Chris Boucher stops by Melville House

While on a summer road-trip to promote his debut novel How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, Christopher Boucher and his wife Lisa Bastoni wrote this beautiful duet as a theme-song for the novel. It’s titled “Shimmies and Shakes.”

Shimmies and Shakes – “HOW TO KEEP YOUR VOLKSWAGEN ALIVE” Theme Song by Melville House

(For more of the music that inspired the novel and kept Boucher and Bastoni company on their journey, check out Boucher’s playlist at the always delightful lit/music blog, Large Hearted Boy.)

Which made us wonder… what other songs inspired by literature? Here’s a list from Books Worth Reading. Anything they’re missing?

• “Golden Slumbers” by The Beatles, inspired by the poem “Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes” by Thomas Dekker
• “Clocks” by Coldplay, inspired by William Tell by Friedrich Schiller
• “Rain King” by Counting Crows, inspired by Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
• “Yeat’s Grave” by The Cranberries, inspired by the poetry of William Butler Yeats
• “Guinnevere” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, inspired by La Morte d’Arthur
• “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits
• “All Along the Watchtower” by Bob Dylan, inspired by Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” by Bob Dylan, inspired by The Hamletby William Faulkner
• “Tangled Up in Blue” by Bob Dylan, inspired by Dante’s Inferno
• “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel, inspired by 45 Mercy Street by Anne Sexton
• “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane, inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” by Elton John, inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• “Battle of Evermore,” “Ramble On” and “Misty Mountain Hop” by Led Zeppelin, inspired by The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by The Police, inspired by Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procul Harem, inspired by The Canterbury Tales
• “Sympathy for the Devil” by The Rolling Stones, inspired by The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgako
• “Kid Charlemagne” by Steely Dan, inspired by The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
• “Sister Moon” by Sting, inspired by Sonnet XXXV by William Shakespeare
• “My Ride’s Here” by Warren Zevon, inspired by the poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson