(Credits: Far Out / Tom Waits / Alamy / Press)
Right now, we are living through hard and troubled times—times riddled with war and war crimes, the dangerously visible impacts of a devastating climate crisis, a growing divide between the left and the right, and an ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots. Every day, we’re met with fresh reminders that things aren’t as they should be—or, as the great Sister Rosetta Tharpe put it, strange things are happening every day.
But then, she sang those words all the way back in 1944. Things have only gotten stranger since then, and plenty of music has reflected that changing strangeness, either through its lyrics or through the use of a novel soundscape. Music has always been around to capture the eccentricities of the world, reflecting the impact of the times on the people.
Music has always been an important tool in helping us navigate difficult times; it gives us something solid to hold onto when the world around us feels funky. Sometimes, though, music can get just as strange as the times that we’re living in.
Whether in the audial experimentation from composers like John Cage or Philip Glass; the melange of world music that meets together on albums like Jackie Mclean and Michael Carvin’s Antiquity, or the out-of-this-world trip of Sun Ra’s Space is the Place; in the avant-garde freak-outs from Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Diamanda Galás, or alternately in the dreamy weirdness of groups like The Flaming Lips, artists have always had a knack for pushing the limits of perception, reality and, on occasion, the listeners’ patience. Creativity is a strange thing itself, and it’s no wonder that for talents as varied as Tom Waits and Randy Newman to Billie Eilish, Celeste and Olivia Rodrigo, strangeness has always tickled their curiosity.
The 10 greatest ‘strange’ songs in history:
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