Epic Rocking

This isn't even the longest track in their library.
CAUTION: "Three Minute Warning" is not for the musically faint-hearted, impatient, or critics of extreme self-indulgence. If you fall into any of the above categories, please hit the stop button on your CD player after track # 8
—The back of Liquid Tension Experiment's first CD.
14. The longer a song is, the more epic it is.
—The 101 rules of Power Metal.

No, relax, someone hasn't renamed Autobots Rock Out. Yet, anyway.

Epic Rocking is the phenomenon where bands release really long songs that either seem to twist and change gears a million times before ending, or just manage to sustain themselves for their prolonged duration. More common in the 60s psychedelic/acid rock era and in the 70s Progressive Rock period.

This trope is the polar opposite of Three Chords and the Truth: instead of a short song with lyrics and catchy beat that anybody can play, these bands focus on deliberately complex songs where playing is a matter of superior technical skill, and everything else is secondary to the instrumental showmanship and considerations of the sound itself, even lyrics.[1] Lyrics can appear in these songs, but they're often sparse and the song is mostly instrumental.

Done right, they maintain the listener's attention, and sound really cool, sometimes downright awesome. Done poorly, they just ramble, cause yawning, suffer chronic Ending Fatigue and fall squarely into What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome? territory. Of course, it was this being done poorly that led to the awesome consequence that was the birth of Punk Rock in the 70s. Which songs are which is the source of endless debate. Dave Barry advances the theory that a major purpose for these songs is that they give radio DJs time to go to the bathroom.

This trope also has the subtrope "Epic Jamming", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Only studio versions are included, since live examples would bloat the list to hell. Many of those songs have a Subdued Section for everyone's sake.

Contrast Miniscule Rocking.

And for clarity's sake: This is a trope about long songs. Not about awesome songs. Please don't add a short song here because it's awesome (we have Crowning Music of Awesome for that) or delete a long one because it's not awesome.

Examples of Epic Rocking include:

By genre

Afrobeat

  • Fela Kuti: Most songs are longer than 10 minutes, some live versions take more than one side of an LP.

Electronic / Industrial

  • "The Chosen Priest and Apostle of Infinite Space", by Bull of Heaven, is more than two months long. They also have other works that are multiple weeks long.
    • "Blurred with Tears and Suffering Beyond Hope" (track 209) is 4,723 hours long, or six months.
    • "Like a Wall in which an Insect Lives and Gnaws" is 50,000 hours long. That's almost six fucking years.
    • These guys had waaaaay too much time on their hands.
    • That's nothing. The top song on their website is listed at... *deep breath* 8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955 years long. That's longer than the universe has existed, by the way.
    • One of their longer songs is "only" 87,708,958,333,333 hours long. Unlike some of their other long songs though, which are usually compressed or not a traditional audio file, this song is a file, the filesize of which is 1.3 zetabytes. For comparison, one zetabyte is one BILLION terabytes.
      • Compressed into an 85 kb archive. In other words, the mother of all zip bombs. The files in the archive are all identical, so its just the same piece repeated a gazillion times over.
      • Like Mel's Olitsky mentioned below, those tracks consist of several tape loops of different lengths, so the length of the song is the LCM of the loops.
  • Olitsky by Ian Mellish consists of four tape loops of slightly different lengths (around 44 minutes), that theoretically would take 1.6 million years to complete its cycle. Three excerpts of this ("Beginning Mix", "Middle Mix", and "End Mix") were compiled into a double album.
  • Burial's remixes of the Massive Attack songs "Four Walls" and "Paradise Circus" are both over 10 minutes long.
  • Kraftwerk's Autobahn is over 24 minutes long, and was one of the first hits of the band that pioneered techno in the 70's.
    • The two part piece "Kometenmelodie" from the same album.
    • "Trans Europe Express/Metall auf Metall/Abzug" is a total of 14 minutes.
  • Orbital: When their songs get really long, they'll sometimes split them into two tracks, labeled part 1 and part 2, such as "Nothing Left" from The Middle of Nowhere and "Out There Somewhere?" from In Sides.
    • Sometimes their studio albums employ Fading Into the Next Song, and the band will then treat the entire song suite as a single epic song at live shows. For example, "Lush / Impact / Remind", and "Way Out / Spare Parts Express / Know Where to Run".
    • Their EP The Box had 4 different alternate mixes of the title song. Later, for the second disc of the American release of In Sides, all four of these tracks were strung together as a single 28-minute track.
  • "Escape Velocity" by The Chemical Brothers is 12 minutes long. Since every track on the new album will be accompanied by short films, and segue into each-other, it can be assumed to be an epic album with every track that long.
  • Daft Punk's songs (when not live or remixed) rarely ever break six minutes in length, a rarity amongst electronic music. Those that do are "Around the World", "Rollin' & Scratchin'", "Rock 'n Roll", and "Burnin'" from Homework, "Emotion" from Human After All, and the aptly named "Too Long" from Discovery which clocks in at exactly 10:00 in length.
  • Erasure, mostly known for three-to-four-minute, fast-paced synthpop, released a self-titled album in 1995 that was "influenced by Pink Floyd and prog rock". The average song length is seven minutes, and the longest is the 10:06 head-trip ballad "Rock Me Gently". (Which was later given a stronger beat, remixed into a four-minute pop song and released as a single.)
  • Jean Michel Jarre has so many pieces of music which are longer than five minutes that many fans count only his three famous suites from the 80s as "epic": "Ethnicolor" and "Rendez-vous 2", both of which are almost twelve minutes long, and "Industrial Revolution" which exceeds 16 minutes.
    • The longest piece of music he ever released, however, is "Waiting For Cousteau". It takes up most of the album of the same name at a length of almost 47 minutes. It should be mentioned, though, that this piece is an assembly of soundbites created for an exhibition which contained photographs and selected objects from Jarre's concerts, and lacks rhythm or structure.
  • Xorcist's "Scorched Blood: Rising From The Ashes" from the Scorched Blood EP is 16:05. The last minute is actually silence to hide the Hidden Track.
  • Trance project Ayla's Nirwana album has the two-tracker "Into the Light / Out of the Light", 14 minutes total. Another epic track from the album is "Ayla(Taucher Remix)", at 9:33. The "Waterfall" and "Elemental Force" remixes of "Angelfalls" are 8:29 and 7:57, respectively.
  • Paraglide(Blue Sky Mix) by Paragliders(one of Oliver Lieb's many aliases) is 12:15.
  • Kashiwa Daisuke, an experimental/progressive electronic musician, likes this. Program Music I is an hour long, and has two tracks.
  • While it's fairly common for ambient house songs to go on for a while, The Orb makes music that's even long by their genre's standards. Their lengthiest song was the 40-minute epic, "Blue Room." And it was released as a single. Gallup (the compilers of the UK singles chart at the time) stated songs that are 40 minutes or longer are considered albums rather than singles. The Orb's response to this? They created a 39:57 mix of the song for radio airplay.
  • Covenant's "Subterfugue for Three Absynths", from the Skyshaper bonus disc, is 43 minutes, although it's mostly an industrial noise loop.
    • "Cryotank Expansion" (25:46) from Dreams of a Cryotank.
  • Juno Reactor has a few multi-part songs, eg "Rotorblade/Mars" from Beyond The Infinite, "Nitrogen" from Shango and "Conquistador" from Labyrinth, whose first half is an Epic Instrumental Opener.
    • Many of their single-part songs are epically long as well. "Samurai," "Children of the Night," "Guardian Angel," and "Zwara (Sleepwalker)" are all 7–10 minutes long. "Mona Lisa Overdrive," composed for The Matrix Reloaded, is just over 10.
  • "Deeply Disturbed (Infected Remix)" by Infected Mushroom (9:06), among others.
  • Trance songs routinely clock around 7–8 minutes, but usually this includes an extended intro/outro to aid DJs in crossfading two songs together. One example that's particularly long even without the extended intro/outro is "Remember Magnetic North," a collaboration between BT, Sasha, and Jan Johnston, that clocks in at about twelve and a half minutes total.
  • Skinny Puppy songs usually aren't more than 5–6 minutes, but "The Centre Bullet" from the CD Updated Rerelease of Bites is 9:42. Better yet is the 15-minute live track "Spahn Dirge" on Rabies. "The Centre Bullet" is actually an instrumental version of a track by Cevin Key's side project Tear Garden.
  • Sweet Release by the Trouser Enthusiasts, is 9:08, extremely long by Eurodance standards and longer than most trance tracks.
  • Autechre's "Perlence Subrange 6-36" is 58:31, and consists of a slowly-changing ambient synth background and a 4-second sequence alternating between three instruments, which also slowly changes. The Quaristice Quadrange remix album also contains several other 10+ minute tracks, including "Perlence Range 7" and "Tkakanren". Also, many of their albums, including Quaristice, use the "one song over multiple tracks" method.
  • The extended version of Mike Mareen's "Agent of Liberty", from Dance Control, is about 9 minutes.
  • Floor.I.D.A (AK 1200 Epic Lounge Mix) (9:22) by Rabbit in the Moon.
  • Lithia Water by Scanner (12:30).
  • Synthdance/spacesynth songs are typically short and sweet (ie <5 minutes), but one of the genre's more epic tracks is Krzysztof Radomski's "Above the Zenith", at 8:41.
  • The Lenny B. remix of Jessica Simpson's "Where You Are" is nearly 11 minutes, which is lengthy even by dance/club standards. However, the second half is mainly repetitions of the coda.
  • Joy Electric typically stuck with short and sweet synthpop tracks. However, The White Songbook saw Ronnie incorporate some prog-rock influences in his songwriting and featured several tracks ("Shepherds of the Northern Pasture", "Unicornicopia", "Sing Once for Me", "The Heritage Bough", "The Songbook Tells All") just over 6 minutes long. Then his Tick Tock Companion EP—an experiment in free-form jamming—consisted of four tracks, each between 12 and 19 minutes long.
  • Nine Inch Nails have a few that pass six minutes in length, most notably "Closer" (6:12), and "Reptile" (6:54) off The Downward Spiral, "We're In This Together" (7:16) off The Fragile and "Zero Sum" (6:14) off Year Zero. Also, some shorter songs become longer live, such as the version of "The Day the Whole World Went Away" (6:30 live vs. 4:32 studio) on And All That Could Have Been.
  • Delerium & Sarah MacLachlan - Silence (DJ Tiesto remix) is 11:34. Epic trance indeed.
  • "45:33" by LCD Soundsystem, Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The video linked shows someone making an Audiosurf run through the whole thing.
  • "Operating Manual" by Galleon.
  • "Fin." (12:39) by Chiptune artist PostApocolyptica.
  • "A 479" (23:04) and "A 477" (15:52) by ambient artist Kara-Lis Coverdale, from A 480.
    • "Disney" (8:15) and "Informant" (7:06), from Sirens, with LXV.
    • The digital version of Grafts is a one-track EP, lasting 22 minutes.
  • Every track on Weightless (Ambient Transmission Vol. 2) by Marconi Union, except "Weightless Part 6", lasts from seven to eight minutes.

Folk

  • Anne Briggs' version of "Young Tambling" is a bit over 10 minutes long. (And completely a cappella, to boot.)
  • Bob Dylan's song "Desolation Row" is about ten minutes, and is one of the few true folk songs on his album Highway 61 Revisited.
  • At over nine minutes, Bert Jansch's version of 'Jack Orion' was unprecedented among British folk traditionalists in 1966. Four years later he rerecorded the song with his band Pentangle...and doubled the length again until it took up an entire side of vinyl.
  • Iron & Wine has a few, but "The Trapeze Swinger" is notable for being both over ten minutes long, and featuring no repeating chorus. Just verse after verse strung together to a lilting acoustic melody.
  • Danielson's "Deeper than the Gov't" is divided into three tracks on the CD, but they flow together as a single, 9-minute song. And "Joking at the Block" is raga-inspired piece that lasts for 12 minutes.
  • A Hawk and a Hacksaw's "No Rest for the Wicked" is over 8 minutes long.

Funk

  • Parliament-Funkadelic: "One Nation Under a Groove", "Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?", "What Is Soul", "Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow", "Maggot Brain", "Promentalshitbackwashenemapsychosis Squad (The Doo-Doo Chasers)", "Bop Gun (Endangered Species)", "Flash Light", "Aqua Boogie (Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)", "Deep" ...and that's just a few.
  • Curtis Mayfield: "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go", "We the People Who are Darker than Blue", "Move on Up".
  • Sly & the Family Stone: "Sex Machine", "Africa Talks to You 'The Asphalt Jungle'", "Thank You for Talkin' to Me, Africa" (itself an Epic Remake of their own "Thank U Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Again".
  • Ohio Players: "Skin Tight".
  • Marvin Gaye: "Got to Give It Up."
  • James Brown: "(I Feel Like A) Sex Machine", "Get Up, Get In To It, Get Involved", "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag", "The Payback". Particularly the versions captured on "Live At The Apollo, Volume 3".

