Spoken Word in Music

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    "The silence, the terror, the pain, the horror, as your mom comes downstairs."
    —Barenaked Ladies, "Enid"

    Studio recorded music sometimes contains barely audible pieces of lo-fi recording. This may be used for an intro or outro, or it might be used to make a long instrumental sequence more interesting.

    This generally is done by tacking on spoken word recordings.

    So what counts? It should fall into one of these categories:

    1. The bit was recorded by someone other than the original artist at the time of the recording.
    2. The bit is created by the original artist, but was likely recorded separately from the song (this is where Pink Floyd and experimental music gets confusing.)
    3. The bit is from radio or television, or other media.

    And of course, it has to be spoken word. It does not include hidden tracks and outtakes. It doesn't include noise from live performances. As always, feel free to rework any of this.

    Examples of Spoken Word in Music include:
    • ABC's "The Look of Love:" "Martin, maybe one day you'll find true love."
    • The Alan Parsons Project gave us Let's Talk About Me with baseball commentary in the background.
    • Barenaked Ladies:
      • "Enid" is the perfect example of this trope: it has some sort of Depeche Mode-esque radio recording, "The silence, the terror, the pain, the horror, as your mom comes downstairs," and then it launches into the song.
        • Out of context, that sounds like a Your Mom joke.
      • "Peterborough and the Kawarthas" has a weather report during the instrumentals.
      • "Maybe Katie:" "I'll set the metronome."
      • The better part of "Crazy" is meaningless words under instrumental music.
      • Steven Page's solo album The Vanity Project has "Hit and Run" fade out with a traffic collision report.
    • The Beatles:
      • "Yellow Submarine" has some speech and submarine sounds in it: "Full speed ahead, Mr. Parker, full speed ahead!"
      • "I Am The Walrus" features a few lines from a BBC Third Programme broadcast of King Lear.
      • One that sparked a conspiracy theory: John Lennon speaks a few odd lines near the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever", one of which sounds like "I buried Paul" due to his slur. It's "Cranberry sauce".
    • David Bowie's "Space Oddity" has a countdown under the lyrics.
      • "All the Madmen" includes a brief recitation in the middle of the song.
    • Kate Bush
      • "Hounds of Love" opens with a sound clip from the film Night of the Demon: "It's in the trees...It's coming!"
        • More accurately, it was a re-creation of the clip.
      • There's a long, eerie instrumental break near the end of "Breathing" with a recording of a man describing the effects of a nuclear bomb.
      • "Houdini:" "Rosabelle, believe!"
      • "Experiment IV:" "I'll bet my mum's gonna give me a little toy instrument!"
      • "Lily":

    Oh thou, who givest sustenance to the universe
     From whom all things proceed
     To whom all things return
     Unveil to us the face of the true spiritual sun
     Hidden by a disc of golden light
     That we may know the truth
     And do our whole duty
     As we journey to thy sacred feet

