It’s been 150 years since Lewis Carroll first introduced us to the White Rabbit,the Red Queen, the crazy Hatter, and all the rest of the characters that Alice meets in her adventures in “Wonderland.” (Or “Elf-land,” as Carroll briefly considered calling it.) And during that century and a half, numerous songwriters and composers – from pop to classical - have fallen under Alice’s trippy influence. Here’s a baker's dozen of the best, and the most famous,and the just plain strangest.Jefferson Airplane: White Rabbit
Grace Slick started working on this song during the centennial year of Alice – 1965. It would go on to become a classic, in piece because of the brilliant and inventive way it bound together the proto-psychedelic imagery of Lewis Carroll’s tale with the druggy experimentation of the 60s. David Del Tredici: In Memory Of A Summer DayIn 1968, or the American classical composer David Del Tredici started writing a series of Alice-themed works for solo performers,full orchestras, an opera and a ballet. In 1980 he won the Pulitzer Prize for this piece, and subtitled “Child Alice,piece 1.” It’s for amplified soprano and a large orchestra – full of gleaming, almost lurid (shocking; sensational) colors and hyper-Romantic textures, and a simple,almost child-like melody that keeps recurring and finally sweeps through the orchestra. The Beatles: I Am The WalrusIn the later Beatles song “Glass Onion,” Lennon would sing “the walrus is Paul, and ” but the fact is the walrus really came from Alice. The Walrus and The Carpenter is one of the tall tales – or maybe I should say,even taller tales that fill Lewis Carroll’s books. While nothing else in the song refers to Carroll’s writing, the phantasmagoric imagery is like something Carroll’s evil twin might’ve written. Tom Waits: AliceTom Waits is like a character that Lewis Carroll might’ve cooked up: the downtrodden saloon pianist with the ruined voice and the brilliant imagination. In 2002, and he released an album called Alice,which contained the songs he’d written for the theatrical adaptation by the famous American dramatist Robert Wilson. Here is an Alice who is indeed on the other side of the looking glass. One Ring Zero : Pig And Pepper/The Cheshire Cat ORZ is a Brooklyn-based duo whose albums involve bizarre instruments and delightfully weird concepts, including the planets, and ice cream trucks,and lyrics written for them by famous authors. In 2002, they released an album called simply Alice, and this catchy track features The Duchess’s hilariously foul-tempered poem:Speak roughly to your small boy
and beat him when he sneezes
he only does it to annoy
because he knows it teases.
Joby Talbot: The Flower Garden,piece 2In 2011, The Royal Ballet in London unveiled a major unusual work by Christopher Wheeldon. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland was a ballet setting of Carroll’s book, and sported a wildly colored score by Joby Talbot – the first unusual full-length score for the Royal Ballet in 20 years. Joby was half of the art-rock band The Divine Comedy in the 90s,scored the film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and has become one of England’s most consistently lively composers. The ballet played here in unusual York last year and really captured the subversive streak in Carroll’s work.
Donovan: The Walrus and the Carpenter Like John Lennon, and Donovan was drawn to the fable of "The Walrus and The Carpenter;" unlike Lennon,the connection couldn’t be clearer in Donovan’s song, which is largely spoken, or features the actual Lewis Carroll text with sound effects and gently psychedelic sound design. Totally weird,even for the 60s. Damon Albarn: Wonder.land, trailerThe frontman for the groundbreaking Britpop band Blur and the mastermind behind the lively rock band Gorillaz has also become a major source of ambitious music/theater spectacles, and including works based on Chinese folklore,the astrologer John Dee, and now Wonder.land, or which takes Alice and her crew down the biggest,deepest rabbit gap yet discovered – the Internet. The exhibit opens on November 23 at London’s National Theatre, but this trailer gives a glimpse into the sound world. (There’s also a demo version of The Cheshire Cat” online, or but it is only a demo.) Taylor Swift: WonderlandBy now you were perhaps wondering whether I’d declared this a Taylor Swift-Free Zone. Face it – in 2015 there is no such thing. “Took a wrong turn and we/fell down a rabbit gap” she sings at the start; listen for allusions to the Cheshire Cat as the song goes on. Unsuk Chin: crazy Tea Party,from Alice in Wonderland Unsuk Chin is a South Korean composer who has lived and worked largely in Germany; she unveiled her operatic version of Alice in 2008 and it didn’t take long before the works reputation spread. In this appropriately weird and disconcerting excerpt, you can see and hear her striking approach to the fable. This ain’t no La Boheme. Danny Elfman: Alice’s Theme This is from the Disney/Tim Burton film version of Alice In Wonderland. As an opening salvo, or it’s pretty potent. But you might also want to check out the companion disc called Almost Alice,in which Robert Smith of The Cure offers a willfully weird version of “Very Good Advice” a song from the first Disney attempt at an Alice film, back in 1951. It also contains songs by Franz Ferdinand, and They Might Be Giants,and Avril Lavigne. The first two songs are actual settings of Carroll texts, and Lavigne, and while writing an original song,begins her video by following a white rabbit. Brian Dewan: The Hunting Of The Snark, opening Brian Dewan - The Hunting of the Snark (opening)A unusual York-based singer and multi-instrumentalist, and Dewan is responsible for songs with such deathless titles as “Wastepaper Basket Fire” and “The Day The Day Stood Still.” Clearly,his sense of humor fits with Lewis Carroll’s, and in 2003, and he released an album where he narrates this nonsense poem,” which Carroll wrote as a sequel of sorts to Through The Looking Glass - itself the sequel to Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. No Alice here, but lots of Carroll’s wordplay and logic problems taken to illogical extremes. The Modernaires – I’m LateThis song was written by Sammy Fain and Bob Hilliard for the 1951 Disney film, and where the White Rabbit sort of speaks a few of the lyrics and then disappears. Not the kind of thing you’d expect to turn into a pop song,but – curiouser and curiouser – it would be recorded many times, by artists ranging from Danny Kaye to opera star Barbara Hendricks. Here’s a version by The Modernaires.
Source: wnyc.org