Hip-Hop

  • The Sugarhill Gang, setting the norm for rap with the 14 minute, 35 seconds Rapper's Delight.
  • DJ Shadow: "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt" (6:40), "Changeling" (7:51), "Stem/Long Stem" (9:21), "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain" (9:23), "In/Flux" (9:21), "What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 - Blue Sky Revisit)" [7:28], from Endtroducing.....
    • "Blood on the Motorway" (9:12), from The Private Press.
  • R. Kelly's bizarre, overblown, hilarious "Trapped in the Closet" saga.
    • It currently has about 22 parts and a total running time of ONE HOUR AND 24 MINUTES.
  • Demain, c'est loin, by French group IAM, has epic rapping, clocking at about 9 minutes of continuous rhyming one after another. (Then again they are five people.)
    • Rapper Akhenaton, of IAM fame, closed his album Soldats de fortune with "La fin de leur monde", a ten-minute (and very eloquent) rant against world politics carried by Akhenaton and fellow member of IAM, Shurik'n.
  • "Liberation" by OutKast is an 8-minute, piano-driven, semi-spiritual piece featuring Cee-Lo, Erykah Badu, and spoken word artist Big Rube.
  • "Last Call" (12:41), "We Major" (7:28), "Runaway" (9:07), "Blame Game" (7:49) and "Illest Motherfucker Alive" (8:23) by Kanye West
  • "Beat Boy" (8:20) by Die Antwoord.
  • "Oldie" (10:36) by Odd Future.
  • "Bad Guy" (7:14) by Eminem.
  • "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" (12:03) "Real" (7:23), "untitled 07 | 2014 - 2016" (8:16) and "FEAR." (7:40) by Kendrick Lamar.
  • From Rodeo by Travis Scott, "3500" (7:41), featuring Future and 2 Chainz, and "Ok Alright" (6:57), featuring ScHoolboy Q.
  • "Steroids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber Megamix)" (22:30) by Death Grips.
  • "Ninety" (7:48) and "Lost Boy" (9:29) by Jaden Smith.
  • "Uneven Compromise" (10:58) by Lil Ugly Mane.
  • Every track by Impossible Nothing, starting with Phonemenomicon, lasts 10 minutes long. There are 26 songs on each album, so prepare for Archive Panic.

Jazz

  • Duke Ellington's work, while not as long as that of some later jazz men, is notable for pushing the limit back when music was released on.[2] His 1931 "Creole Rhapsody" took up both sides of a 10-inch record, and his 1935 "Reminiscing in Tempo" took up four 10-inch sides. It's telling that, once the long-playing record format was invented, Duke's very first LP consisted of four songs, ranging from 8 to 15 minutes in length.
  • Anything by Charles Mingus, who wrote some of the most melodically complex jazz songs of all time (look up "Hora Decubitus" or "The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife" if you don't believe me).
    • Then there's Epitaph, a piece clocking in at 127 minutes that was never performed in full before his death. It carries all the complexity of Mingus' normal work, but just at an insane length.
  • A special achievement awarded to a certain Mr. Miles Davis, who between 1968 and 1975, starting with Miles in the Sky, dedicated himself to going too far with this. This culminated in the albums A Tribute to Jack Johnson (two tracks, both 25–28 minutes long), Big Fun (a double album with four songs between 21–28 minutes) and Get Up With It (another double album with two songs that broke 32 minutes).
    • Don't overlook "Kind of Blue", where all but one track were recorded "live" in the studio, while improvising, with no overdubs. While several bandmembers were struggling with raging heroin addictions.
      • To clarify, all the tracks on Kind of Blue were recorded live. Only one has two complete takes ("Flamenco Sketches"); one had a replacement ending recorded but it was never used ("Freddie Freeloader"). But the album definitely qualifies, with four out of five tracks clocking in over 9 minutes. Hat tip to "All Blues," 11 minutes and 33 seconds. Expanded reissues of the album feature a bonus track after a full take of the song in which bassist Paul Chambers is heard panting and saying, "Damn, that's a hard mother!" Well said.
  • Herbie Hancock in his jazz-funk fusion era.
  • The Free Jazz subgenre largely does away with fixed tempos, chord changes, harmonic structures in favor of simultaneous improvised soloing. It tends to be (but is not always) fast, loud, chaotic, and frenetic. The pieces also tend to be 20+ minutes long. It's an epic experience that one endures as much as enjoys. The epicness is especially apparent in any of the large-ensemble Free Jazz pieces along the lines of John Coltrane's Ascension, Peter Brötzmann's Machinegun, and Ornette Coleman's seminal Free Jazz: a Collective Improvisation. Many of these kinds of pieces feature multiple drummers and walls of horns each blasting their own disparate riffs and solos.
  • Sun Ra took a trip to Saturn.
  • Bohren has a number of these, the longest being "1" from Midnight Radio and "Zeigefinger" from Geisterfaust.
  • Pat Metheny's "The Way Up (68:10)" is exactly that. Technically, it's divided on the album into four sections, but it's really just one really, really long track. And one hour, eight minutes, and ten seconds long.
  • Jaga Jazzist's longest track is the 28-minute-long "Out of Reach (or Switched Off)"—although 22 minutes of it is taken up by a vocal skit in Norwegian. Their longest proper song is "Toccata", at 9 minutes.
  • Every song on Face the Music by George Duke, except "Chillin'", "Ain't It Funky Now", "Close to You" and "Creepin'", last for more than seven minutes. "Ten Mile Jog" is the longest song on the album, at 11:27.

