Songs with a Story

Plus Upcoming Music Releases for Fantasy RPG Fans & Blister Critters

Songs with a Story

Far Out magazine published an article this month that listed “underrated songs with a story.” The introduction to the piece has the following vague reference to roleplaying games:

“A good song with a story stays with you. They weave their way into your psyche to such an extent that you go around spotting the Eleanor Rigbys of this world on public transport like a roleplaying game of Where’s Wally set in a failed society. These short stories captivate us and never get tiring with repeated listens—they are fables for the pop culture age.”

Their list includes songs by well regarded lyricists like Randy Newman, Tom Waits, and Loudon Wainwright III. A list of my favorite songs with a story would include “Then Came the Last Days of May” by Blue Öyster Cult, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot, and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band.¹

Ted Gioia would classify these songs as “Narrative” songs according to the following taxonomy he described in a fascinating article he recently published in his The Honest Broker newsletter:

I’m told that there are 1,200 different music genres.

What a mess—we’d be better off ditching most of those categories. And I plan to write about this foolish way of compartmentalizing music in the future.

But today, let me simplify things for you. I can reduce all this confusion to three kinds of popular song. And they haven’t changed in thousands of years.

Go ahead and listen to a million pop tunes. You can always fit them into one of these three categories:

• The LYRIC song expresses an emotion or mood.

• The NARRATIVE song tells a story or conveys information.

• The DANCE song gets people moving—and doesn’t even need words.

Paid subscribers to The Honest Broker can read the full article here.

Upcoming Music Releases for Fantasy RPG Fans

Two new releases have been announced that I think might appeal to fans of fantasy literature and RPGs…

Heavy Temple - Garden of Heathens

Check out the cool cover artwork for Heavy Temple’s upcoming new album:

I love their previous album Lupi Amoris, which featured amazing vocals from High Priestess Nighthawk. She sounds equally powerful on “Extreme Indifference to Life,” the first single from the new album. You can listen to it and pre-order the Garden of Heathens album here:

Castle Rat - Into The Realm

The band Castle Rat describes themselves as follows:

“Castle Rat is a Medieval Fantasy Doom Metal band led by the Rat Queen on a mission to expand and defend ‘The Realm’ from those who seek to destroy it. She is joined by The Count, The Plague Doctor, and The Druid. Together they face the relentless wrath of their arch nemesis: Death Herself — ‘The Rat Reaperess.’”

You can preview two of their songs from their upcoming album Into the Realm here:

Blister Critters - RPG Outro Music

Let’s wrap up this week’s newsletter with some outro music. Dave Thaumavore interviewed Anthony Grasso and Wythe Marschall, the co-creators of the upcoming RPG Blister Critters. The game is described as a “mutant cartoon animal TTRPG” and has a music-related mechanic for game session outro music:

15. Another really great idea for a session mentioned in the quickstart is the “End Credits” portion, where at the end of a session an outro song is played. This is one of many places where I thought “Why didn’t I think of that?” Where did you come up with having an outro song for your sessions, and have you used such a song with other RPGs as well?

Tony: When Blister Critters was first being developed, I had just wrapped up running a 90s, Earthbound-esque, homebrewed/systemless campaign called Goodvale (also set in suburbia!). The vibes were HEAVY and we, me and my players, would frequently dress up and decorate. This included finding fun music to play during games! It was a clear sign for me, games are more than the rules being followed, it’s also the vibe at the table. As Blister Critters is a cartoon you can play, all good cartoons have a killer intro and memorable outro. Courage the Cowardly Dog is the first one that comes to mind for me. It’s just another step towards giving players the coolest experience possible, and one that doesn’t really require any prep or effort.

Wythe: This is all Tony! I love music and use it in games occasionally, but I’ve never mechanicalized it. One reason I love Blister Critters so much is that it adds a lot of smart, simple, optional rules to the Grit System, ones that we can easily try out in our flagship sci-fi game or the in-development fantasy games.

You can read the whole interview here:

What makes Blister Critters such a blast?

1. Favorite songs with “story” song titles would include “Stories for Boys” by U2 and “Stories of the Street” and “Story of Isaac” by Leonard Cohen. Favorite song by Stories is “Brother Louie” I guess.