sammet's project [[Avantasia]] has a few more: "The Seven Angels" (14:17) and "The Scarecrow" (11:12) beat the 10-minute mark, with "The Tower" (9:43), "Stargazers" (9:33) and "The Wicked Symphony" (9:28) not far behind.

* [[Bathory]] have many epic tracks such as Blood Fire Death (10:28), Shores in Flames (11:07), One Rode to Asa Bay (10:23), Twilight of the Gods (14:02) and many more.

** It's note worthy that some of their songs are actually trimmed down from the album version for the music videos & radio play. Some examples are "Afterlife", "Bat Country" and "The Beast & The Harlot".

* [[Savatage]] toes the line in length. While their longest songs range from seven ("Alone You Breathe") to ten ("Morphine Child") minutes long, they are as complicated in change of pace and tone as other examples here.

* Cathedral provide a 27 minute song titled "The Garden" from their album "The Garden of Unearthly Delights".

* Death metal band Nile have quite a few: "To Dream of Ur" from the album "Black Seeds Of Vengeance" clocks in at over 9 minutes, "Wrought" and "Extinct" from their "In The Beginning" compilation are 8 3/4 and 9+ minutes respectively, "Unas Slayer Of The Gods" from "In Their Darkened Shrines" is 11:43 (and the four-part title track totals about 18 minutes), "User-Maat-Re," "Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten," and the title track from "Annihilation Of The Wicked" are 9 1/4, 9 3/4, and a little over 8 1/2 minutes long respectively, "What Can Safely Be Written" and "Even The Gods Must Die" from "Ithyphallic" are 8 1/4 and 10 minutes long respectively, and "4th Arra Of Dagon" and the title track from "Those Whom The Gods Detest" run 8:40 and 8:06 respectively. Couple this with their tendency to write songs with absurdly long names ("Libation Unto the Shades Who Lurk in the Shadows of the Temple of Anhur," "Invocation of the Gate of Aat-Ankh-es-en-Amenti," "Dusk Falls Upon the Temple of the Serpent on the Mount of Sunrise," "Chapter of Obeisance Before Giving Breath to the Inert One in the Presence of the Crescent Shaped Horns," "Papyrus Containing the Spell to Preserve Its Possessor Against Attacks from He Who Is in the Water," "Permitting the Noble Dead to Descend to the Underworld," and "Yezd Desert Ghul Ritual in the Abandoned Towers of Silence") and they pretty much qualify.

* Swedish Progressive Metal band Seventh Wonder has an average song length of around 6 minutes, many surpassing such, but the title track to their 2010 album "The Great Escape" clocks in at 30:21.

* Japanese symphonic power metal band [[Versailles]] have "The Love from a Dead Orchestra", "History of the Other Side", "God Palace -Method of Inheritance-", "Princess -Revival of Church-" and "Faith & Decision" (the longest of the lot at 16-and-a-half minutes). A few of their other songs are over 6 minutes long.

* Progressive Neo Classical Guitarrist George Bellas with his 2009's album, "Step Into The Future", the whole album is one song that runs for 1 hour, 15 minutes and 22 seconds

* There's actually a progressive and power metal Internet radio station called [http://www.epicrockradio.com Epic Rock Radio]. Unsurprisingly, it features a LOT of these.

 

 

* The [[wikipedia:Free jazz|Free Jazz]] subgenre largely does away with fixed tempos, chord changes, harmonic structures in favor of simultaneous improvised soloing. It tends to be (but is not always) fast, loud, chaotic, and frenetic. The pieces also tend to be 20+ minutes long. It's an epic experience that one endures as much as enjoys. The epicness is especially apparent in any of the large-ensemble Free Jazz pieces along the lines of John Coltrane's ''Ascension'', Peter Brötzmann's ''Machinegun'', and Ornette Coleman's seminal ''Free Jazz: a Collective Improvisation''. Many of these kinds of pieces feature multiple drummers and walls of horns each blasting their own disparate riffs and solos.

* [[Sun Ra]] took a trip to Saturn.

 

 

* [[Sigur Ros]]: The final track on ''( )'', especially.

** Almost the entire album of ''Tak...''. Notable examples include "Milano" at 10 minutes and "Glosoli" which, alas, is only 6 and a half, but it truly is an epic rocking.

** On the vinyl version of ''Yanqui U.X.O.,'' "09-15-00" and "09-15-00 (Continued)" are merged as one 22-minute track, thus making the ''shortest'' song on any GY!BE album "The Dead Flag Blues," at 16-minutes in length.