Metal

  • The entire genre of both doom metal and drone metal, with bonus points to Isis for having songs that alternate between awesome ambient sounds and pounding metal riffs, and...our winner, drone doom band Sunn O))), known best for having 40 minute songs that should never be listened to alone in the dark.
    • By extension, the entire meta-genre of drone music almost always takes the cake in terms of length, such as pioneering drone band Earth, whose album Earth 2 has two 30-minute tracks and one 15-minute track.
      • Also there's Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine, who have released only one album so far. One song is 18 minutes, the other is 7, and the first one is *deep breath* 29 minutes long.
    • Boris tend to switch genres from album to album, but whenever they do Drone/Doom it can get quite lengthy too - their songs in the style average 15–20 minutes, and a few ("Absolutego," "Flood," "Sun Baked Snow Cave") go on for over an hour.
  • Black Metal band Sabbat usually has songs that only go from 5 to 7 minutes, but one of their tracks, The Melody of Death Mask, is 59 minutes long.
  • French Progressive Metal band Kalisia definitely qualify, with their debut release Cybion consisting of a 70 minute epic song divided into 20 'pistes', which according to Kalisia was only done to give people some form of indexing the song, which they insist must be listened to as one huge piece.
  • Stoner-metal band Sleep's third (and final) album Dopesmoker consists of two songs: the SIXTY-THREE MINUTE title track, a Fantasy epic about the journey of the Weedians traveling towards the Riff-filled Land, a sort of bongified version of the Jews wandering the desert. And, seemingly just for shits and giggles, the other song is a 9-and-a-half minute live performance of their song "Sonic Titan".
  • Metallica: "Fade to Black", "For Whom the Bell Tolls", "The Call of Ktulu", "Orion", "Master of Puppets", "...And Justice for All", "One", "To Live is to Die". From their self titled to St. Anger, the complexity and length of their songs tended to be cut down dramatically.
    • Their latest album, Death Magnetic, is a return to form. Not one song on Death Magnetic is under 5 minutes, and only 1 is under 6 minutes ("My Apocalypse" - 5:01).
    • Load also has a pair of long ones - "Bleeding Me" runs 8 minutes and "Outlaw Torn" just short of 10 minutes (and originally, available as the "Unencumbered by Manufacturing Restrictions Version" - see Epic Albums below - was close to 11 minutes).
    • Metallica is noted for having a lengthy instrumental song on all of their albums before their shorter, more commercial turn in their self-titled effort in 1990. Aside from their first album, Kill 'Em All, where the instrumental is 4 minutes long, each one of these was longer than 8 minutes. Their newest album brings this back with a penultimate instrumental track called Suicide & Redemption, clocking in at over 10 minutes.
    • Showing the bad side of this trope, Kirk Hammett said that they spent a long time without playing "...And Justice For All" because "I couldn't stand watching the front row start to yawn by the eight or ninth minute."
  • Many post-metal bands are like this. Rosetta has songs averaging at about 8 or 9 minutes, the longest being the final track off their debut album which is 16 minutes long. Mouth of the Architect's longest song is 15:38, and Neurosis' longest is a bit longer than that (15:58).
  • Megadeth: "Good Mourning/Black Friday", "Holy Wars... the Punishment Due", "Five Magics" is on the shorter side, at around 5 and a half minutes, but features an extended instrumental section before the blisteringly fast part of the song kicks in. However, their longest song by far, the NWOBHM homage "When", clocks in at over 9 minutes. The song itself is (intentionally) reminiscent of another song that fits this trope, the Diamond Head classic "Am I Evil?" notably covered by Metallica on Garage Inc. and clocking in at almost 8 minutes.
  • Anthrax's fifth album, Persistence of Time, has 3 songs clocking in at around 7 minutes long, and 5 more than 5 and a half minutes long. However, at the same time, they Covered Up Joe Jackson's "Got The Time" and made it last some 2 and a half minutes.
  • Manowar's 27-minute (!) epic "Achilles: Agony and Ecstasy (In Eight Parts)", also a case of Shown Their Work oddly enough.
  • Stoner Metal band Ocean Chief has some long tracks. Galleons from the Sun (23:03), Oden, (25:24), and Tor, (25:34). As you may have guessed, these guys have a fetish for vikings.
  • Pantera: "Cemetery Gates", "This Love", "Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks", "Suicide Note Pt. I & II", "Floods", "It Makes Them Disappear".
  • Tool: "Lateralus", "Parabol/Parabola", and "Pushit" all clock in around 10 minutes or longer. The majority of their songs are no shorter than 4 minutes, and feature constantly changing time signatures, heavily symbolic lyrics, and some of the most epic (and technically challenging) drumming in metal/art rock/music history.
    • Rosetta Stoned? 11 minutes, 14 if you count Lost Keys (Blame Hoffman) before it. Wings for Marie/10,000 Days? 17. 17 mothertropin' minutes. And it WORKS.
    • Don't forget Disposition/Reflection/Triad. Concieved as one song, split into 3 tracks, much like Wings after it, it clocks in at around 23 minutes. And again, it WORKS.
    • "Disgustipated" may be a counter-example, becuase it ends with 10 minutes of chirping crickets, followed by a answering machine message, apparently by an assassin named "Bill The Landlord".
      • It was also on track 69, meaning that the CD player would skip the rest of the tracks at about 2 per second, making for a delay of about 30 seconds before the "Song" begins. And only about 4 Min. of the song is truly Disgustipated.
    • Also, "Third Eye," "Eulogy" and the eponymous "Aenima."
  • Jane's Addiction: "Ted, Just Admit It...", "Three Days", "Then She Did...".
  • Faith No More: "The Real Thing", "Jizzlobber", "King for a Day".
  • Fantômas, another Mike Patton band, has "Surgical Sound Specimens From The Museum Of Skin (Delirium Cordía)," which takes up an entire album on its own and clocks in at nearly an hour even if you don't count the 20 minutes of respirator noise at the end.
  • UneXpect tend to have rather long songs, averaging around 6 or 7 minutes, and any one of those songs will easily be one of the craziest, most intricate, hyperactive and outright bizarre pieces of music you will ever hear.
  • A specialty of Dream Theater, the most oversized examples being "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence" (42:02 - written as one song but split into eight tracks for the eponymous album), "In the Presence of Enemies" (25:38 - split into two parts on the album), "Octavarium" (24:00), "A Change of Seasons" (23:06) and "The Count of Tuscany" (19:16). The average Dream Theater song probably lasts around 8 minutes and 47 seconds.
    • Their Twelve Step Suite clocks in at 56:57 and features 12 parts over five songs, each on different albums, and each being fairly lengthy and epic in their own right.
    • Funny because they cite many punk bands as influences.
    • Their live shows are even more like this, as they'll often just start jamming during the instrumental sections. A prime example is the Live at Budokan version of "Beyond This Life", which adds about 8 minutes to the song. "Beyond This Life" is eleven minutes long to begin with.
    • Dream Theater spinoff band Liquid Tension Experiment had a song called "Three Minute Warning" that lasted for over 27 minutes. The band lampshaded it on the back of the cd case, as seen in the page quote.
      • Even more impressively, "Three Minute Warning" was the result of bassist Tony Levin threatening to quit and leave if they "didn't start jamming in three minutes." They literally did the whole thing in one take, making it up as they went.
  • Nightwish: "The Poet and the Pendulum," "Ghost Love Score," "Fantasmic," and "Beauty of the Beast" to name a few.
  • Stratovarius: Several across all albums but the Song "Elysium" from the album of the same name really takes the cake clocking in at 18 minutes 6 seconds long.
  • Dragon Force (video game). They topped themselves with "Soldiers of the Wasteland", which is just shy of ten minutes long. Most of their songs run about six-and-a-half to eight minutes.
  • Iced Earth: "Dante's Inferno (16 minute tour of Dante's Hell)", "The Coming Curse", "Travel in Stygian", "When the Night Falls", all of the "Gettysburg" trilogy...
  • How the friggn' hell did we miss Opeth? Every track they have that isn't an atmospheric bit or a transitional song is really, really long.
    • And for the record, their longest track, Black Rose Immortal, cuts at 20:14.
  • Symphony X: "Through the Looking Glass, The Odyssey, The Divine Wings of Tragedy".
    • It should be noted that with the exception of the first song, these are all titles of their albums.
    • "Rediscovery Pt. 2: The New Mythology" counts as well, as it is over twelve minutes.
    • On Iconoclast, there is "Reign in Madness" at 8:37, "When All is Lost" at 9:10 and the title track at 10:51.
  • Judas Priest: "Run of the Mill", "Winter", "Victim of Changes", "Sinner", "Beyond the Realms of Death", "Blood Red Skies", the live version of "Diamonds and Rust", also, a few of their newer songs manage to stretch on and on and not get old, namely "The Future of Mankind" and "War".
  • Shadow Gallery: "The Queen of the City of Ice", "Ghostship", "Cliffhanger 2", "First Light".
  • Agalloch, who have a style pretty similar to Opeth.
  • Technical metal group Meshuggah only make music that embodies this trope... detuned guitar lines lance through each other at breakneck pace, and the drumming, while inhumanly symmetrical, never settles down for long. Their EP I is composed of a single, 21 minute song. The following full-length album, Catch Thirtythree is broken into tracks, but at more or less arbitrary intervals... the entire album is essentially a single epic rock, sans any jamming whatsoever.
  • Iron Maiden: "Hallowed Be Thy Name", "The Longest Day", "Brave New World", "Paschendale", "Fear Of The Dark", "Rime Of The Ancient Mariner", etc. Typically each album ended with one of these.
    • And not to mention practically all of A Matter of Life and Death, not just "The Longest Day". Only two of the 10 songs clock in under six minutes.
      • They seem to be taking a liking to this trope. Brave New World (before A Matter Of Life And Death) had long songs, and their latest album, The Final Frontier, only has one song under 5 minutes (at 4:29). Further proof that Tropes Are Not Bad.
    • Even on their first album, where most of the songs were four minutes and under, they had "Phantom of the Opera".
  • Between the Buried and Me does it frequently (especially in their album, "Colors"), going from incredibly heavy to very soft to heavy again, somewhat similar to Opeth, but with more modern sound.
    • Used to a great extent on most recent album "The Great Misdirect" three tracks clock in at over ten minutes long ("Disease, Injury Madness" is 11:03, "Fossil Genera - A Feed From Cloud Mountain" is 12:11 and the truly epic "Swim to the Moon" is 17:54).
    • And yet again on their new EP "The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues", three songs, thirty minutes.
  • Mastodon: While fans of very technical songs in general, "Hearts Alive" alone qualifies at truly epic, clocking at 13:39
    • "The Last Baron" is also over 13 minutes long.
    • You could probably mention "The Czar" which is by no means short at 10:54
  • Black Metal bands do this a lot. The band Wolves in the Throne Room have only made eight songs, but the average length is 14–15 minutes long.
  • Experimental black metal band Trist has a song called "hin", which clocks in at 59:55!
  • British Doom band Esoteric does this. Exclusively. All of their albums are two discs and well over an hour long.
  • Green Carnation's "Light of Day, Day of Darkness" clocks in at 60:06
    • Good grief, no wonder the version featured on the Damnatus album was only an "excerpt"...
  • Moonsorrow from Finland has slowly made this their specialty in the past few years, with Verisäkeet (2005) featuring 5 songs for a total of 70 minutes, then Viides Luku - Hävitetty (2007) being only two songs but totalling 56 minutes, and finally Tulimyrsky (2008), which is officially an EP, however the title track is nearly half an hour by itself (10 minutes longer than most EP's) and with the 4 other lengthy tracks following it, it reaches 68 minutes.
    • Their 2011 album Varjoina Kuljemme Kuolleiden Maassa ("As a shadow I walk the land of the dead") tones the Epic Rocking down quite a bit, but the shortest non-interlude track is still almost 12 minutes long.
  • Blind Guardian has some good examples, like "And Then There Was Silence." They usually involve many layers of multi-tracked vocals.
  • Opeth contemporaries and sometime collaborators Edge of Sanity's Crimson album is one, 40-minute long track.
    • It's sequel (Crimson II) is longer by three minutes.
  • Helloween has "Halloween", "Keeper of the Seven Keys", "The King Of A 1000 Years" and "Occasion Avenue", the only 4 songs over the 10-minutes mark in the history of the band. But that can't be compared with "The Keeper Trilogy", from Unarmed, a 17 minutes-long song which mashes-up the first three songs in that order, becoming the longest song the band has ever recorded in studio.
  • Equilibrium gifted us with "Mana", an epic 16-minute instrumental song.
  • Devil Doll's songs average around 40 minutes. Their longest is a staggering 79 minutes.
  • Fates Warning: "Epitaph", "Pirates of the Underground", "Guardian", "Exodus", "The Ivory Gate of Dreams", "Something from Nothing", "Still Remains". Even their shorter songs use multiple time signatures, tempo changes, and different sections.
    • By far their longest song is "A Pleasant Shade of Gray", which is split into 12 parts and takes up its entire album. It clocks in at 55:46.
  • Lost Horizon, who sound a lot like Dream Theater, naturally have several long songs, including "The Kindgom of My Will", "Cry of a Restless Soul", and "Highlander (The One)".
  • Many '80s power metal and thrash bands will add a long, elaborate song to an album of normal-length songs as a climax piece, such as "R.I.P." and "Follow Me" by Forbidden, "The Crucifix" by Jag Panzer, "The Day at Guyana" by Agent Steel, "Roads to Madness" by Queensrÿche, "The Years of Decay" and "Skullkrusher" by Overkill, "Suiciety" by Realm, etc. Since bands tended to put every ounce of creativity they had into these epic songs, many of them are also Crowning Music of Awesome.
  • Gothic Metal band Type O Negative often reach the ten minute mark, though it's usually a parody, such as in "Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty of Infidelity," "Christian Woman," and "Black No. 1," the last two of which much shorter "radio" versions have been released.
    • "Haunted", at 10:08. A much shorter instrumental version was featured in Descent II and the PSX Descent games. A longer instrumental (but still only half the length of the original) was in the Descent II Expansion Pack Vertigo.
  • Iron Savior: "Made of Metal". The title alone says it all.
  • Epica has "The Divine Conspiracy," "Consign to Oblivion," (Both of which are title tracks for albums of the same name), "Design Your Universe," (Title track again) "Kingdom of Heaven," (From same album as DYU, but is even more epic at 13:35) and about half of the songs on their first any of their albums qualify as these.
  • After Forever tried their hand at this with "Dreamflight."
  • Kamelot's "Elizabeth"
  • Rhapsody of Fire (previously just Rhapsody). They have roughly one of these per album. Their song "Gargoyles, Angels of Darkness" clocks in at 18:59. However, the record goes to "Heroes of the Waterfall Kingdom" -the last track (besides the bonus track) of the album "From Chaos to Eternity"-, that has a length of 19:42.
  • Neurosis's music can be described as "trance metal" for a reason: songs can take their time building steam. They have the occasional song that's under 4 minutes, but a lot hover around 9-12, and one clocks in at over 26. Combine this tendency with the soft-loud dissonance and challenging lyrics, and you have the reason their fanbase is niche.
  • Jex Thoth's "Equinox Suite", 15-ish minutes of psychedelic alchemical Doom Metal.
  • Sonata Arctica's "The Power Of One", "Destruction Preventer", and "White Pearl, Black Oceans"
  • Warmen, the mostly instrumental prog-metal side project of Children of Bodom keyboardist Janne Wirman, is definitely about the virtuosity. An excellent example is the title track from the album Beyond Abilities. One of those "guitar" parts is actually played by Janne on keyboard; the other is performed by his brother, guitarist Antti Wirman.
    • They also have the Salieri Trilogy of tracks from their first three albums: "Warcry of Salieri" (5:56) from Unknown Soldier, "Salieri Strikes Back" (5:17) from Beyond Abilities and "Return of Salieri" (4:49) from Accept the Fact. It starts out awesome and just grows more intense with each iteration - while the shortest, "Return of Salieri" is 4 minutes and 49 seconds of breathless, non-stop face-melting. Even the one-minute-long fretless bass solo.
    • In fact, the whole project is basically all about a bunch of the best players in Finnish metal indulging shamelessly in their EPIC SKILLZ. Beyond Abilities, indeed...
  • Pagan Altar: "Armageddon" and "Reincarnation".
  • Brutal Death Metal band Deeds Of Flesh has the track "The Endurance" cutting at 11:48.
  • Melodic Death Metal band Dark Lunacy has "Forget Me Not" at 11:21, and in general several 6+ minutes tracks.
  • Blackened Death Metal band Behemoth has "The Reign Ov Shemsu-Hor" with 8:26.
  • Folk//Death/Prog Metal band Tyr is practically defined by this trope in their recording efforts; wtih some songs changing time signatures and tempos nearly every third bar; "Hail to the Hammer" being a good example. Impressive for a song that's just under 5 minutes. Oddly, they tend to avert this trope on stage, where they play more straight Death/Folk Metal.
  • Finnish Folk-Metal band Ensiferum does this from time to time, most notably with "Lai Lai Hei", which changes musical styles and tempos many times times in its 7:15 run.
  • Djent band Periphery chose to close their 73-minute debut album with a 15-minute epic titled "Racecar". Lots of guitar solos, high singing and technical riffage.
    • Omega (11:44) and Stranger Things (7:35), from Juggernaut: Omega.
    • Marigold (7:19), Absolomb (7:43) and Lune (7:47), from Periphery III: Select Difficulty.
    • "Reptile", the opener of Periphery IV: HAIL STAN, lasts 16 minutes, while the closer "Satellites" clocks at 9 minutes.
  • The Melvins have a few examples, the longest being the 22 minute title track to Pigs Of The Roman Empire (a collaboration with Lustmord). Although their self-titled album is indexed as one 31 minute track, it's actually several different songs, including covers of Alice Cooper and Flipper, so it may not count.
    • Just barely beating "Pigs of the Roman Empire" by 30 seconds is "Hands First Flower", which is technically a solo piece by one-time member Joe Preston (as a tongue-in-cheek nod to Kiss doing the same thing, they had put out 4 solo EP's under the Melvins name in one year): It's much more in line with drone metal than the rest of their material, which makes sense because Joe Preston had joined the band just after leaving the already mentioned Earth.
  • Pelican, as a post-metal band, has song lengths averaging around 8 minutes, with outliers like the EP version of "March Into The Sea" (which clocks in at 20:28).
  • Slough Feg's Ape Uprising clocks in at 10:02 and half of the track consists of guitar duels.
  • Gamma Ray has Insurrection at 11:33 and Heading for Tomorrow at 14:32
  • Edguy have "Eyes of the Tyrant" (10:00), "The Kingdom" (18:23), "Theater of Salvation" (14:10), "The Pharaoh" (10:37) and "The Piper Never Dies" (10:37).
    • Also, Edguy frontman Tobias Sammet's project Avantasia has a few more: "The Seven Angels" (14:17) and "The Scarecrow" (11:12) beat the 10-minute mark, with "The Tower" (9:43), "Stargazers" (9:33) and "The Wicked Symphony" (9:28) not far behind.
  • Bathory have many epic tracks such as Blood Fire Death (10:28), Shores in Flames (11:07), One Rode to Asa Bay (10:23), Twilight of the Gods (14:02) and many more.
  • Venom: "At War With Satan", which clocks at over 19 minutes. Also "Cursed" and "Destroyed & Damned".
  • Avenged Sevenfold, especially in City of Evil. The shortest song is two seconds short of five minutes, and the two longest are 8:46 and 9:14. Their self-titled has "A Little Piece of Heaven" at eight minutes flat, and Nightmare has only two songs under five minutes with "Save Me" topping out at 10:56.
    • It's note worthy that some of their songs are actually trimmed down from the album version for the music videos & radio play. Some examples are "Afterlife", "Bat Country" and "The Beast & The Harlot".
  • Savatage toes the line in length. While their longest songs range from seven ("Alone You Breathe") to ten ("Morphine Child") minutes long, they are as complicated in change of pace and tone as other examples here.
  • Scar Symmetry has "Holographic Universe", the title track from their third album, which runs to 9:05.
  • Therion are going more and more in this direction as time goes on. Vovin had the three-part Draconian Trilogy, Deggial had Via Nocturna, Sirius B had Kali Yuga (which recently saw a third part added on with the release of Sitra Ahra), Gothic Kabbalah had the completely mind-blowing Adulruna Rediviva (which clocked in at a deliciously nerdy 13 minutes and 37 seconds long), and Sitra Ahra features Land of Canaan which, while not as long as Rediviva, is still an impressive 10 mintues as well as being one of the most eclectic songs they've written...and considering Therion's history, that's saying something.
  • Cathedral provide a 27 minute song titled "The Garden" from their album "The Garden of Unearthly Delights".
  • Death metal band Nile have quite a few: "To Dream of Ur" from the album "Black Seeds Of Vengeance" clocks in at over 9 minutes, "Wrought" and "Extinct" from their "In The Beginning" compilation are 8 3/4 and 9+ minutes respectively, "Unas Slayer Of The Gods" from "In Their Darkened Shrines" is 11:43 (and the four-part title track totals about 18 minutes), "User-Maat-Re," "Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten," and the title track from "Annihilation Of The Wicked" are 9 1/4, 9 3/4, and a little over 8 1/2 minutes long respectively, "What Can Safely Be Written" and "Even The Gods Must Die" from "Ithyphallic" are 8 1/4 and 10 minutes long respectively, and "4th Arra Of Dagon" and the title track from "Those Whom The Gods Detest" run 8:40 and 8:06 respectively. Couple this with their tendency to write songs with absurdly long names ("Libation Unto the Shades Who Lurk in the Shadows of the Temple of Anhur," "Invocation of the Gate of Aat-Ankh-es-en-Amenti," "Dusk Falls Upon the Temple of the Serpent on the Mount of Sunrise," "Chapter of Obeisance Before Giving Breath to the Inert One in the Presence of the Crescent Shaped Horns," "Papyrus Containing the Spell to Preserve Its Possessor Against Attacks from He Who Is in the Water," "Permitting the Noble Dead to Descend to the Underworld," and "Yezd Desert Ghul Ritual in the Abandoned Towers of Silence") and they pretty much qualify.
  • Alice in Chains: "Love, Hate, Love", "Rooster", "Rotten Apple", "Sludge Factory", "Head Creeps", "Frogs", "Over Now", "A Looking In View", "Acid Bubble".
  • Korn had "Daddy" from their self-titled album at about 9 minutes, and "My Gift to You" from Follow the Leader at over 7 minutes. The album See You on the Other Side had a few songs that were about six minutes.
  • Swedish Progressive Metal band Seventh Wonder has an average song length of around 6 minutes, many surpassing such, but the title track to their 2010 album "The Great Escape" clocks in at 30:21.
  • Japanese symphonic power metal band Versailles have "The Love from a Dead Orchestra", "History of the Other Side", "God Palace -Method of Inheritance-", "Princess -Revival of Church-" and "Faith & Decision" (the longest of the lot at 16-and-a-half minutes). A few of their other songs are over 6 minutes long.
  • Progressive Neo Classical Guitarrist George Bellas with his 2009's album, "Step Into The Future", the whole album is one song that runs for 1 hour, 15 minutes and 22 seconds
  • There's actually a progressive and power metal Internet radio station called Epic Rock Radio. Unsurprisingly, it features a LOT of these.
  • Dir En Grey has quite a few. Their debut album gives us 'Mazohyst of Decadence', clocking in at 9 minutes and 22 seconds, and 'Akuro no Ota', clocking in at 9 minutes and 42 seconds. Macabre has two songs just above 6 minutes, as well as the title track clocking at at just under 11 minutes, not to mention 'Zakuro' at 8 minutes and 37 seconds. Kisou has two songs over 6 minutes. Uroboros has 'Vinushka', clocking in a 9 minutes and 37 seconds, and 'Ware, Yami Tote...' at 7 minutes and 1 second. Their latest release, Dum Spiro Spero gives us 'The Blossoming Beelzebub' at 7 minutes and 35 seconds, and 'Diabolos' at 9 minutes and 51 seconds.
  • The live version of BABYMETAL's "Road to Resistance" tops out at almost nine minutes long.