    • There are a number of songs from Sophie B. Hawkins which contain indistinct conversations of people in public in places with exotic accents just for the heck of it:
      • "Mr. Tugboat Hello"
      • "Let Me Love You Up"
      • "I Want You"
      • "Savior Child"
    • The Information Society song "What's On Your Mind" had snippets of Mr. Spock saying "pure energy" from a Star Trek: The Original Series episode.
    • Michael Jackson's "Thriller" includes a soliloquy by Vincent Price.
      • La Roux's "Tigerlily" has a similar interlude as an Homage.
      • Other MJ examples: "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," "The Girl is Mine," "PYT," "ABC," "Man in the Mirror"
      • The breakdown section of "Smooth Criminal" has a male voice (presumably a police officer) shouting, "OK, I want everyone to clear the area right now."
    • The Meat Loaf song "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" has the somewhat, umm... suggestive baseball play-by-play radio broadcast, courtesy of broadcasting legend Phil Rizzuto. Rizzuto reportedly had no idea that the commentary he was recording was going to be used as a sex metaphor.
      • The dialogue at the start of "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth". ("Would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?")
    • The Monkees' "Don't Call on Me" begins and ends with simulated nightclub chatter, complete with Micky playing an MC who introduces the song.
      • The soundtrack to Head (edited together by Jack Nicholson, of all people) contains many examples of this, most notably "Swami – Plus Strings, Etc."
      • "Gonna Buy Me A Dog" is about half spoken word, with the members of the group goofing around and apparently trying to disrupt the recording outright.
    • Tom Petty's "Even the Losers" begins with a woman saying, "It's just the normal noises in here."
    • Jim Morrison of The Doors frequently did this. A lot of his spoken lyrics were actually his own poetry.
    • Pink Floyd
      • "Wish You Were Here" begins with the sound of an AM radio flipping through the stations, until it settles on a station playing the beginning of "Wish You Were Here". Then the "listener" begins playing along (this is where the second guitar comes in).
      • "Speak to Me" from The Dark Side of the Moon: "I've been mad for fucking years..."
        • For that matter, there is spoken word throughout the whole of Dark Side of the Moon. They interviewed people in the studio and incorporated their responses as little bits. Even Paul McCartney was interviewed, but they didn't use him.
      • The Wall—YOU! YES YOU! STAND STILL LADDIE! IF YE DUNNA EAT YER MEAT, YE CANT HAVE ANY PUDDING! HOW CAN YE HAVE ANY PUDDING IF YE DUNNA EAT YER MEAT? Oh my God, what a fabulous room, are all these your guitars?, The Dam Busters in the background, etc.
      • The radio chatter in "Learning to Fly".
      • An excerpt from a Steven Hawking speech in 'Keep Talking'; it's about the only bit I can remember the refrain showing up in.
    • It would almost be easier to list the songs in which Pulp doesn't have an interlude using this trope, but we'll stick to listing examples for the time being:
      • "Love is Blind" from Separations: "We held hands and we looked out of the bedroom window . . . "
      • The very beginning of "Acrylic Afternoons", on His 'N' Hers.
      • "I Spy" and "F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E." off of Different Class
      • "A Little Soul" from This is Hardcore.
      • "Wickerman" from We Love Life is an entire song of this trope; Jarvis literally just speaks over background music for nearly eight minutes.
    • Gwen Stefani's "Long Way To Go" samples an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
      • Sugarland's "Happy Ending" does too, along with Neil Armstrong's first words stepping onto the moon. Baby's born in the ghetto... "I have a dream that one day..." Baby's born with a silver spoon... "That's one small step for man..." One tells his mama I have a dream/One tells his mama I'll walk the moon...
    • "Weird Al" Yankovic:
      • "Jerry Springer" has a mock argument during the instrumentals.
      • "Grapefruit Diet" has a take-out order at the end.
        • "Skipper Dan:" "And there it is, the back side of water...what have I done with my LIFE?"
      • "I Lost On Jeopardy:" "That's right, Al, you lost. And let me tell you what you didn't win..." Courtesy of original Jeopardy announcer Don Pardo.
      • "You're Pitiful": Al starts the song, then stops and asks if he was too early, and when to actually start singing.
        • The song he was parodying—James Blunt's "You're Beautiful"—does the same thing.
      • Albuquerque is besides the choruses almost completely spoken word, with Al telling a surreal story of a man's life growing up and going to Albuquerque. And it is awesome.
      • "Craigslist:" "An open letter... to the snotty barista... at the Coffee Bean on San Vicente Boulevard..."
      • "Confessions Part III:" "You don't know how hard it is for me to tell you this... but remember that shirt you got me for my birthday? Well... I returned it for store credit. That-that thing was hideous, what were you thinking? ..."
      • "Whatever You Like:" "Hey girl, you know our economy's in the toilet, but I'm still gonna treat you right!"