* Mogwai: "Like Herod," "Mogwai Fear Satan," "Christmas Steps," "My Father, My King"....

* [[Slint]]: Most of the songs on ''Spiderland''.

* [[Talk Talk]]: Most of both ''Spirit of Eden'' and ''Laughing Stock''.

 

 

== Pop ==

** Then, of course, there's the Jacksons' ''Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)'', clocking in at just under 8 minutes.

 

== Jam Bands ==

 

== Punk ==

* "Nothing Left Inside", "Scream" and "Three Nights" by [[Black Flag]]

* "24 Beats Off" and various instrumental riffs by Fugazi.

* "Another World" by Richard Hell & the Voidoids (8:12)

* "Shut Down" by The Germs (9:30), unusual in being a slow, dirge-like, proto-[[Music/Grunge|Grunge]] song rather than The Germs more usual fast and sloppy (yet vaguely arty) material.

* [[The Verve]]: the unedited versions of "Gravity Grave" (plus the Glastonbury '93 live version from ''No Come Down'') and "She's a Superstar", "Feel", "Virtual World", "Butterfly" (the original ''A Storm in Heaven'' version and the acoustic B-side from ''No Come Down''), "One Way to Go", "So It Goes", "A Northern Soul", "Drive You Home", "(Reprise)", "Bittersweet Symphony", "The Rolling People", "Catching the Butterfly", "Come On" (nominally 6 minutes, artificially extended to 15 thanks to the [[Hidden Track]]).

* [[Bruce Springsteen]] routinely wrote sprawling, epic numbers, often intended to be live show-stoppers. These include "Jungleland", "Racing in the Street", "Incident on 57th Street", "Rosalita", "New York City Serenade", "Kitty's Back" and "Backstreets". Often, shorter songs like "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", "Mary's Place", and "The E-Street Shuffle" were stretched to incredible twenty-minute-plus lengths live.

** They pushed the trope even farther on ''Third Stage'' with "The Launch/Cool The Engines"; a similar extended quasi-symphonic instrumental intro to a lively rocker. "Can'tcha Say (You Believe in Me)/Still in Love" also qualifies; only this time the instrumental is the coda rather than intro.

** "A Man I'll Never Be" is pretty long (6 minutes) compared to the other songs on the album.

** Add "It Better End Soon", "Ballet For A Girl In Buchannan", "Devil's Sweet", <s> much of</s> 18 out of 23 tracks on ''Chicago III'' ("Sing A Mean Tune Kid", the Travel Suite, An Hour in the Shower, Elegy), [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psHpgomSisg "Poem 58"], "A Song For Richard And His Friends", and both parts of "Aire" together (the prelude, and the main track).

** More from ''Transit Authority'': first, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpYeqlvLAxQ "Beginnings"]. That song is absolutely ''nothing'' without the crossfade into the percussion jam. Moving on, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lghDG9vYfRQ "South California Purples"], their drum solo-licious cover of [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72NMsRyD-6Q "I'm a Man"], and for the avant-garde nerds, Terry Kath's [[Mind Screw|"Free Form Guitar"]] runs the table for Side 3.

** Also, Exogenesis. Split into 3 parts to avoid fatigue.

** And "Unnatural Selection", which is just shy of seven minutes long.

** And "Citizen Erased", at over 7 minutes long.

* [[Elton John]]: "Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding", "Carla/Etude/Chloe", "Tonight", "It's Hay Chewed", "Empty Sky", "Madman Across the Water" (particularly a 9-minute version unreleased until as a bonus track on ''Tumbleweed Connection''), "Indian Sunset"

* "Death Bed" by [[Relient K]] is over 10 minutes long. Of course this is to be expected with a song that tells the story of a man's life.

* Wilco, "Spiders (Kidsmoke)". Turns into [[Epic Jamming]] when performed live.

* [[Bob Dylan]] has done a number of long songs over the years: "Desolation Row", "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", "Hurricane", etc.

** Highlands, which lasts over 17 minutes.

** Tori has made a lot more epics, including "Yes, Anastasia" (9:33), "Little Earthquakes" (6:53), "Apollo's Frock" (8:14), "Lady in Blue" (7:12), "Garlands" (8:21), and most infamously, her cover of "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" ('''9:55''').

* Kings of Leon: "Knocked Up", 7:10 long.

