10 Best Songs Over 10 Minutes Long
From David Bowie and Sufjan Stevens to Funkadelic and Black Country, New Road, these are 10 of the greatest songs over 10 minutes long.
Found yourself addicted to Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and, worst of all, TikTok? Over here at Still Listening, we are taking a day off from our usual content to put out a public health announcement designed to fix your goldfish-esque, scroll-addicted brains.
Brain rot. You know the score. Short-form content, doomscrolling, AI-generated slop and the general deterioration of our collective ability to concentrate on anything for longer than about 30 seconds.
So we have taken it upon ourselves to perform a bit of civic duty. Call it hero’s work, even. It’s all for free, volunteer work only, not getting paid for this, I might add. We have come up with a list of ten of the very finest songs across recorded history stretching beyond that mystical ten-minute mark, specially tested in a laboratory to act as an antidote. Put down that phone and get yourself back in the driving seat.
(Results may vary…)
1) ‘Svefn-g-englar’ - Sigur Rós
For me, this track is the very definition of an odyssey. It’s closer to musical alchemy than anything I have ever heard before. Sonic elements are fused together, combining like the elements and creating this glorious cacophony of noise.
Very few songs throughout the history of music, even since the birth of noise-rock, have the sonic ability to rival this track for sheer scale and emotion. Best enjoyed in a dimly lit bedroom, eyes shut and headphones on, for the sensation of a rocket ship taking off in your bedsit, carrying you out of that room and on a voyage of discovery.
2) ‘Station to Station’ - David Bowie
Was Bowie at his creative peak as the Thin White Duke? That’s a question for another day. If I’m being genuine, this is a track that really doesn’t require much explanation. It’s 1976 and a goodbye to Ziggy Stardust, who so perfectly encapsulated the feeling of a Martian landing down on the cold streets of London.
‘Station to Station’ marked the point where any inhibitions the young man had were completely vaporised. It’s nefarious, quite possibly one of the greatest rock and roll ballads ever recorded and, funnily enough, the singer didn’t remember a single second of making the track or the album.
“It’s not the side effects of the cocaine,” he bellows around the six-minute mark. I’m not so convinced, David, but I don’t need any convincing that this track is thunderous fun. Listen to it back-to-back with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars for a crash course in getting what you want, whenever you want it.
3) ‘Sister Ray’ - The Velvet Underground
As previously mentioned, Still Listening has the health and well-being of the next generation at the centre of our attention. We are out to promote healthy habits and encourage good, clean musical enjoyment. The Velvet Underground, much like Bowie, are pioneering figures in harmless musical clownery. I’ve listened to ‘Sister Ray’ about a million times and I still don’t understand how this song is about anything other than cooking up a Sunday lunch, anyway.
Has there ever been such a definitive track for finding out who your real friends are? Try our little experiment. Next time you go to a house party or function, please do play this track as loud as possible. Whoever bolts out of the room first is an instant strike off the invite list.
Unmistakable, original punk, a wall of sound and something that will never be topped.
4) ‘East River Dawn’ - Laurie Spiegel
Relax your mind and float downstream…
Laurie Spiegel is a pioneering electronic musician who has been working wonders with analogue synthesisers since 1969, predating many hugely influential bodies of work. She was the embodiment of East Coast electronic music before it was cool, introducing a sound that seemed to transcend time and space and stepping through the door into uncharted territory before almost anybody else.
This track is spacey, direct, tremulous and will sound as enchanting in 100 years’ time as it did the moment it was first released. Very rarely do the musician and the art itself so perfectly resemble each other as they do here.
5) ‘Refractions in the Plastic Pulse’ - Stereolab
The audible equivalent of painting with all the colours of the rainbow, standing with paintbrush in hand before a piece of art so vivid, alive and mesmerising.
’60s sunshine pop, ’70s free jazz improv, minimal techno, IDM and ’70s French film soundtracks, all beautifully packaged into one shapeshifting composition. Listen as a cure for any ailing attention span as the track, in all its chameleon-esque glory, twists and turns at every stage. It’s more like ten songs in one package than almost anything else ever put to record.
6. ‘Maggot Brain’ - Funkadelic
“Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time and you have knocked her up.”
If my new day job was putting works of art on rocket ships and firing them into space just to reach a few friendly aliens, I think this track would be number one on the list for the elusive first-contact mission.
Eddie Hazel plays guitar and the air goes heavy. An entire life has come and gone across ten minutes.
It’s quite tricky to imagine life as normal after hearing this, and I’d be hard-pressed to return to a life of watching clips of Oppenheimer or Breaking Bad on my tiny smartphone. Say goodbye to life as you know it and indulge in everything Funkadelic have to offer you.
7. ‘All Delighted People’ - Sufjan Stevens
Restless musical innovation will take you to some fascinating places, and for Sufjan Stevens all roads led to ‘All Delighted People’ from his 2010 EP of the same name.
How does such grandeur and excess never once reach the point of feeling indulgent? How can one man be responsible for such a heavenly sound?
“And what difference does it make? I love you so much anyway…”
The term “pure emotion in motion” is something I bandy around quite often, but it can’t be understated how much this track applies to that crowning phrase.
8) ‘Cop Shoot Cop’ - Spiritualized
I am not accepting any responsibility for the fact that so many songs over ten minutes long seem to be about audible filth and getting up to who-knows-what.
‘Cop Shoot Cop’ is a mind-melting composition by the king of the tearaways, the man himself, Jason Pierce. It’s an acidic mix of post-rock, shoegaze, jazz, gospel and noise-rock. It also happens to permeate so deeply into your psyche that a seventeen-minute epic flies by in what feels like a breezy five.
Call it strung-out ragged glory.
9) ‘Basketball Shoes’ - Black Country, New Road
Some words will never be enough. Any schtick I could harp on about this track would be like fingerprints on a handrail or trying to dry your eyes in the pouring rain.
‘Basketball Shoes’ and the wider album Ants From Up There will more than likely stand out as cultural artefacts of the 2020s when historians have a research project due in a few hundred years, and I think even that would still be underselling the dream this album sells.
‘Basketball Shoes’ is a requiem for England, and you don’t even have to be continually swept up in the BCNR movement to view it as such an achievement.
10) ‘Marquee Moon’ - Television
Is anybody surprised? You really shouldn’t be.
This list has been an exercise in endurance listening, and ‘Marquee Moon’ is the very best we have to offer you.
There’s a perception that every track of a certain length has to be a meandering slog and a half. Looking at certain egregious examples by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin here. Television hit the sweet spot perfectly.
It’s like a flash of lightning. That opening riff is pure life and death. Nothing will ever come close.
“I remember how the darkness doubled / I recall, lightning struck itself.”