    • A Kanon Wakeshima song ends with what sounds like Wakeshima singing the song in the shower.
    • Dream Theater uses this a lot. About a third of their songs have either spoken word sections, or sound samples from movies or something.
    • Loreena McKennitt's Dicken's Dublin has a lot of this, with a child speaking intermittently during the song.
    • UNKLE's "Rabbit In Your Headlights" has a sound clip from Jacob's Ladder in the middle.
      • Also from Outro, "I... I feel... that this has been the most incredible and wonderful thing to have ever have happened... and also the worst. It's... it's a mixed bag. I've been taken to the depths of extreme... terror by this... on the one hand. On the other hand, this experience has been about finding great... joy"
    • Fort Minor's "Kenji" begins and closes with clips from an interview with Mike Shinoda's father and aunt about their experience during their family's internment at Manzanar during WWII. Justified as the song was inspired by those events.
      • As for Linkin Park, their latest album contained samples of speeches by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Mario Savio, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
    • Many extreme metal bands will do this as a contrast to the loud, often violent intensity of their music. They also can sum up the lyrical attitude of the musician in question.
      • Skyfire's Spectral - "This is not a dream."
      • At the Gates's Slaughter of the Soul - "We are blind, to the worlds within us, waiting to be born."
      • Slipknot's self titled album with "742617000027" followed by "(sic)" ("The whole thing I think is sick").
      • I'm In A Coffin's One Final Action - "The best day of my life."
      • Caïna uses this a lot, typically of the third variety.
    • Iron Maiden uses this sometimes, like at the beginning of "Number of the Beast" and "The Prisoner."
    • Ayreon has the mysterious voice at the beginning of several songs in Into The Electric Castle and has excerpts of a few different speeches during "Unnatural Selection" on 01011001.
    • Blind Guardian has these between several songs on the Concept Album Nightfall in Middle Earth, presumably to make it easier to understand what each of the songs is about - though it still probably won't help much if the listener hasn't read The Silmarillion.
    • Many Ministry songs have these: Earlier on they were mainly from movies, though "NWO" included many samples of George Bush. As they essentially released three straight albums of protest songs after the election of George W. Bush, a lot of out of context samples of him came in too. And "End Of Days Part II" ends with a lengthy excerpt from Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous speech about the military-industrial complex.
    • Steel Pole Bath Tub frequently used television and movie clips in songs; "Train To Miami" uses a sample of Jack Nicholson sneering "yeah, yeah, yeah" from Five Easy Pieces for instance. When they put out their major label debut they were specifically cautioned against doing this by the label's legal department.
    • Jawbreaker's "Jet Black" starts with a bit of Christopher Walken's One-Scene Wonder monologue from Annie Hall ("I tell you this because as an artist, I think you'll understand..."), then continues with more of it during the bridge.
    • "Scooby Snacks" by Fun Lovin' Criminals extensively uses dialogue clips from Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Enough so that they apparently had to credit Quentin Tarantino with co-writing the song.
    • "Your Touch" by The Black Keys (at least the music video) has the two band members talking over a guitar solo. "So, how do you feel about...y'know, being dead?" "I dunno, my neck hurts."
    • Rob Zombie seems pretty fond of using movie samples in songs: For instance, every song on White Zombie's La Sexorcisto featured at least an instrumental break or two with clips from horror films, exploitation films or b-movies, along with Iggy Pop making a guest appearance to recite Word Salad Lyrics in a monster truck rally commercial announcer voice. These have shown up plenty of times in his solo career too, and the song "House of 1000 Corpses" featured extensive dialogue from the movie of the same name, despite coming out a couple of years before the film itself did.
    • Tool with Bottom, done by spoken-word artist and previous Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins
      • There's many other examples that this band has done. First, there's "Third Eye", which uses spoken-word excerpts from Bill Hicks routines, then there's "Message to Harry Manback", which consists of an angry answering machine message with somber piano music in the background; "Faaip de Oiad" which includes a sample of a prank call sent into the Art Bell radio show, and finally "Disgustipated", which ends with another (very creepy) answering machine message.
    • Liberate by Disturbed features the lead singer quoting the book of Isaiah during the bridge: "Out of Zion shall come forth the law (Isaiah 2:3) And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem (Isaiah 2:3) Nation shall not raise sword against nation (Isaiah 2:4) And they shall not learn war anymore (Isaiah 2:4) For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken (Isaiah 1:20)."