* [[Sonic Youth]] - "Expressway to Yr. Skull", "Teen Age Riot", "The Sprawl", "'Cross the Breeze", "Trilogy", "Tunic (Song for Karen)", "Washing Machine", "The Diamond Sea" (both versions), "Female Mechanic Now on Duty", "Wildflower Soul", "Hits of Sunshine (for Allen Ginsberg)", "Karen Koltrane", "Free City Rhymes", "[[Stream X Sonik]] Subway", "NYC Ghosts & Flowers", "Disconnection Notice", "Rain on Tin", "Karen Revisited", "Sympathy for the Strawberry", "The Dripping Dream", "I Love You Golden Blue", "Massage the History", and so on.

* Brazilian band Legião Urbana has "Faroeste Caboclo" ("[[wikipedia:Caboclo|Caboclo]] Western]]"), a 9 minute long song, with 159 verses telling the story of a boy that goes to Brasília and becomes a criminal. They managed to surpass it with 11-minute long "Metal Contra as Nuvens".

* The Dears, a Montreal indie band. Particularly, on their 2004 album ''No Cities Left'', only three of eleven songs clock in at under five minutes, and even those have a grand orchestral sweep to them.

* [[MGMT]] have a couple of long, multipart songs: "Metanoia" is almost 14 minutes, while "Siberian Breaks" is a little over 12.

* [[Billy Idol]]'s [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWdCXa2MB6M "Don't Need a Gun"] (6:16).

* [[Billy Joel]]'s "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant". Runs about twelve minutes, from ballad to honky-tonk to a fast-paced rocker, back to ballad.

* "So Many Men, So Little Time" by Miquel Brown (8:14)

* Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park Suite" is 17:40.

* Canadian indie rock band Wintersleep has several epic songs: "Motion" on the ''Wintersleep'' album, which begins with a single acoustic guitar chord being strummed once per bar, and ends with distorted guitars colliding with a 35mm film synchronizer being tortured. The ''Untitled'' album has "Nerves Normal, Breath Normal" which segues out of another song and goes on for 7:23, including a lengthy jam and a drum solo, and "Danse Macabre" which starts as a fairly straightforward hard rock song, then turns into a quiet jam, and ends with the drummer wildly crashing his cymbals at high speed. ''Welcome To The Night Sky'' ends with "Miasmal Smoke & The Yellow Bellied Freaks", an 8-minute long song that shifts through instrumental moods before becoming a high-tempo rock song, then becomes a 2-minute prolonged outro.

* J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. recorded a 15 minute epic cover "Maggot Brain" with Mike Watt and Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic.

* "The Jojo Burger Tempest" by Working for a Nuclear Free City. A 30 minute track consisting the leftovers of when they were recording the album of the same name.

* Brand New's ''Limousine (MS Rebridge)'' is 7 minutes and 42 seconds long.

* "Enough Is Enough" by Silkworm is an 8 minute, 14 second long multi-section crescendo.

* Many of [[Jeff Buckley]]'s live performances of his songs end like this. See the eight minute long version of "Dream Brother" from "Live á l'Olympia" for a good example

* Canadian singer/songwriter [[Matthew Good]] tends to have one of these per album since he went solo. ''Avalanche'' has two, "Avalanche" and "Near Fantastica", ''White Light Rock and Roll Review'' has "Blue Skies Over Bad Lands"<ref> And "Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra", but only because of a hidden song</ref>, ''Hospital Music'' has the opening track "Champions of Nothing", ''Vancouver'' has "The Vancouver National Anthem" and "Empty's Theme Park", and ''Lights of Endangered Species'' has "Non Populus".

 

 

== Folk ==

* [[Bob Dylan]]'s song "Desolation Row" is about ten minutes, and is one of the few true folk songs on his album Highway 61 Revisited.

* At over nine minutes, Bert Jansch's [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE_ZyGHKsmc version of 'Jack Orion'] was unprecedented among British folk traditionalists in 1966. Four years later he [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb-eYuk0cXg rerecorded the song] with his band Pentangle...and doubled the length again until it took up an entire side of vinyl.

* Iron & Wine has a few, but "The Trapeze Swinger" is notable for being both over ten minutes long, and featuring no repeating chorus. Just verse after verse strung together to a lilting acoustic melody.

* [[Danielson]]'s "Deeper than the Gov't" is divided into three tracks on the CD, but they flow together as a single, 9-minute song. And "Joking at the Block" is raga-inspired piece that lasts for 12 minutes.

 

 

* The Sugarhill Gang, setting the norm for rap with the 14 minute, 35 seconds ''Rapper's Delight''.

* DJ Shadow: "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt", "Changeling", "Stem/Long Stem", "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain", "In/Flux", "What Does Your Soul Look Like" and "Blood on the Motorway".