Pop

  • Michael Jackson had a few, starting with Off the Wall opener "Don't Stop Til You Enough". Thriller had Billie Jean and Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' (6:20 and 6:04, respectively). Bad was more straightforward (only "Man in the Mirror" is over 5 minutes)... then Dangerous had 10/14 songs at least 5 minutes long (two clocking over 7!). The second disk of History had 3 songs over 6 minutes ("Earth Song", "History" and "Little Susie") - which are even longer on remix album Blood on the Dance Floor (which in turn has the epics "Morphine" and "Superfly Sister"). His final album, Invincible, opens with another epic, "Unbreakable", and has 5 more songs over 5 minutes.
    • Then, of course, there's the Jacksons' Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground), clocking in at just under 8 minutes.
  • Frankie Goes to Hollywood's debut double album Welcome to the Pleasuredome's first side of record one claimed several tracks (Well, The World is my Oyster, Snatch of Fury, Stay and Welcome to the Pleasure Dome), but in reality, they all combined into the album's title track, lasting a total of about 17 minutes.
  • Prince released a bunch of lenghty songs during his career:
    • "Controversy" (7:14) and "Do Me Baby" (7:47), from Controversy.
    • "Let's Pretend We're Married" (7:20), "D.M.S.R." (8:05), "Automatic" (9:24) and "Lady Cab Driver" (8:25), from 1999.
    • "Purple Rain" (8:44)
      • "I Would Die 4 U/Baby I'm a Star", recorded live, available on the Special Edition of the Purple Rain film, has extended instrumental jams and last for around 12 minutes.
      • The Deluxe Edition of the Purple Rain album adds many long songs from The Vault. "The Dance Electric" (11:29), the Hallway Version of "Computer Love" (12:18), "Possessed" (7:56) and "We Can Fuck" (10:17).
      • The Deluxe Expanded edition of the album adds longer variations of songs from singles. The Special Dance Mix of "Let's Go Crazy" (7:35), the Extended Version of "Erotic City" (7:23), "God (Love Theme From Purple Rain)" (7:58), the Extended Version of "Another Lonely Christmas" (6:47), the Extended Version of "I Would Die 4 U" (10:18).
    • "Tempation" (8:23), from Around the World in a Day.
    • "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night" (8:59), from Sign o' the Times.
    • "2 Nigs United 4 West Compton" (7:00), from The Black Album.
    • "Positivity" (7:15), from Lovesexy.
    • "Live 4 Love" (6:58), from Diamonds and Pearls.
    • "Come" (11:13), from the titular album.
    • "Shhh" and "Gold" from The Gold Experience are 7 minutes long.
    • "Joint 2 Joint", "The Holy River" (6:56), "Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother / Wife" (7:38), "Style" (6:41) and "Sleep Around" (7:42), from Emancipation.
    • "Crystal Ball" (10:28), "Cloreen Bacon Skin" (15:37) and "Days of Wild" (9:19), from Crystal Ball.
      • "Kamasutra" (11:49), from the titular album by The NPG Orchestra.
    • "She Spoke 2 Me (Extended Remix)" (8:20) and "When the Lights Go Down" (7:11), from The Vault... Old Friends 4 Sale.
    • "Wherever U Go, Whatever U Do" (8:50), from Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic.
      • "The Greatest Romance Ever Sold" (8:07), from Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic
    • "Rainbow Children" is 10 minutes long. Three other tracks on The Rainbow Children, "Family Name", "The Everlasting Now" and "Last December" last around 8 minutes.
    • "Xpedition" (8:24), from Xpectation.
    • Every track on the 4-track N·E·W·S lasts 14 minutes.
    • "Judas Smile" (6:37) and "U Make My Sun Shine" (7:06), from The Chocolate Invasion.
    • "Ol' Skool Company" (7:30), from MPLSound.

Punk

  • "Starship" by MC5.
  • "Nothing Left Inside", "Scream" and "Three Nights" by Black Flag
  • "24 Beats Off" and various instrumental riffs by Fugazi.
  • "Marquee Moon" by Television (though granted they were mostly punk by association rather than sound).
  • "Another World" by Richard Hell & the Voidoids (8:12)
  • "Shut Down" by The Germs (9:30), unusual in being a slow, dirge-like, proto-Grunge song rather than The Germs more usual fast and sloppy (yet vaguely arty) material.
  • "(I Saw You) Shine" (8:30) and "Sex Bomb" (7:48), among others, by Flipper. They were unusually slow for a Punk band, but they still counted.
  • "Black Friday Rule" by Flogging Molly.
  • "Kids of the Black Hole" by the Adolescents.
  • "Glazed" and "Ghost Shark" by Rocket from the Crypt.
  • The Stooges' "We Will Fall", "Fun House" and "Dirt".
  • Half of the songs on "The Monitor" by Titus Andronicus are over seven minutes long, but "The Battle Of Hampton Roads" takes the cake at 14 minutes.
  • "Reoccuring Dreams" by Hüsker Dü.
  • "From the Cradle to the Grave" by The Subhumans
  • "Yes Sir, I Will" by Crass, clocking in at over 40 minutes to become the longest punk song ever (!).
    • Although it is technically supposed to be all one song, it's worth nothing that the song is split into multiple tracks (seven, to be precise) and doesn't play like a single, flowing 40-minute opus. The longest individual track, however, is just over twenty minutes long.
  • Their friends Flux of Pink Indians had a similar sense of perversity: The charmingly titled double LP The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks, in spite of listing multiple song titles, is essentially made up of four, epic-length, ear-bleeding terror trips.
  • "The Decline," by NOFX, 18 minutes.
  • "Pay the Man" by The Offspring.
  • Any of the Zodiac singles by the Canadian experimental punk band Fucked Up. The longest one so far, "Year of the Pig", clocks in at 18 minutes, and the others are around 13 minutes long apiece.
  • Ever since Green Day decided to enter Rock Opera territory, they do suites ("Jesus of Suburbia", "Homecoming") or just plain long songs ("Wake Me Up When September Ends", "21st Century Breakdown").
  • No Means No accomplish this several times: No Big Surprise on the Generic Shame album is longest at 11:19; then there are Real Love and Brother Rat/What Slayde Says on Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed at 9:57 and 9:07; and The World Wasn't Built in a Day on Dance of the Headless Bourgeoisie at 9:34. All of their albums have a mix of Three Chords-style songs alongside the more expansive tracks (although it's impressive just how much they can fit in a three-chorder as well)
  • The Prefects' "The Bristol Road Leads To Dachau" is over twelve minutes long.
  • The ever-mercurial art-punks Wire have "A Touching Display", "Crazy About Love", "And Then... / Coda", "Boiling Boy", "Torch It!", "You Hung Your Lights In The Trees", "Artificial Gravity" and "23 Years Too Late", all of which exceed six minutes in length in their original versions. But none of these hold a candle to the ever mutating live beast that is "Drill"; the longest released version (from the Astoria, London, 1988) is nearly eighteen minutes long, while there are other versions rumored to go on for as long as half an hour. Bear in mind that this band's average song length was once under a minute, as well as that "Drill" has only one chord.
  • Half Japanese's 61-minute "Heaven Sent". Conversely, the rest of the songs on the eponymous album are little over a minute a piece.
  • Some songs by The Blood Brothers, though not as long as other examples cited, have songs such as "Cecilia & the Silhouette Saloon", "USA Nails", "The Shame", "Camouflage, Camouflage", "Spit Shine Your Black Clouds", "Lift the Veil, Kiss the Tank", "Street Wars/Exotic Foxholes", and "Giant Swan", which all clock in between five and eight minutes, each song taking drastic (and fantastic) unexpected turns, all result in rocking most epic.
  • Showbread has a few of these. "Stabbing Art to Death" clocked in at over seven minutes in its first release, and "Age of Reptiles/Age of Insects" is all but eleven. The average length of a Showbread song is five minutes, if you factor in songs such as "And the Smokers and Children Shall Be Cast Down", "Matthias Replaces Judas", "The Bell Jar", "The Pig (Anorexia)", "The Death (Anorexia)", "The Beginning (Anorexia)", "The Flies (Nervosa)" (both of these are instrumentals), "The Goat (Nervosa)", "The Beginning (Nervosa)", "The Fear of God", "A Man With a Hammer", and "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things".
  • Chiptune punk band Anamanaguchi gives us "Mermaid", clocking in at around eight minutes.
    • "Aurora (Meet Me In the Stars)" is a bit short compared to others at 5:45, similar to "For Those About to Rock" above, but it likewise has the makings of this trope.

R&B/Soul

  • "Living for the City" (7:23) by Stevie Wonder.
  • "Cause I Love You" (7:11) by Lenny Williams.
  • "Pyramids" (9:52) by Frank Ocean.
  • "I Admit" by R. Kelly, a response song to controversies surrounding him and accusations of sexual abuse and kidnapping, among other things, lasts 19 minutes.

Rock

Hard Rock

  • The Who: "A Quick One, While He's Away", "Underture", "We're Not Gonna Take It", "Won't Get Fooled Again", "Who are You", "Eminence Front", "I've Known No War".
    • "The Song is Over" deserves special mention. It's the one song that Pete Townshend has sworn he'll never play at concert, because it would simply be impossible for four people to play all the parts it requires.
    • The Live At Leeds versions of My Generation and Magic Bus clock in at 15:47 and 7:48, despite being 3 minute songs originally.
  • Guns N' Roses: As far back as Appetite for Destruction, there was "Rocket Queen". Use Your Illusion I and II had several more, including "November Rain", "Estranged", "Locomotive", and "Coma".
    • "Paradise City" from Appetite is a possible example, considering it gets faster and faster as it goes.
  • X Japan: "Dahlia," "Silent Jealousy," "Forever Love," "I.V.", "The Last Song," "Tears", "Rose of Pain".
    • And then there's "Art of Life". 30 minutes studio version, 33 minutes performed live. This song can also be seen as a Love It or Hate It since, while it is the band's Crowning Moment of Awesome, performing it again at 43 when injured has possibly ended Yoshiki's career as a drummer.
  • Meat Loaf's overblown, symphonic style of rock includes lots of examples: "Bat Out of Hell", "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)", "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", and so on. Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf's principal songwriter, coined the term "Wagnerian Rock" to describe this style, and is at least partly responsible for its epic excess. Witness Steinman's productions for artists like Air Supply (Making Love Out Of Nothing At All), Celine Dion (It's All Coming Back To Me Now, which Meat Loaf would eventually cover), and Bonnie Tyler (Total Eclipse Of The Heart), and Todd Rundgren's willing participation, as producer and lead guitarist on Bat Out Of Hell, are both mysteries that will probably never be solved.
    • Is that the Chessmaster, or the Cheesemaster?
    • The songs found on Steinman's website from his defunct Batman musical project, like "Catwoman's Song" and "Vespers/Angels Arise/Graveyard Shift", definitely partake of this, as do the songs on his own solo album Bad for Good (recorded when Meat Loaf lost his voice in the early 1980s).
    • Likewise the songs he wrote for his "girl group" Pandora's Box and their concept album Original Sin.
  • Mother Love Bone: "Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns"
  • Neil Young: "Cortez the Killer", "Down By The River", "Pocahontas". He and Crazy Horse stretched a live version of "Cinnamon Girl" out to over 12 minutes. He's been known to do the same with the live versions of "Sedan Delivery", "Like a Hurricane", and "Barstool Blues".
    • The studio version of "Ordinary People" clocks in at 18:13. That's eighteen minutes without extended guitar solos.
  • Pearl Jam - "Release", 9:30.
  • Blue Oyster Cult: "7 Screaming Diz-Busters", "Shooting Shark", "Black Blade", and "Astronomy" all top six and a half minutes. This isn't counting most of their live output, notably the face-melting live versions of "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" and "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" from the album Extraterrestrial Live.
  • Alice Cooper: Halo of Flies. According to Alice Cooper himself, the song was written to prove that the band can perform long progressive suites
  • Foo Fighters has the 7-minute long "Come Back". (many of their songs have shifts and false endings, but are usually concise enough to not fit the trope)
  • The Runaways' "Dead End Justice" and "Johnny Guitar" relative to the rest of their output: both are a little over seven minutes long. "Johnny Guitar" owes most of it's length to extensive jamming, but "Dead End Justice" has multiple sections and is almost a self-contained mini-Rock Opera.
  • Bon Jovi's "Dry County" clocks in at 9:52.
  • Alter Bridge has "Blackbird" at 7:58.
  • Chuck Berry's "Concerto in B. Goode" at 18:43.