    • Creature Feature loves these. "The Greatest Show Unearthed" opens with a talker's spiel for a Circus of Fear; "Buried Alive" begins with a quote from Edgar Allen Poe; "Aim For The Head" contains dialogue from Night of the Living Dead; "A Gorey Demise" opens with a bunch of corpses having a party... There are fewer Creature Feature songs without spoken word than with.
    • Fastball's "The Way" opens with a radio tuning and snippets of various stations before the song starts playing. For the first few lines, it sounds like it's playing on a low-quality radio.
    • The Veronicas Insomnia, Cold, Untouched and more.
    • Jonathan Coulton's song "Shop Vac" has a brief spoken word portion under the last verse, a mock-up news broadcast which is then cut off by static. It is difficult to hear it in its entirety but it appears to say, "... the case of two men who have come up with an idea for ads reaching a captive audience. The ads can now be seen inside public bathroom stalls. 'It may seem silly,' says ... A forty-nine-year-old, unidentified man went berserk last night, opening fire with a twelve-gauge shotgun in a crowded, downtown..."
    • Spin Doctors' "What Time Is It?" Also opens with a mock-up newscast, initially talking of Israeli jet fighters, then moving to the next topic "A forty-nine-year-old, unidentified man went berserk last night...".
    • Roky Erikson's "Creature With The Atom Brain" contains extensive dialogue snippets from the B-Movie of the same name... sort of. It's the original dialogue from the movie, but it's Roky reciting the lines instead of the actors.
    • "Scary Picture Show" by Riot Squad opens with a line from Night of the Creeps: "Let's play a game! It's called 'Scary Noises'."
    • Countless bands of the National Socialist Black Metal subgenre sample Adolf Hitler's speeches in their music.
    • The Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch" opens with a line from a documentary: "This is called the act of mating! But there are many other differences between humans and animals that you should know about."
    • The Wings album Back to the Egg has two songs dependent on these. "Reception" includes several spoken-word radio clips, and "The Broadcast" is a speech set to music—and no, Paul McCartney is not the speaker.
      • "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" has a short spoken section where Paul sounds notoriously like John Cleese.
    • The soundtrack album for Give My Regards to Broad Street includes sound bites of dialogue from the film, which are not always directly connected to the songs they're attached to.
    • The "Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep" prayer in the middle of Metallica's "Enter Sandman".
    • Beck uses this on occasion - "Where It's At" features several clips from a Totally Radical 70's sex education record ("We're all part of the total scene!"), while "Truck Drivin' Neighbors Downstairs" starts with two men engaging in a Cluster F-Bomb filled drunken shouting match. Scarily enough these are the actual downstairs neighbors the song was written about - they were being so loud he accidentally picked up their argument on his four-track while trying to record home demos.
      • The b-side "Zatyricon" is probably his most extensive use of the trope, as the vocals consist entirely of prank calls to cosmetic surgery practices made by Tony Hoffer (who was a member of Beck's backing band at the time).
    • "Critical Acclaim" by Avenged Sevenfold features the singer shouting criticisms of the right wing and those who put them in place.
    • The Necromancer by Rush starts with the narration of the story of Prince By-Tor, spoken by Neil Peart (possibly with an edited voice).
      • Also, Countdown includes snippets of radio talk from a Space Shuttle launch.
      • Double Agent, from the Counterparts album, contains lyrics spoken, instead of sung, by Geddy.
    • I am seriously surprised no one has mentioned the entire music career of one William Shatner.
    • Eels "Manchild" contains samples from a depressed-sounding answering machine message left by Jill Sobule ("I'm not having any fun...")
    • "Selfish" by Ned's Atomic Dustbin includes a repeated sample of Reginald VelJohnson from Die Hard ("Why don't you wake up and smell what you're shovelin'?").
      • "What Gives My Son?" has a couple of different samples of fathers yelling at their sons to get a haircut and a job ("you want to be a bum all your life, be a bum, but not under my roof!"). They both seem to come from different movies or shows, but no one seems to have figured out the original sources.
    • "Car Seat (God's Presents)" by Blind Melon ends with a poem written and recited by Shannon Hoon's great grandmother set to a fairly lengthy instrumental jam.
    • "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches, go look it up, we'll wait.
      • Make sure to watch the video. Mind. Blown.
    • Stone Sour, Omega and The Frozen. Be warned, the first is amazingly nihilistic, the second is highly cynical.
    • Sonic Youth's "Providence" consists entirely of feedback, piano, and an answering machine message from Mike Watt, which apparently concerns Thurston Moore accidentally throwing equipment in the trash while stoned.
    • Vernian Process, "Her Clockwork Heart".
      • Many steampunk bands, in fact. Among them, Abney Park's "Until the Day You Die:"