** It currently has about 22 parts and a total running time of '''ONE HOUR AND 24 MINUTES'''.

* ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCUiG9aZSh8 Demain, c'est loin]'', by French group IAM has epic ''rapping'', clocking at about 9 minutes of continuous rhyming one after another. (Then again they ''are'' five people.)

** Rapper Akhenaton, of IAM fame, closed his album "Soldats de Fortune" with "La Fin De Leur Monde", a ten-minute (and very eloquent) rant against world politics carried by Akhenaton and fellow member of IAM, Shurik'n.

 

 

== Electronic / Industrial ==

* [[Burial]]'s remixes of the [[Massive Attack]] songs "Four Walls" and "Paradise Circus" are both over 10 minutes long.

** The two part piece "Kometenmelodie" from the same album.

** "Trans Europe Express/Metall auf Metall/Abzug" is a total of 14 minutes.

** Sometimes their studio albums employ [[Fading Into the Next Song]], and the band will then treat the entire song suite as a single epic song at live shows. For example, "Lush / Impact / Remind", and "Way Out / Spare Parts Express / Know Where to Run".

** Their EP ''The Box'' had 4 different alternate mixes of the title song. Later, for the second disc of the American release of ''In Sides'', all four of these tracks were strung together as a single 28-minute track.

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GqRsmffeVI "Escape Velocity"] by The Chemical Brothers is 12 minutes long. Since every track on the new album will be accompanied by short films, and segue into each-other, it can be assumed to be an epic album with every track that long.

* [[Erasure]], mostly known for three-to-four-minute, fast-paced synthpop, released a self-titled album in 1995 that was "influenced by Pink Floyd and prog rock". The average song length is seven minutes, and the longest is the 10:06 head-trip ballad "Rock Me Gently". ([[Zig Zagged Trope|Which was later given a stronger beat, remixed into a four-minute pop song and released as a single.]])

* [[Jean Michel Jarre]] has so many pieces of music which are longer than five minutes that many fans count only his three famous suites from the 80s as "epic": "Ethnicolor" and "Rendez-vous 2", both of which are almost twelve minutes long, and "Industrial Revolution" which exceeds 16 minutes.

* [[Nine Inch Nails]] have a few that pass 6 minutes in length, most notably "Closer" (6:12), and "Reptile" (6:54) off [[Magnum Opus|The Downward]] [[Concept Album|Spiral]], "We're In This Together" (7:16) off [[Double Album|The Fragile]] and "Zero Sum" (6:14) off [[Concept Album|Year Zero]]. Also, some shorter songs become longer live, such as the version of "The Day the Whole World Went Away" (6:30 live vs. 4:32 studio) on ...And All That Could Have Been.

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qycAC_6Bbto Delerium & Sarah MacLachlan - Silence (DJ Tiesto remix)] is 11:34. Epic trance indeed.

 

 

== Defies category ==

* [[Frank Zappa]] doesn't quite fit squarely into any genre, but some of his songs clocked in at over 20 minutes, most notably the song "Billy The Mountain", a song about a mountain that tries to go on vacation with his wife, a tree named Ethel, but his large size leaves a path of destruction in his wake. He also wrote complex jazz pieces like "Willie the Pimp" or "Son of Mr. Green Genes".

* [[Foetus]] has "Slung", which is notably an 11 minute swing song in the middle of an industrial rock album.

** You may also include "Negative Energy" from Jim Thirwell's You've Got Foetus On Your Breath era, clocking at 15:55, although the last 12 or so minutes are just sustained feedback.

** Similarly, ''The Great Barrier Reefer'' by Bongripper. One song, clocking in at 1:19:23.

* ''Light of Day, Day of Darkness'' by Green Carnation

* ''Misplaced Childhood'', ''Brave'' and ''Marbles'' by [[Marillion]].

* ''Freak Out!'', ''Absolutely Free'' and ''We're Only in It for the Money'' by [[Frank Zappa]] and the Mothers of Invention.

* The suite on side two of ''Abbey Road'' by [[The Beatles]], if taken as one song.

* [[Sufjan Stevens]]. Nearly all of his albums are at least an hour long. ''Songs for Christmas, Vol V'' clocked in at a mere 11 tracks and 35 minutes; most would consider this a full album, but he marketed it as an EP.

* ''Ys'' by [[Joanna Newsom]]. The shortest song is seven minutes.

** And the longest(and best example of this as it is actually composed of many unfinished pieces and one complete piece) is seventeen minutes.

* ''Thick as a Brick'' and ''A Passion Play'' by [[Jethro Tull]], the former being an [[Affectionate Parody]] of the trope and the latter more serious.

