The 10 best songs over 10 minutes long
When music is good, it fills short gaps in time, the backing track to a handful of minutes. But when it’s great, it bends time – not filling gaps, but marching determinedly over them for as long as it’s the artist wants. Pioneering musicians, such as Nina Simone, can use time as a tool for sculpting art without letting it become a limitation for their work.
Our ranking of the ten best time-benders over ten minutes owes a lot to the advent of prog rock in the 1960s. As traditional rock’s more experimental bedfellow, prog allowed for a lot more ambitious composition work, conceptual storytelling, and, frankly, more time dedicated to exploring the capabilities of each instrument featured on a song.
But metal and blues have also produced a few ten-minute classics, which are naturally very guitar-focused for the duration. The real trick, though, is producing a longer song that holds an audience’s attention for its entirety.
If you’re going the longer song route, you’ll effectively nix any chances of radio play without an aggressive edit, so only a select few manage to make something impactful that doesn’t leave listeners twiddling their thumbs. From Jane’s Addiction to Pink Floyd, check out our ranking of the best to do it below.
The 10 best songs over 10 minutes:
10. ‘Three Days’ – Jane’s Addiction (10:47)
Alternative rock trailblazers Jane’s Addiction wrote ‘Three Days’, a sprawling ten-minute track that meditates on sex, death, and rebirth in 1968. Written about Xiola Blue’s time in Los Angeles with frontman Perry Farrell and his partner Casey Niccoli, the song charts their three-day drug and sex fest.
It foreshadowed Xiola’s death from a heroin overdose, leading a lot of listeners to believe her death inspired the song’s heavy themes, despite being recorded before her untimely passing. Extended instrumental passages take up a majority of the song, which are kicked into high gear in the song’s third act when Dave Navarro plays a rapturous, emotive solo.
9. ‘Coma’ – Guns ‘N Roses (10:14)
In a big departure from their usual stadium rock sound, ‘Coma’ is the longest song ever recorded by Guns N’ Roses, appearing as the final song on Use Your Illusion I. Axl Rose has said he spent a year attempting to write this song, but just couldn’t manage it. Eventually, he went into the studio and crashed for two hours – woke up and wrote the entirety of the songs ending off the top of his head.
When charged with coming up for the musical backing to the song, Slash has said he holed up in a house he and Izzy Stradlin rented in Hollywood Hills after the Appetite for Destruction tours, doing his portion of the writing in a “heroin delirium”. Rose’s lyrics were also inspired by drugs, in his case – an overdose suffered years earlier – the horror of which is hammered home by the flatlining heart monitor and panicked conversations featured on the song.
8. ‘Sinnerman’ – Nina Simone (10:19)
On 1965’s Pastel Blues, Nina Simone sends off listeners with a ten-minute finale with her version of ‘Sinnerman’, originally recorded by the Les Baxter Orchestra in 1956. When Simone used to play gigs in New York, she would always close out sets with her seminal hit ‘Sinnerman’, saying: “I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I’ve performed, I want them to be in pieces.”
The frantic beats of drums, clapping hands, and gospel-style cries are as jazzy as they are bluesy, resulting in a huge crescendo around the four-minute mark that’s seen out by a fierce piano. The intensity is backed by Simone’s pleas to God to forgive her mistakes, belting out the lyrics she learned in childhood at revival meetings held by her mother, a Methodist minister.
7. ‘Lucille’ – B.B King (10:11)
‘Lucille’ is a ten-minute love letter to B.B. King‘s beloved guitar. It’s a love that sustained King an entire career playing the blues, and his reverence for the Gibson L-30 fittingly started with a story about fire and heartbreak. In 1949, King was performing in an Arkansas nightclub in the thick of winter, and the club owners filled a garbage pail with kerosene and lit it to keep its patrons warm. A fight broke out between two men who knocked over the pail, causing a huge fire.
King ran outside with everyone else, only to risk his life rushing back in to save his precious guitar from the flames. He then christened it Lucille after finding out a woman who worked at the titular club was the cause of the argument.