Jam Bands

  • Phish
  • Dave Matthews Band
  • The Allman Brothers Band were probably the Southern alternative to The Grateful Dead (no surprise considering Duane Allman idolized Garcia), mixing blues, rock and touches of jazz. The greatest example is probably "Mountain Jam", that tracks at 33:41 and features a solo from EVERYONE in the band. "Ramblin' Man", "Whipping Post", "Jessica", "Les Brers in a Minor", and "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" are other noteworthy examples, often passing twenty minutes in concert.

Post-Rock

  • Sigur Rós: The final track on ( ), especially.
    • Almost the entire album of Tak.... Notable examples include "Milano" at 10 minutes and "Glosoli" which, alas, is only 6 and a half, but it truly is an epic rocking.
  • Godspeed You! Black Emperor: The only song shorter than ten minutes on any of their official album releases is "09-15-00 (Continued)", at 6:16. F♯A♯∞ and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven have tracks that run, on average, twenty minutes, with each divided into several movements.
    • On the vinyl version of Yanqui U.X.O., "09-15-00" and "09-15-00 (Continued)" are merged as one 22-minute track, thus making the shortest song on any GY!BE album "The Dead Flag Blues," at 16-minutes in length.
  • Mogwai: "Like Herod," "Mogwai Fear Satan," "Christmas Steps," "My Father, My King"....
  • Tortoise. Special mention goes to the 20-minute track Djed, which contains four or five separate movements.
    • Also, "Cliff Dweller Society" and "Gamera" from A Lazarus Taxon.
  • Slint: Most of the songs on Spiderland.
  • Talk Talk: Most of both Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock.
  • Stereolab is unusual for post-rock in that most of their songs are pretty reasonable lengths; nevertheless every album (with the exception of Chemical Chords) has at least one track that's 6 minutes or longer. Their longest songs are "Refractions in the Plastic Pulse" (17 minutes) and "Jenny Ondioline" (18 minutes).
  • "Verstærker" (10:34), "Gattaca" (8:22) by Jakob, from their titular EP. "Means" is a whooping 34 minutes long.
    • "Some Summer" (7:27), from Subsets of Sets.
    • "Controle" (8:53), "Jimmy Hoffa" (8:17), "Laburnum" (7:51) and "Skew...aard" (9:51), from Cale:Drew.
    • The Dominion EP is one song that lasts for 29 minutes.
    • "Lonesome" (8:00), "Safety in Numbers" (7:53), "Everything All of the Time" (9:38) and "Saint" (9:01), from Solace.
    • "Blind Them With Science" (6:57) and "Resolve" (9:11), from Sines.

Progressive Rock

  • Emerson, Lake & Palmer: "Karn Evil 9" and "Tarkus".
  • Yes: "Yours Is No Disgrace", "Roundabout", "South Side of the Sky", "Heart of the Sunrise", "Close to the Edge", "The Revealing Science of God", "Starship Trooper", "The Gates of Delirium" and about a dozen others. Heck, when they did a Cover Version of Simon And Garfunkel's "America", they turned a relatively sparse 3 minute acoustic folk song into 10 minutes of epic rocking, despite actually skipping a whole verse. Tales from Topographic Oceans, however, gained a reputation for embodying the worst, most excessive aspects of prog-rock.
  • King Crimson: "One More Red Nightmare", "21st Century Schizoid Man", "In the Court of the Crimson King", "Lark's Tongues In Aspic Pt.1 & Pt.2", "Pictures Of A City", "Epitaph", "Starless and Bible Black", "Fracture"
    • Indeed, the entire "In the Court of the Crimson King" (1969) classic album should be considered epic rocking.
    • How about the B-side of the 1970 album "Lizard"? It's 23 minutes long and even has Jon Anderson of Yes.
    • Also, from their later albums: "The ConstruKction of Light" (2000) - the titular song and "Lark's Tongues In Aspic Pt.4" - and "Level Five", "EleKtriK" and "Dangerous Curves" from "The Power to Believe" (2003) qualify just as well as the earlier compositions.
    • "Lark's Tongues In Aspic" is actually an ongoing rock epic, spanning nearly thirty years and featuring segments on the albums Lark's Tongues In Aspic, Three of a Perfect Pair, and The ConstruKction of Light.
  • Early Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. Most notably the 23 minute Mind Screw of "Supper's Ready". But also deserving mention are the fan favorite 10 minute songs "Firth of Fifth", "The Musical Box", "Fountain of Salmacis" and more.
    • Phil Collins-era Genesis has some, too, like "Domino" and "Home By The Sea"/"Second Home By The Sea".
    • The short-lived four-piece era (1976-78) has "Mad Man Moon", "One For The Vine", "Ripples" and "Inside And Out".
  • Early Rush. Some of the more complex examples include "By-Tor and the Snow Dog", "The Necromancer", "The Fountain of Lamneth", "2112", the "Cygnus X-1" and "Hemispheres" duology, "La Villa Strangiato"... the list goes on. Indeed, certain tropers would nominate the entire Rush catalog.
  • Pink Floyd: "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", "Echoes", "Interstellar Overdrive", "A Saucerful of Secrets", "Atom Heart Mother", "Comfortably Numb" (particularly the P* U* L* S* E version).
    • Animals has a lot of this, excluding the "Pigs on the Wing" Book Ends. "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is more like a regular song that just happens to be 11 minutes long than true Epic Rocking, but "Dogs" and "Sheep" certainly qualify.
    • "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast", from Atom Heart Mother also counts.
    • "Intertellar Overdrive" was just a part of their early live repertoire. Only the beginning and the ending were the same. The band would just jam until they got bored and then would bring it back with the bookend riff. This sort of playing is also evident in "Pow R Toc H" and "Nick's Boogie".
    • More recent ones are "Sorrow" and "High Hopes" (from their two last albums).
    • The Experience Version of "Wish You Were Here" contains a 20 minute version of Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (basically both halves played back to back). Other songs of notable length from the album are "Raving and Drooling" (12 and a half minutes) and "You've Got to Be Crazy" (18 minutes 10 seconds).
  • Porcupine Tree: "Anesthetize", "Arriving Somewhere But Not Here", "The Sky Moves Sideways", "Russia On Ice", "Radioactive Toy". Hell, any of the big songs by the Tree qualify for Epic Rocking.
    • Voyage 34 is split into 4 parts, so technically doesn't count. The 40 minute unedited version of Moonloop, however...
    • What about the title song of their latest album "The Incident"? 55-minutes long, broken down into 14 parts and it takes up the ENTIRE first disc. Wow.
  • Kansas has a number of these, including "Song for America", "The Pinnacle", and "The Wall"
    • And "Magnum Opus" on the Leftoverture album, which, despite being several songs in a medley, clocks in at 8:26.
  • Magma has several songs that are at least 30 minutes long.
  • The Mars Volta: "L'Via L'Viaquez"; in fact, the whole of Frances the Mute fits this trope.
    • Before Executive Meddling (of sorts) set in, "Cassandra Gemini" was supposed to be one 32 minute track. In fact, it might still count because the digital version of the album has it formatted as one track.
    • The Willing Well songs. IV (and more especially with the unbelievably long Neverender Night Three version), can seem like this, but is mitigated by the fact that it is actually two songs: the second (Bron-Y-Aur) is hidden in the first.
      • The Neverender version is an hour. There's even a twenty minute long drum solo where everyone but the drummer goes backstage! "Ladies and Gentlemen, Chris Pennie!" indeed...
    • The End Complete V, in a similar situation, except that the live versions aren't as long as the above
  • Anything, and I mean anything, where Alan Parsons is involved.
  • Any of The Decemberists music in prog (as opposed to folk-pop) mode, specifically The Tain, "The Island" suite and "When The War Came" from The Crane Wife, and pretty much all of Concept Album The Hazards of Love.
  • Supertramp: "Fool's Overture", "It's a Long Road", "Try Again", "Brother Where You Bound", "It's a Hard World".
    • It can be safe to call "Rudy", "Asylum", "School", "Child Of Vision", "From Now On", "Lover Boy", "Waiting So Long" and "Another Man's Wowan" mini-epics. Note that most of them are written by Rick Davies.
  • Uriah Heep: "Salisbury", "The Magician's Birthday", "July Morning", "Why".
    • "Paradise/The Spell", if you count both of them as one song, is 12:46. Although they are separated on the record, and the lyrics are separate for each.
    • Indeed, quite a bit of material on Uriah Heep Live could count as well, such as "Gypsy", the "Rock and Roll Medley" and "Circle of Hands".
  • Styx: "Come Sail Away", "A Day", "Father O.S.A." (preluded by a brilliant little Bach cover), "Movement for the Common Man"
  • Glass Hammer: Far too many to list. Special mention, however, has to go to "The Knight of the North," which clocks in at almost 25 minutes and required the addition of a string trio and a choir to the 9-person lineup for the most recent performance.
  • Van der Graaf Generator's "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers"
  • Can's "Yoo Doo Right," at twenty and a half minutes is already a rather lengthy song. However, it turns out the song actually came from a six hour jam session that they had to shorten in order for it to fit on the record.
  • The Soft Machine's 1970 Third and Tangerine Dream's 1972 Zeit both kicked off a short-lived early-70s fad for double albums consisting of four songs, one per side. Tangerine Dream honed the concept by using just one note per song, for a total of four notes in the space of eighty minutes.
  • Marillion gets in on the action by means of "This Strange Engine", "Interior Lulu", "Ocean Cloud", "Neverland" and a good couple of others. They once played an entire set of only their longest songs, dubbed "The Shortest Set List In The World".
  • Transatlantic is a supergroup made up of Mike Portnoy, Roine Stolt, Neal Morse, and Pete Trewavas (Marillion). Their magnum opus? 78-minute song The Whirlwind, divided into 12 tracks on the album but played cohesively live.
  • Renaissance's average song length is probably something over seven minutes—this is including their shorter tracks. One classic, "Ashes Are Burning", clocks in at 11:21.
    • The suite "Scheherazade" takes up an entire album side, and lasts 24:39.
  • The Ikon by Utopia. The thing is over 30 minutes long!~!
    • Utopia's "Singring and the Glass Guitar" clocks in at a modest 18:24.
  • "The Greener Grass" by Fair To Midland. It's said by the band that it is the longest song they have written (so far), at over ten minutes.