* ''A Night at the Opera'' by [[Queen]]. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the more mainstream rock songs there.

* Fate's Warning's "A Pleasant Shade Of Grey", which was originally meant to be one song, but split up into 6 songs.

* ''Sandinista!''by [[The Clash]]. A triple-LP lasting nearly two and a half hours.

* Every album by [[Summoning]] (bar their first one, ''Lugburz''). Most of their songs are 7 minutes or more, but special mention goes to "Land of the Dead", a beautifully melancholic piece that goes on for 13 minutes.

* [[Yes]]: ''Relayer''. 3 songs. at 40:28. "The Gates of Delirium" alone is over 20 minutes long.

* Chris Butler's "The Devil Glitch", at 69 minutes.

* Emerson, Lake and Palmer's ''Brain Salad Surgery''. The main track on the album called "Karn Evil 9" is nearly half an hour long, and is split over 2 sides of the album (the entire second side is devoted to the track, but there is a part on the first side).

** The following album, ''The Final Frontier'', is similar, eventually clocking at 76 minutes, and having an 11-minute long song.

* Japanese drone/stoner metal band Boris has a few: ''Absolutego'' is one 65-minute song; ''Flood'' is one 70-minute song; and ''Feedbacker'' is a 43-minute suite.

* Freaky Chakra's ''Lowdown Motivator'' and ''Moonroof Operator'' albums each have several long multiple-track suites, while ''Blacklight Fantasy'' segues all of its songs into a continuous mix. As for the songs themselves, "Peace Fixation" and "Light Dark Light" from the first album are 14:07 and 10:30, respectively.

* Lindstrom's ''Where You Go I Go Too'' features 3 songs over 55 minutes, which is outlandish even by disco standards.

** Then comes the infamous ''Lulu'' with [[Lou Reed]], which is long enough to be spread across two disks. 5 songs are over 7 minutes long (3 of which are over ''11 minutes''').

* Anything by ambient electronica group Dilate. ''Cyclos'' had to have its songs compressed to fit on a single CD, while ''Octagon'' is a 2 1/2 hour double album. Most of the songs are over 10 minutes long.

* Swans had a habit of doing this on live albums and on later studio albums. ''White Light from the Mouth of Infinity'' doesn't feature a single song under 5 minutes in length. ''Public Castration Is a Good Idea'' features lengthy, huge-sounding live renditions of works from their mid-80s albums, ''Swans Are Dead'' is a collection of two epic shows from tours they performed near the end of their career, and ''Soundtracks for the Blind'', oft considered their magnum opus by fans, is a 2 and a half hour double CD of lengthy, dark, atmospheric post-rock epics.

* Miles Davis's ''Pangaea'' has only two songs: Gondwana (46 minutes) and Zimbabwe (41 minutes).

* Psychedelic rock band Acid Mothers Temple frequently does this, with their debut being a 53-minute song. It ends with two minutes of [[Leave the Camera Running|loud beeping.]]

* Parodied in the [[Homestar Runner]] CD "Strong Bad Sings", with "Moving Very Slowly", a metal song with a very long outro which fades out, then fades back in and finishes.

* Parodied in ''[[This Is Spinal Tap]]'' with "Jazz Odyssey".

** "You Don't Love Me Anymore" isn't a true example; the song is only 4 minutes long. It just looks longer on a CD thanks to the 10 minute filler for the [[Easter Egg|bonus track]] "Bite me", which is just [[Last-Note Nightmare|a cacophony of screaming and instrument bashing]] designed to scare anyone who accidentally left their CD player on after the song ended.

* Jello Biafra/ Ministry side project Lard have "70's Rock Must Die", which lyrically is a rant against 70's nostalgia, and musically is 7 minutes of parodying 70's hard rock tropes (gratuitous cowbell, endless guitar soloing, a power ballad style bridge, vocal histrionics, and of course an [[Overly Long Gag]] of an ending). They also have debatable straight examples with the 15 minute "I Am Your Clock" and the 32 minute "Time To Melt" (debatable in that neither really go through a lot of changes, they're just deliberately punishingly slow)

** [[MIDI]] files and [[Chiptune|Chiptunes]] can also produce long playbacks from small files.

** "SSI Intro" by Purple Motion of the Future Crew is 11:52. "Progressive Funk" by Moby(not ''that'' [[Moby]]) is also 12 minutes.

** Justin Bieber's 'U Smile' got the same treatment, which made the rounds mid-2010 (although it [[Digital Piracy Is Evil|seems to have disappeared]]).