6. ‘Thick as a Brick (Pt. 1)’ – Jethro Tull (22:40)
‘Thick As A Brick (Pt. 1) is one side of the Thick As A Brick album, which features two massive 20-minute songs split over two sides. Released in 1972, Ian Anderson is said to have written it to lash out at critics of Aqualung, who dismissed it as a concept album, despite his insistence it was a simple collection of songs. His nearly 45-minute rebuttal to that criticism was engineered to make fun of the idea of the concept album itself.
The progressive rock sound of ‘Thick As A Brick’ might’ve been a hit for Jethro Tull fans, but its huge run-time didn’t work with the modern download model, so in 2012, Anderson divided the album into eight pieces to be bought individually on iTunes. Whereas artists like Pink Floyd famously refused to cut their content down to make listening along easier, Anderson said: “I accept that that’s the musical appetite of most folks these days. They don’t really have the time or the concentration to listen to a whole album in one go. They want it in manageable pieces.”
5. ‘Child in Time’ – Deep Purple (10:20)
Deep Purple In Rock, the album ‘Child in Time’ appears on, is the Deep Purple classic that launched heavy rock to dizzyingly heavy heights alongside peers like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. ‘Child In Time’ is without a doubt the stand-out of the album, an anti-Vietnam protest song that is lifted by the controlled scream of Ian Gillan.
Every member of the band played extremely heavily, whether it be Jon Lord’s menacing organ or Ritchie Blackmore’s blistering guitar solo. But Gillan’s vocals are what truly drive the song, his deafening cries speaking to the desperation and devastation of war.
4. ‘Echoes’ – Pink Floyd (23:34)
Pink Floyd‘s ‘Echoes’ is the last track from the 1971 album Meddle. It’s a whopping 23 minutes long, taking up the entirety of the LP’s second side. It’s rich with instrumental passages and studio effects, as well as Rodger Waters’ introspective lyrics about empathy and the human condition.
At the beginning of the Meddle recording sessions, the band amplified the sound of a grand piano played by Richard Wright, sending the signal through a speaker and a Binson Echorec unit – the result of which made the ‘ping’ sound that opens the track. ‘Echoes’ sounds like a jazz-funk jam put through a blender, with Gilmour’s guitar going through a fuzz effect box, met with yet met distortion from the wah-wah pedals and an experiment with sound delay.
3. ‘I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)’ – Meatloaf (12:01)
Nobody can nail a rock ballad quite like Meatloaf, and ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’ might be the longest and best example of that yet. Written with his longtime collaborator Jim Steinman, the song was released on the singer’s sixth album, Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell. Its theatricality is almost camp – which some critics have taken and run with, but it remains a delightful 12 minutes of rock and roll excess.
Meatloaf throws the kitchen sink at it, the songs bursting at the seams with the rev of motorbikes and Roy Bittan’s bombastic piano, as well as Meatloaf’s signature operatic vocals. It was a commercial hit, marking Meatloaf’s first and only number one on the UK Singles Chart.
2. ‘Marquee Moon’ – Television (10:40)
Television‘s Marquee Moon saw Tom Verlaine playing the guitar at his absolute best. On 1977’s ‘Marquee Moon’ Verlaine plays with almost incomprehensible precision, his searing sound making its impressive run time flash by without a beat or solo sounding over-indulgent.
Each of the verses on the track begins with a double-stopped guitar, with Verlaine slipping into an almost jazzy solo on the third verse that carries the entire second half of the song. The lyrics are biting, the playing dripping in technical finesse and style, ultimately: it’s a new-wave odyssey completed before you’ve had time to register that it has been on for ten minutes.
1. ‘Maggot Brain’ – Funkadelic (10:40)
Funkadelic‘s Maggot Brain was a defining album that established the band’s psychedelic funk sound. ‘Maggot Brain’ opens with an other-worldly monologue from George Clinton, who tells the audience: “I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe, I was not offended – for I knew I had to rise above it all or drown in my own shit.”
Clinton is said to have instructed guitarist Eddie Hazel to play as if he’d just been told his mother was dead, urging him to tap into how he’d make sense of his life – and release every emotion those thoughts triggered in his playing. Inspired by Hendrix, Clinton took the recording and ran it through an Echoplex three or four times, giving it an eery, discordant feel. It’s biblical, hellish, decked out with all the fuzz you’d expect from the depths of the universe.