Psychedelic Rock, Blues-Rock, early Heavy Metal

  • The Grateful Dead: Their entire catalog.
    • And their live material, too. I mean, just look at the track listing for Dick's Pick's Volume 4 (Widely regarded to be the band's Crowning Music of Awesome).
    • "Dark Star" in particular gets expanded a lot in live performances. The version on the aftermentioned Dick's Picks Vol. 4 is over a half-hour long, and longer versions do exist (Such as the 41 Min. version performed at the Cleveland Convention Center).
  • Jimi Hendrix: "Hear My Train A'Coming", "Voodoo Chile", "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)", "Machine Gun", "Country Blues", "Bold As Love".
  • Led Zeppelin: "You Shook Me", "Dazed and Confused" (the version on the The Song Remains The Same Soundtrack is nearly half an hour long), "How Many More Times", "Stairway to Heaven", "When the Levee Breaks", "No Quarter", "In My Time of Dying", "Kashmir", "In the Light", "Achilles' Last Stand", "Carouselambra".
  • Black Sabbath: "The Warning", "War Pigs", "Hand of Doom", "Wheels of Confusion", "Heaven and Hell".
  • Iron Butterfly: "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".
  • Eric Clapton (Derek and the Dominos): "Layla", "Got to Get Better in a Little While", "Key To The Highway".
  • Dire Straits have "Telegraph Road" (14 minutes), "Brothers in Arms" (Nearly 7 minutes) and "Tunnel Of Love" (8 minutes).
    • What about "Money for Nothing" or "Love Over Gold"?
  • The Doors: "The End", "Riders on the Storm", "Light My Fire" , "LA Woman", "Celebration of the Lizard", "When the Music's Over", "The Soft Parade".
  • The Velvet Underground: "Heroin", "All Tomorrow's Parties", "The Gift", "Sister Ray", "The Murder Mystery".
  • The Rolling Stones: "Midnight Rambler", "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'", "Going Home", 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'.
  • Queen: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Innuendo" "The Prophet's Song", "March of the Black Queen", "Father to Son", that 22-minute ambiance at the end of "Made in Heaven"
    • Queen: full stop. Though the songs usually are epics with many changes of rhythm with less than 5 minutes!
    • "Tenement Funster / Flick of the Wrist / Lily of the Valley" from Sheer Heart Attack. Though it's listed as three separate tracks on the album, many fans consider it to be one 8-minute song.
  • "Station to Station" by David Bowie clocks in at 10 minutes, 15 seconds. The first minute or so is just train sounds, leading into the droning guitar-based beginning section, then changing gears to an upbeat piano-based section. It's a damn good song.
    • Bowie also has Width of a Circle which could be 15+ minutes live.
      • Never forget Cignet Committee proof that not all rockers liked the sixties.
  • Jefferson Airplane: "Spare Chaynge", "Hey Frederick".
    • Also, you can't leave out live versions of "Wooden Ships", "The Other Side of This Life", and "The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil"
  • Quicksilver Messenger Service: "The Fool", "Mona" (a Bo Diddley cover), "Calvary", "The Hat".
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Free Bird"
  • The Outlaws: "Green Grass and High Tides" (as recently made famous by Rock Band).
  • Rainbow: "Stargazer", "A Light in the Black"
    • Special mention must be given to "Catch the Rainbow", which is a not-at-all-short six and a half minutes in the studio, and gets expanded into a fifteen minute epic live song, featuring Ritchie Blackmore and Cozy Powell trying to out-awesome each other while Ronnie James Dio screams his head off. Most of their live material is like this.
  • Stevie Ray Vaughan: "Texas Flood", "Lenny", "Little Wing".
  • Canned Heat, "Refried Boogie" and "Fried Hockey Boogie".
  • UFO: "Rock Bottom", "Love to Love"
  • Jethro Tull: Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play each had an entire album dedicated to the eponymous songs, and both ran for over forty minutes, filling a whole LP each.. Live versions of 'Thick as a Brick' run up to 90 minutes, leading to the band opening with an epic take on 'Thick as a Brick' and, an hour and a half later, Ian Anderson saying, "And now, for our second number..." While not full-album epic, 'Baker St. Muse' clocks in at 16 minutes, and they have a number of songs in the seven or eight minute range.
  • Equally surprising is the absence of Peter Frampton. "Do You Feel Like We Do" clocks in at 14:15, and he makes the guitar talk to you.
  • Fleetwood Mac: "Oh Well".
  • Mountain. While classics like Mississippi Queen is up there, special mention has to be made to Nantucket Sleigh Ride. The live version found on Twin Peaks is 31:42. So long it took up two sides on the LP.
  • ACDC - While "For Those About To Rock" is on the shorter side at 5:44, it makes up for the brevity with several tempo changes, blistering interleaved guitars, and cannons. FIIIIIRE!
    • On the other end of the spectrum, there's "Jailbreak" from the Live at Donington DVD. All 14-odd minutes of it (compared to the 4:40 from the '74 Jailbreak album).
    • On the AC/DC Live album, "High Voltage" and "Let There be Rock" also pitch in with respectable times of 10:33 and 12:17 respectively.
  • Modest Mouse: "Spitting Venom", "Stars are Projectors", and "Trucker's Atlas" all clock in over 8 minutes long. Heck, their average song is close to 5 minutes long
    • Don't forget other songs such as "Night on the Sun" and "Other People's Lives".
  • George Thorogood and the Destroyers: "One Burbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (11:25 for the extended version. Bonus points for being a cover.)
  • Deep Purple and Child in Time. It's over 10 minutes long on the album and a bit shorter live.
  • Golden Earring, "Vanilla Queen".
    • Eight Miles High, clocking in at around 19 minutes.
    • The album version of "Twilight Zone" is nearly 8 minutes long
    • They do this a good bit, though not to an extreme extent. On one of their compilation albums, a third of the songs are over 7 minutes.
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival: "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", which clocks in at 11 minutes and five seconds.
  • Traffic: "Glad", "Dear Mr. Fantasy", "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" (the latter just shy of 12 minutes and one of the longest songs This Troper has personally heard on the radio)
  • Amon Duul II's album Yeti contains a whopping FOUR examples: "Soap Shop Rock" is 13 minutes, 47 seconds and sectioned, "Yeti (Improvisation)" is 18 minutes 12 seconds, "Yeti Talks To Yogi (Improvisation)" is 6:18, and "Sandoz in the Rain" is exactly 9 minutes.
  • Wishbone Ash: "Handy", "Phoenix", "The Pilgrim", "Where Were You Tomorrow", "Time Was", "The King Will Come", "Warrior", "Throw Down the Sword", "F.U.B.B.", "(In All of My Dreams) You Rescue Me", "Why Don't We", "Tales of the Wise".
  • Santana: "Black Magic Woman". It's actually shorter than most examples here, but it would have been a lot more shorter if it didn't have an epic instrumental closing.

Soundtracks

  • Yoko Kanno loves this trope, especially when working with the Seatbelts:
    • "The Real Folk Blues" as found on the Vitaminless disc, a 6 minute boiling vat of hyperactive drumming, erratic lead guitar, melodic basslines, plus strings and a brass section.
    • "Space Lion". If there is one song that can be summed up as "epic melancholy", this is it.
    • "7 Minutes", frantic techno-rock that finds enough time for slow-downs and a choral section.
    • "Yakitori", also 7 minutes long, a jam rock track.
  • The last battle theme of Atelier Iris 3, "Schwarzweiβ (Kiri No Mukouni Tsunagaru Sekai)", features a lot of epic instrumental work. Points for Sakuraba-san (Game composer and also a prog artist) doing the Hammond and keyboard works.
  • Surprisingly, Nobuo Uematsu pulled off a ridiculously epic one of these... back in the Nineties, and with a SNES game to boot. Final Fantasy VI has the longest single song in the entire Final Fantasy series, the final boss theme, Dancing Mad. Playing during the final Sequential Boss battle, which consists of four separate battles against two or more enemies per battle, Dancing Mad has a unique section for each battle, and each unique battle section loops at least once on the official version (note that if you take too long fighting one of the battles, the song will simply loop again, making the final song even longer.) The official soundtrack version clocks in at 17 minutes. The Black Mages (Uematsu's rock band) clocked that shit out at only 12, knowing that looping the movements would probably kill them, while the Distant Worlds arrangement is a bit less than 11, since it also cut the interlude before the fourth movement.
    • The One-Ups, a semi-famous orchestra group that played video game music, used a 13-minute arrangement as its very last concert, ever. Behold.
    • That game had more incredibly long songs. The ending theme uses bits from nearly every leitmotif or theme in the game, and lasts an incredible 21 minutes. This is topped (in Final Fantasy games) only by the orchestral performance of "The Dream Oath" - a 23 minute long mini-opera. Which actually has lyrics, although technical limitations kept them off the game proper. No other song in the series even comes close - the next, the ending theme to VIII, is a "mere" 13 minutes.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean's "The Kraken".
  • Homestuck brings us "Cascade", the thirteen-minute-long Genre Busting soundtrack to the climatic End of Act 5 for which it is named. While technically a patchwork of four different songs, they were specifically written/rewritten and meshed together to flow as one consistent piece for this purpose.
  • The Delta Halo Suite on Halo 2's OST is the longest piece in the series, at over 11 minutes.
  • Oblivion's Theme from Turok 2 runs for over 15 minutes before its main loop completes; it actually is composed of several loops of different lengths, according to one Youtube user's calculations, the LCM of the loops is over 208,398 years. Turok 3 also has a 19-minute song.
  • The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary soundtrack has two songs a bit over 10 minutes long.
  • "Samara" from Mass Effect 2 is just under nine minutes. "M4 Part II", the song that plays over the end credits of the first game, is just over eight.
  • "With the Flies" (7:41), "One Particular Moment" (7:01) and "Under the Midnight Sun (7:01) by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) soundtrack.
    • "Technically, Missing" (6:43) and "At Risk" (11:07), from the Gone Girl soundtrack.
    • "8 Billion" (8:41) and "One Perfect Moment" (10:08), from the Before the Flood soundtrack.
      • "Before the Flood" (7:53) and "Between Two Poles" (8:06) were made with Gustavo Santaolalla.
    • "The Place You Are Right Now" (7:06), "The Night Drive" (12:14) and "Long Shadows on the Street" (7:10), from the Patriots Day soundtrack.
    • "Other Ways to Get to the Same Place" (8:07), "What Comes Back" (7:36) and "The Right Things" (8:52), from The Vietnam War TV documentary soundtrack.
    • "Outside" (12:42), "Looking Forwards and Backwards" (9:00), "What Isn't Anymore" (7:49), "Careful What You Wish For" (7:30) and "And It Keeps On Coming" (7:14), from the Bird Box film soundtrack.
  • "Kara Main Theme" (6:54) by Philip Sheppard, "The Revolution Is Starting" (7:19) by John Paesano, "Kamski" (7:42) and "Connor Main Theme" (8:54) by Nima Fakhrara, from the Detroit: Become Human soundtrack.

Various other rock & pop

  • Oasis: "Champagne Supernova".
    • Also "All Around the World", which at 9:20 in length is the longest ever A-side on a UK number 1 single. It's likely to retain this record since the rules were changed. Most of the songs in that album (Be Here Now) are long as hell too.
    • And the 22-minute-long "Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Mix" of "Falling Down", by Amorphous Androgynous (a side project of The Future Sound of London).
  • Stone Roses: "I Am the Resurrection", "Fool's Gold", "One Love", "Something's Burning", "Breaking into Heaven".
  • Radiohead: "Paranoid Android".
    • And even better, this six-minute epic was the first single from the album.
  • The Verve: the unedited versions of "Gravity Grave" (plus the Glastonbury '93 live version from No Come Down) and "She's a Superstar", "Feel", "Virtual World", "Butterfly" (the original A Storm in Heaven version and the acoustic B-side from No Come Down), "One Way to Go", "So It Goes", "A Northern Soul", "Drive You Home", "(Reprise)", "Bittersweet Symphony", "The Rolling People", "Catching the Butterfly", "Come On" (nominally 6 minutes, artificially extended to 15 thanks to the Hidden Track).
  • Bruce Springsteen routinely wrote sprawling, epic numbers, often intended to be live show-stoppers. These include "Jungleland", "Racing in the Street", "Incident on 57th Street", "Rosalita", "New York City Serenade", "Kitty's Back" and "Backstreets". Often, shorter songs like "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", "Mary's Place", and "The E-Street Shuffle" were stretched to incredible twenty-minute-plus lengths live.
  • Boston: "Foreplay/Long Time". Actually started out as two different songs (the instrumental Foreplay and the lyrical Long Time), but then Tom Scholz realized that the two would sound epic together, and the rest is history.
    • They pushed the trope even farther on Third Stage with "The Launch/Cool The Engines"; a similar extended quasi-symphonic instrumental intro to a lively rocker. "Can'tcha Say (You Believe in Me)/Still in Love" also qualifies; only this time the instrumental is the coda rather than intro.
    • "A Man I'll Never Be" is pretty long (6 minutes) compared to the other songs on the album.
  • Chicago, believe it or not: "Liberation". Fifteen minutes of pure experimentations and guitar noodling.
    • Add "It Better End Soon", "Ballet For A Girl In Buchannan", "Devil's Sweet", much of 18 out of 23 tracks on Chicago III ("Sing A Mean Tune Kid", the Travel Suite, An Hour in the Shower, Elegy), "Poem 58", "A Song For Richard And His Friends", and both parts of "Aire" together (the prelude, and the main track).
    • More from Transit Authority: first, "Beginnings". That song is absolutely nothing without the crossfade into the percussion jam. Moving on, "South California Purples", their drum solo-licious cover of "I'm a Man", and for the avant-garde nerds, Terry Kath's "Free Form Guitar" runs the table for Side 3.
  • Muse: "Knights of Cydonia"
    • Also, Exogenesis. Split into 3 parts to avoid fatigue.
    • And "Unnatural Selection", which is just shy of seven minutes long.
    • And "Citizen Erased", at over 7 minutes long.
  • Elton John: "Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding", "Carla/Etude/Chloe", "Tonight", "It's Hay Chewed", "Empty Sky", "Madman Across the Water" (particularly a 9-minute version unreleased until as a bonus track on Tumbleweed Connection), "Indian Sunset"
  • Luna Sea - The One -Crash to Create- is 22 min, and is the only song on the album with the same name.
  • "Death Bed" by Relient K is over 10 minutes long. Of course this is to be expected with a song that tells the story of a man's life.
  • Wilco, "Spiders (Kidsmoke)". Turns into Epic Jamming when performed live.
  • Starflyer 59 had a few 6-minute songs in the early, Shoegazer-influenced years, such as "Messed Up Over You" from Gold, "Le Vainqueur" from the EP of the same name. Ironically, after switching to a lighter, indie-pop sound, their albums got shorter but their long songs got longer: witness "Too Much Fun" from The Fashion Focus, "I Like Your Photographs" from Leave Here a Stranger, and the 14-minute-long "Traffic Jam" from Fell in Love at 22 (EP).
  • The eclectic alt-country group Woven Hand had a few epic tracks on the album Blush Music: "My Russia (Standing on Hands)" and "Your Russia (Without Hands)" were about 7 minutes apiece. And "Animalitos (Ain't No Sunshine)" reworked Bill Withers' classic song into a 14-minute-long alt-country/drone-rock.
  • Embrace, though not given to it so much recently, have the title tracks from their first two albums "The Good Will Out" and "Drawn from Memory" each 7 minutes in length.
  • "The Room", The Living End's 8 minute ender for their third album, "Modern Artillery". Even more unusual given the album's more stripped back and simple nature.
    • To a lesser extent their entire second album "Roll On". Full of complex riffs and changing chord progressions, and even stated by the band as being made to spite the critics who labelled them 3-chord punk. In particular "Uncle Harry" and "Blood On Your Hands".
  • Matthew Sweet's "Thunderstorm" lasts nine minutes and has four key changes and an epic two-minute bridge.
  • The Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)".
  • Bob Dylan has done a number of long songs over the years: "Desolation Row", "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", "Hurricane", etc.
    • Highlands, which lasts over 17 minutes.
  • Tori Amos - "Datura". How the song progresses may represent a trip on Datura, a hallucinogen.
    • Tori has made a lot more epics, including "Yes, Anastasia" (9:33), "Little Earthquakes" (6:53), "Apollo's Frock" (8:14), "Lady in Blue" (7:12), "Garlands" (8:21), and most infamously, her cover of "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" (9:55).
  • Kings of Leon: "Knocked Up", 7:10 long.
  • 50 Foot Wave's multi-part "Power+ Light", which clocks in at 25:48. Songwriter Kristin Hersh has said that during the process of writing it, it became "a song which stretched out in both directions, greedily snatching at parts of any other songs it could find and stuffing them down its throat".
  • Sonic Youth - "Expressway to Yr. Skull", "Teen Age Riot", "The Sprawl", "'Cross the Breeze", "Trilogy", "Tunic (Song for Karen)", "Washing Machine", "The Diamond Sea" (both versions), "Female Mechanic Now on Duty", "Wildflower Soul", "Hits of Sunshine (for Allen Ginsberg)", "Karen Koltrane", "Free City Rhymes", "Stream X Sonik Subway", "NYC Ghosts & Flowers", "Disconnection Notice", "Rain on Tin", "Karen Revisited", "Sympathy for the Strawberry", "The Dripping Dream", "I Love You Golden Blue", "Massage the History", and so on.
  • Brazilian band Legião Urbana has "Faroeste Caboclo" ("Caboclo Western]]"), a 9 minute long song, with 159 verses telling the story of a boy that goes to Brasília and becomes a criminal. They managed to surpass it with 11-minute long "Metal Contra as Nuvens".
  • The Smashing Pumpkins. If Billy Corgan can make a song longer, he will. His magnum example is the "Pastichio Medley" b-side, 73 different riffs and other odds and ends but together for 16 minutes of insanity. And seven minutes of the 73rd piece on a continuous loop.
  • The Dears, a Montreal indie band. Particularly, on their 2004 album No Cities Left, only three of eleven songs clock in at under five minutes, and even those have a grand orchestral sweep to them.
  • MGMT have a couple of long, multipart songs: "Metanoia" is almost 14 minutes, while "Siberian Breaks" is a little over 12.
  • The video version of New Order's "Perfect Kiss" is 9:28, even longer than the 12 single version, which was 8:50. The original long version of "Blue Monday" is 7:23.
  • Dead or Alive's "Turn Around and Count 2 Ten", at 6:55. There's also an 8-minute version of "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)", which has a 3-minute instrumental intro.
  • Alabama's "My Home's in Alabama." Six-and-a-half minutes of midtempo eighties country rock.
  • The album version of Keith Urban's "Stupid Boy" is six minutes long, half of which is a bunch of riffing. "Once in a Lifetime" from the same album also goes on forever.
  • "Year Of The Knife" from Tears for Fears clocks in at 7:08.
  • The German band Norbert und die Feiglinge probably topped them all with what used to be known as the longest single ever—"Todesanzeigen". 79:19. You read it right, one hour, nineteen minutes, nineteen seconds. The song is neither remixed and reengineered from shorter material nor a jam session, it is composed and has lyrics all through (okay, it has dozens of verses). In fact, when someone made a mistake playing or mixing the song, they had to start over from the very beginning.
  • Billy Idol's "Don't Need a Gun" (6:16).
  • Billy Joel's "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant". Runs about twelve minutes, from ballad to honky-tonk to a fast-paced rocker, back to ballad.
  • The Buggles' "We Can Fly From Here" clocks in at over nine minutes if you take the two parts together, though they're separate on the CD.
  • "So Many Men, So Little Time" by Miquel Brown (8:14)
  • Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park Suite" is 17:40.
  • Lindstrom has a few of these. All of the songs on Where You Go I Go Too are over 10 minutes (with one clocking in at 29), and he also has a 42 minute version of "Little Drummer Boy".
  • Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" (video version) nearly reaches 9 minutes.
  • Santa Esmeralda's cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" which extends a song under 3 minutes to an album version lasting 16 minutes, and a single version (present in the Kill Bill soundtrack) lasting 10 1/2.
  • Canadian indie rock band Wintersleep has several epic songs: "Motion" on the Wintersleep album, which begins with a single acoustic guitar chord being strummed once per bar, and ends with distorted guitars colliding with a 35mm film synchronizer being tortured. The Untitled album has "Nerves Normal, Breath Normal" which segues out of another song and goes on for 7:23, including a lengthy jam and a drum solo, and "Danse Macabre" which starts as a fairly straightforward hard rock song, then turns into a quiet jam, and ends with the drummer wildly crashing his cymbals at high speed. Welcome To The Night Sky ends with "Miasmal Smoke & The Yellow Bellied Freaks", an 8-minute long song that shifts through instrumental moods before becoming a high-tempo rock song, then becomes a 2-minute prolonged outro.
  • J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. recorded a 15 minute epic cover "Maggot Brain" with Mike Watt and Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic.
  • Madness composed "The Liberty of Norton Folgate" (10:12) as the climax of their concept album of the same name.
  • Anberlin utilized epic rocking for the final tracks of their second, third, and fourth studio albums: Dance Dance Christa Paffgen (7:07), *fin (8:27), and Misearbile Visu (6:37), respectively.
  • "The Jojo Burger Tempest" by Working for a Nuclear Free City. A 30 minute track consisting the leftovers of when they were recording the album of the same name.
  • Brand New's Limousine (MS Rebridge) is 7 minutes and 42 seconds long.
  • "I Will Possess Your Heart" (8:26), "Transatlanticism" (7:55), and "Unobstructed Views" (a comparatively shorter 6:10, but feels very long regardless) by Death Cab for Cutie.
  • Sparklehorse occasionally delved into this, with Morning Hollow (7:23) and Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (10:35).
  • Don McLean's "American Pie" clocks in at over eight and a half minutes (LP version is 8:33; the two "parts" of the original single add up to 8:42).
  • Of Montreal's "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal" is just shy of 12 minutes, while "The Hopeless Opus or The Great Battle of the Unfriendly Ridiculous" is over 17.
  • The Flaming Lips have a six hour song called "I Found a Star on the Ground": It does have multiple sections, but they go by very slowly.
    • They also created a twenty-four hour song, "7 Skies H3", which streamed on Halloween, 2011. It also has multiple sections, as well as actual lyrics, forming a kind of really long ballad.
  • "Religion Song (Put Away The Gun)" by Everything Else clocks in at almost eight minutes. The song Everything Else is nearly eighteen.
  • "Enough Is Enough" by Silkworm is an 8 minute, 14 second long multi-section crescendo.
  • Many of Jeff Buckley's live performances of his songs end like this. See the eight minute long version of "Dream Brother" from "Live á l'Olympia" for a good example
  • Deerhunter use this in "Desire Lines" and "He Would of Laughed" with extended outros, as well as their more experimental album closer "Calvary Scars II / Aux. Out".
  • Canadian singer/songwriter Matthew Good tends to have one of these per album since he went solo. Avalanche has two, "Avalanche" and "Near Fantastica", White Light Rock and Roll Review has "Blue Skies Over Bad Lands",[3] Hospital Music has the opening track "Champions of Nothing", Vancouver has "The Vancouver National Anthem" and "Empty's Theme Park", and Lights of Endangered Species has "Non Populus".
  • Sisters of Mercy's "This Corrosion" and "Temple of Love", at the very least.
  • "Mary on the Mend" by Cherry Ghost is almost eight minutes long.
  • "Stay Home" (8:10), "Silhouettes" (7:22) and "Doom in Full Bloom" (7:49) by American Football.
  • "Here Comes the Night" (10:57) by The Beach Boys, from L.A. (Light Album).
    • "God Only Knows (Highlights From Tracking Date)" (9:25), from The Pet Sounds Sessions.
    • "Heroes and Villains Sections (Stereo Mix)" (7:16), "Smile Backing Vocals Montage" (8:30), "My Only Sunshine (11/14/66)" (6:52), "The Elements: Fire Session (11/28/66)" (8:27) and "Good Vibrations Session Highlights" (8:20), from The Smile Sessions.
    • "Fun, Fun, Fun (Session Highlights)" (7:39), from Keep an Eye on Summer - The Beach Boys Sessions 1964.
    • "Good Vibrations (Rehearsal / Live in Hawaii 8/25/67)" (8:27), from 1967 - Live Sunshine. Three other tracks, "The Letter" (8:38), "Their Hearts Were Full of Spring" (8:18), "The Lord's Prayer" (7:58), are rehearsals from the next day.
    • "Been Way Too Long (Sections)" (7:56), from I Can Hear Music: The 20/20 Sessions.

Defies category

  • Frank Zappa doesn't quite fit squarely into any genre, but some of his songs clocked in at over 20 minutes, most notably the song "Billy The Mountain", a song about a mountain that tries to go on vacation with his wife, a tree named Ethel, but his large size leaves a path of destruction in his wake. He also wrote complex jazz pieces like "Willie the Pimp" or "Son of Mr. Green Genes".
  • Havalina Rail Co., whose style can best be described as "eclectic", have a few. "New Song" is 7 minutes of accordion swing-pop; "Bullfrog" is a 7-minute hybrid of bluegrass and jam-rock; "Let's Not Forget Hawaii" is a 6-minute Hawaiian steel guitar ballad; "Rivers of Russia" is a 7-minute violin-piano duet; the live-in-the-studio version of "You Got Me Cry'n" takes what would otherwise be a pop song and drops 4 minutes of organ and guitar solos into the bridge, stretching the whole thing to 8 minutes long; and the 6-minute "Space, Love, and Bullfighting Suite" veers between theremin noodling, Wurlitzer jamming, mariachi violin, and acoustic guitar accompanied by bird calls.
  • Foetus has "Slung", which is notably an 11 minute swing song in the middle of an industrial rock album.
    • You may also include "Negative Energy" from Jim Thirwell's You've Got Foetus On Your Breath era, clocking at 15:55, although the last 12 or so minutes are just sustained feedback.
  • A lot of songs by Vernian Process, especially those outside of the LP Behold the Machine. From that album however, there is the nearly fourteen minute instrumental "The Maiden Flight".

Epic Albums

  • Quadrophenia by The Who.
  • Jesus Christ Superstar was originally just the concept album, and it is regarded by some people as being the best version (I mean, it has Ian Gillan and Murray Head as Jesus and Judas, respectively!). From "Overture" (the beginning of the album), "Heaven on Their Minds", "What's the Buzz/Strange Thing Mystifying", and "Everything's Alright" are all performed as one extremely long song, clocking in at about 17 minutes (!)
  • Lateralus by Tool. The songs are plenty long (more than half are 6 minutes or longer), but the real whopper is the album itself, at 78 minutes and 58 seconds.
    • "The manufacturer would only guarantee us up to 79 minutes... We thought we'd give them two seconds of breathing room." - Danny Carey
  • Loveless by My Bloody Valentine.
  • Blues for the Red Sun and Welcome to Sky Valley by Kyuss.
  • Dopesmoker by Sleep.
    • It's one song that's over an hour.
    • Similarly, The Great Barrier Reefer by Bongripper. One song, clocking in at 1:19:23.
  • Light of Day, Day of Darkness by Green Carnation
  • American Idiot by Green Day. Twenty First Century Breakdown even more.
  • Misplaced Childhood, Brave and Marbles by Marillion.
  • Freak Out!, Absolutely Free and We're Only in It for the Money by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
  • Lifeforms, ISDN and Dead Cities by Future Sound of London.
  • After Bathing at Baxter's by Jefferson Airplane, divided into several suites by the band.
  • The suite on side two of Abbey Road by The Beatles, if taken as one song.
  • Sufjan Stevens. Nearly all of his albums are at least an hour long. Songs for Christmas, Vol V clocked in at a mere 11 tracks and 35 minutes; most would consider this a full album, but he marketed it as an EP.
    • Dream Theater's A Change of Seasons is classified as an EP, but it's nearly an hour long. The band didn't want people (or their record company) to think they were releasing a studio album, so they stuffed in the live covers (The Big Medley itself fits this trope) and labeled it an EP.
  • Ys by Joanna Newsom. The shortest song is seven minutes.
    • And the longest(and best example of this as it is actually composed of many unfinished pieces and one complete piece) is seventeen minutes.
  • "Food for the Gods" by Fireaxe. Spans three disks, and is just a few minutes under 4 hours long.
  • Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play by Jethro Tull, the former being an Affectionate Parody of the trope and the latter more serious.
  • A Night at the Opera by Queen. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the more mainstream rock songs there.
  • Many Pink Floyd albums but particularly The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall
    • Some of their earlier albums can count, too. Atom Heart Mother and Meddle both have songs that take up a whole side of the album.
  • The Equalizer & Other Cliff Hangers by Stewart Copeland, which is a collection of reworked pieces from The Equalizer soundtrack, can be also called a collection of Crowning Music of Awesome. this is only the first track
  • Junta by Phish. Half of the albums 14 songs are over 8 minutes, and many of them are much longer in live performances.
  • The Tain by The Decemberists. The whole record is just one 18-minute epic in five parts, based on a famous Irish mythic poem.
    • On that note, The Hazards of Love, also by The Decemberists. The whole record is just one 58-minute epic in 17 parts, based on Colin Meloy's vivid imagination.
  • Tyranny and Mutation by Blue Oyster Cult, with thematically organized sides labeled "The Red" and "The Black".
  • Bat Out Of Hell, by Meat Loaf.
  • Three out of the four full-length albums by Japanese doom metal band Corrupted contain only 1 song, the shortest (!) clocking in at 41 minutes.
  • The Fantômas album Delìrium Còrdia contains only one song, which lasts for 74:17. The last 20 or so of those minutes consist of the sound of a record's run-out groove, but still...
  • Devil Doll's (the real Italo-Slovenian band, not the American band) shortest song clocks right a bit more than 20 minutes. They released a total of five albums, which contained a total of six songs (seven if you count the easter egg at the end of The Girl Who Was... Death). Their last album was divided in several tracks/parts, but it's still one single piece of music.
  • Fate's Warning's "A Pleasant Shade Of Grey", which was originally meant to be one song, but split up into 6 songs.
  • Sandinista!by The Clash. A triple-LP lasting nearly two and a half hours.
  • Mike Oldfield often does one-song albums, such as Tubular Bells (source of the famous theme from The Exorcist) and Amarok (that being a CD instead of an LP, lasts 60 minutes!)
  • Every album by Summoning (bar their first one, Lugburz). Most of their songs are 7 minutes or more, but special mention goes to "Land of the Dead", a beautifully melancholic piece that goes on for 13 minutes.
  • Yes: Relayer. 3 songs. at 40:28. "The Gates of Delirium" alone is over 20 minutes long.
    • This is nothing new to the band. 1972's Close to the Edge had three songs. The title track (18:43) took up an entire side, And You and I (10:08) and Siberian Khatru (8:55) filled the record out. Arguably the CMoA for prog rock.
    • "Tales from Topographic Oceans". Each song is about 20 minutes on its own. As said above, however, it's also marred for being one of the worst, most excessive albums in prog-rock. The Fandom is... split.
    • This is positively tiny compared to The Keys to Ascension, a double double album from the 90s consisting one part studio tracks (two of which were nearly 20 minutes long) and two parts live recordings. iTunes put the two double albums together into one titanic super-set, resulting in an album that contains 218 minutes worth of music.
  • Oasis's Be Here Now, only three songs on this twelve-song album are under five minutes (that includes a two minute instrumental reprise), the lead single ('D'You Know What I Mean?') was 7:42 (the first minute consisting of pretty much feedback), the second ('Stand By Me') was just shy of 6 minutes and the third ('All Around The World') was 9:20 on the album and extended to 9:38 on the single, making it the longest song to ever reach number 1 in the UK.
  • Chris Butler's "The Devil Glitch", at 69 minutes.
  • Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery. The main track on the album called "Karn Evil 9" is nearly half an hour long, and is split over 2 sides of the album (the entire second side is devoted to the track, but there is a part on the first side).
  • Iron Maiden, A Matter of Life and Death. Eight of the ten songs are at least 6:30 in length (the other two are at least 4:30), with some over 9 minutes. And it works, interestingly enough...the songs are grand and sweeping and well-done. Not bad for a band in its fourth decade of activity (it was released in 2006).
    • The following album, The Final Frontier, is similar, eventually clocking at 76 minutes, and having an 11-minute long song.
  • Japanese drone/stoner metal band Boris has a few: Absolutego is one 65-minute song; Flood is one 70-minute song; and Feedbacker is a 43-minute suite.
  • Several Klaus Schulze albums, such as Timewind and Moondawn, both of which consist of two 30-minute-a-piece tracks. The reissue of Timewind includes a bonus disc with the 40-minute "Echoes of Time"(a prototype of "Bayreuth Return").
  • Vladislav Delay's Anima album, which consists of a single 62-minute experimental ambient track.
  • Most of the tracks on Blue Amazon's The Javelin album are 11–16 minutes long, and they are seamlessly mixed together on certain versions.
  • Sasha's Xpander EP. All of the tracks, except for the radio edit of the title track, are about 10–12 minutes in length.
  • BT's unsung debut album Ima has "Sasha's Voyage of Ima", a 42-minute nonstop megamix of the album's songs mixed by the aformentioned Sasha. Most of the standalone songs are also quite long, for example the two-part "Loving You More" is a total of 13 minutes; "Blue Skies", another two-parter, is 17 minutes; and "Divinity" is 11 minutes. They don't call it "epic house" for nothing.
    • ESCM also has several 8-10 minute pieces, as well as crossfading most of the album. The UK edition of Movement in Still Life is a continuous DJ-style mix.
  • Jeffrey Fayman and Robert Fripp's A Temple in the Clouds collaboration, which uses Fripp's "Frippertronics" guitar loops, consists of a 15 minute track (The Pillars of Hercules), a 30 minute track(the title track), and two 4-minute interludes(The Sky Below and The Stars Below).
  • Most of the tracks on BT's 2-disc These Hopeful Machines album are over the 10-minute mark.
  • Joanna Newsom's Have One on Me. a Triple Album.
  • The Andy Warhol tribute album Songs for Drella by Lou Reed and John Cale is one long, connected piece.
  • Freaky Chakra's Lowdown Motivator and Moonroof Operator albums each have several long multiple-track suites, while Blacklight Fantasy segues all of its songs into a continuous mix. As for the songs themselves, "Peace Fixation" and "Light Dark Light" from the first album are 14:07 and 10:30, respectively.
  • Lindstrom's Where You Go I Go Too features 3 songs over 55 minutes, which is outlandish even by disco standards.
  • While Metallica are used to long songs and all their albums could be considered epics for it, when you consider sheer length, everything after The Black Album is over 70 minutes (Load manages to peak at 78:59. And that's after shortening one of the songs!).
    • Then comes the infamous Lulu with Lou Reed, which is long enough to be spread across two disks. 5 songs are over 7 minutes long (3 of which are over 11 minutes').
  • Anything by ambient electronica group Dilate. Cyclos had to have its songs compressed to fit on a single CD, while Octagon is a 2 1/2 hour double album. Most of the songs are over 10 minutes long.
  • Swans had a habit of doing this on live albums and on later studio albums. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity doesn't feature a single song under 5 minutes in length. Public Castration Is a Good Idea features lengthy, huge-sounding live renditions of works from their mid-80s albums, Swans Are Dead is a collection of two epic shows from tours they performed near the end of their career, and Soundtracks for the Blind, oft considered their magnum opus by fans, is a 2 and a half hour double CD of lengthy, dark, atmospheric post-rock epics.
  • Dream Theater are no strangers to epic music, but they really took it to an extreme with Black Clouds and Silver Linings. With only 6 songs, the album clocks in at over 75 minutes, with 4 songs clocking in at over 10 minutes.
  • Miles Davis's Pangaea has only two songs: Gondwana (46 minutes) and Zimbabwe (41 minutes).
  • Psychedelic rock band Acid Mothers Temple frequently does this, with their debut being a 53-minute song. It ends with two minutes of loud beeping.
  • DJ mixes, particularly Trance and House, aim to crossfade songs together to avoid any breaks. The end result is that the transitions between songs are easier to ignore, resulting in a 70+ minute "song".
    • Many electronica artist albums, some of which are mentioned above, are also crossfaded or seamlessly mixed.
  • The Pet Shop Boys' Introspective album, which includes "Always On My Mind/In My House"(9:05), "Domino Dancing"(7:40), "Left to My Own Devices"(8:16), and "It's Alright"(9:24).
  • Showbread's "Anorexia Nervosa" is over 90 minutes of music.
  • The Blood Brother's "Young Machetes" comes in right at an hour.
  • Mike Oldfield's Amarok, Tubular Bells, Ommadawn, Hergest Ridge and Incantations.
  • Vangelis' Voices. Opens with the 7:01 title track, which is followed by the 8:25 Echoes. The 7:53 Ask the Mountains, the 6:41 Losing Sleep and the 5:56 Dream in an Open Place are also present.
  • Juno Reactor's Luciana is one of the "album-length single" type (a 61 minute track).
  • Faunts' M4 is officially an EP, and priced as such. To be fair, it does only have 5 songs. It's still 39.2 minutes long, pretty much full album length. There is only 1 song under 7 minutes long.
  • Emilie Autumn 's Laced/Unlaced CD/Collection comes to 1 hour. 47 minutes. and 31 seconds and it plays as a standard album on iTunes. Epic Rocking, Long elaborate songs, covers and her own masterpieces...
  • Sound Horizon's Moira is just two minutes shy of a full hour and a half. While this is impressive in of itself, Revo's commented that the album is more or less a single song that was broken up into sections for practical reasons.
  • Moonsorrow's Viides Luku - Hävitetty lasts 56 minutes and 29 seconds. Okay, that's short for an album (it's officially an EP), but the shortest track lasts over 26 minutes.
  • Autechre's Untilted has eight tracks, most at least 8 minutes in length, with its piece de resistance, Sublimit, clocking in at 15:56.
  • The Downward Spiral and The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails. Especially the latter, which is a double album.
  • The original concept album of Chess had several tracks that qualified at least in part as Epic Rocking, starting with "The Opening Ceremony" (a suite almost 10 minutes long, one part of which -- "The Arbiter's Song" -- received separate release as a single on its own).
  • Days of Future Passed by The Moody Blues, particularly "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights in White Satin"

Parodies

  • Parodied in the Homestar Runner CD "Strong Bad Sings", with "Moving Very Slowly", a metal song with a very long outro which fades out, then fades back in and finishes.
  • Parodied in This Is Spinal Tap with "Jazz Odyssey".
  • Parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic, repeatedly: "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota", "Genius in France", "Nature Trail to Hell", "Albuquerque", "Trapped in the Drive-Thru", "Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me", "You Don't Love Me Anymore".
    • "You Don't Love Me Anymore" isn't a true example; the song is only 4 minutes long. It just looks longer on a CD thanks to the 10 minute filler for the bonus track "Bite me", which is just a cacophony of screaming and instrument bashing designed to scare anyone who accidentally left their CD player on after the song ended.
  • The Jello Biafra/Ministry side project Lard have "70's Rock Must Die", which lyrically is a rant against 70's nostalgia, and musically is 7 minutes of parodying 70's hard rock tropes (gratuitous cowbell, endless guitar soloing, a power ballad style bridge, vocal histrionics, and of course an Overly Long Gag of an ending). They also have debatable straight examples with the 15 minute "I Am Your Clock" and the 32 minute "Time To Melt" (debatable in that neither really go through a lot of changes, they're just deliberately punishingly slow)
  • Parodied in a season one episode of Flight of the Conchords, when Bret writes a love song for his girlfriend, Coco, and asks Jemaine to critique it. When he sings it for Jemaine, the camera keeps cutting to moments that clearly happened several minutes later as Jemaine moved around the apartment until a final cut when Bret finished singing. Jemaine's first complaint is the two hour length of the song. Parodied again in a season two episode when the duo is commissioned to write a jingle for a 30 second toothpaste commercial, but wind up turning in an eighteen minute ballad.
  • Parodied in Saturday Night Live in "The Tom Arnold and Madonna Story" where Tom Arnold submits his record for publishing and the first complaint of the record company executives is that his Johnny Be Good cover lasts 9 and a half minutes... and that's the shortest track on the whole record.
  • Wondermark #1323: "In which is begun an Epic".

Woman: I thought you said this song was about a submarine battle.
Musician: The naval stuff really starts picking up around verse eighty-seven!

Internet Origins

  • Given the fact that the file size of MOD files is determined more by the instruments included in the file than by the actual song data, it's not too surprising that quite a few Demoscene compositions are very long pieces when played back.
    • MIDI files and Chiptunes can also produce long playbacks from small files.
    • "SSI Intro" by Purple Motion of the Future Crew is 11:52. "Progressive Funk" by Moby(not that Moby) is also 12 minutes.
  • An interesting little open source program can stretch any audio file out to many, many times its original length. A Crowning Moment of Awesome for the program is running "Still Alive" from Portal through it and stretching it out to eight times its normal length, resulting in a file nearly 24 minutes long, but which sounds absolutely amazing.
  1. ↑ There are exceptions, however; Velvet Underground were notorious for building epic-length songs on as little as a single chord.
  2. ↑ the most common 10-inch discs could hold about 3 and a half minutes of music per side; 12-inch discs could hold 4 or 5 minutes per side
  3. ↑ And "Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra", but only because of a hidden song
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