    "Dr. Weird's Mysteries will be continued shortly. So by the way, doctor, is mystery your sole pleasure?"
    "Young man, what can be more pleasant than mystery?"
    "Well, music. I mean the kind of music a man can hum or whistle when he feels on top of the world."

      • A similar case occurs in Abney Park's "Herr Drosselmeyer's Doll,"

    "Gentlemen, this fallen angel is the illegitimate daughter of art and science. A modern marvel of engineering, clockworks elevated to the very natural process which even now is in your blood, racing, your eyes flashing at such irreproachable beauty. Here is Gaia, here is Eve, here is Lilith, and I stand before you as her father. Sprung fully-formed from my brow, dewy and sweet; she can be yours and yours again, for her flesh is the incorruptible pale to be excused from the wages of sin . . ."

      • "The Inventor's Daughter" by The Cog Is Dead segues into the next song, "The Death Of The Cog," with a spoken "report:"

    "We interrupt this broadcast to bring you breaking news. At approximately 2:05 PM this afternoon, an English clockmaker by the name of Hamilton revealed to the world a new kind of clock. This sick, twisted design displays the time digitally on a small backlit screen and is run entirely on electricity. Hamilton predicts that this new abomination is the way of the future, and believes that someday these hideous creations of his will be in every home in the world. It is with deep regret that we announce to you, dear listeners, that the cog is dead. We repeat: The Cog Is Dead."

    "Come on, boys -- and girls -- enjoy! Mr. Soot's Traveling Parade of Pulchritude! You will see such delights as you have never witnessed before. Come on, now, form a proper queue, that's right...if you have the money, we have the honey! Behind these curtains you will see a frolicsome view that will leave your toes a-tingling and you brain aflame with desire!"

    • Mike Oldfield's "Amarok" has someone impersonating Margaret Thatcher towards the end of the song.
    • God Bullies' "Fear And Pain" starts with an odd pseudo in-flight announcement ("...your captain is The Lord Jesus Christ, and I am your Chief Stewardess, The Angel Of Mercy"), taken from the religious record Flight F-I-N-A-L.
    • Sublime's "April 29, 1992 (Miami)", a song about the Los Angeles riots in 1992, is interspersed with recordings of police communications on that day alerting officers to break-ins and looters.
    • Eddie Rabbitt's "American Boy" includes samples of speeches from Martin Luther King Jr., Neil Armstrong and John F. Kennedy.
    • "This Ain't No Rag, It's a Flag" by the Charlie Daniels Band includes a recording of a kid reading the Pledge of Allegiance.
    • Ben Folds Five's "Your Most Valuable Possession" is a message Ben Folds' father left on his answering machine, set to loungey backing music.
    • "The killer awoke before dawn. He put his boots on."
    • Diana Ross's version of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."
    • Foo Fighters' "Everlong" features some faint and semi-unintelligible whispering over the quiet part of the interlude after the second chorus, supposedly taken from sources including a love letter and a technical manual.
    • One of the gimmicks of the Manic Street Preachers' album The Holy Bible is that a lot of the songs have quotes lifted from various sources as intros. This gimmick is revisited on the "sequel" to the album, Journal for Plague Lovers."
    • ABC's "Poison Arrow" has a spoken part just before the last chorus.
    • Our Solemn Hour by Within Temptation contains a few lines of a speech by Winston Churchill at the very start.
    • "FantasMic", Nightwish's seven-minute long Epic Rocking Nerdgasm about the Disney Animated Canon, has a sound clip from Beauty and the Beast in the middle of it.
    • Madness' Cover Version of "Lola" by The Kinks was originally meant to be sung the whole way through, but a problem in the studio resulted in Suggs speaking the last lines of the song instead.
    • Spark Plug Entertainment's Spiders Web A Pigs Tale features one near the beginning, when the main character Walter tries to explain to his mother how her pie went missing after he had ate it.
    • Radiohead's "Fitter Happier" has what sounds like radio chatter in the background, along with some other unsettling noises.
    • Everclear's "AM Radio" opens with some radio squeaks and squawks of the sort that might be made by tuning in, and then "Portions of today's programming are reproduced by means of electrical transcription of tape recordings."
    • Stars' "The Woods" features samples from the documentary Grey Gardens, specifically "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale talking about accidentally dropping her scarf off the porch and into the massively overgrown backyard ("It's a sea of leaves, sea of leaves... if you lose something you can’t find it again, lost at the bottom”).
      • Also by Stars, from the beginning of "Your Ex Lover Is Dead", "When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire." Apparently a recording of one of the band member's fathers.
    • Math The Band's "Hang Out Hang Ten" and "Almost!" both end in what seems to be nonsensical Quote Mining of some kind of self-help tape: "You've probably also realized that fears and anxieties are one of the most important skills you can acquire", and "I've had students tell me they have thousands of years of experience, which dates back twenty five thousand years, which means forty million discoveries of ancient wisdom and of new insights".
    • They Might Be Giants were somewhat fond of this trope for their first few albums. "Snowball In Hell" features a segment of a motivational tape for salesmen, while "I'm Def" and "I'll Sink Manhattan" feature messages left on the answering machine used for their Dial-A-Song phone line.
    • Cracker's cover of The Residents' "Blue Rosebuds" includes some barely audible speech due to a Throw It In moment from the producer: An inmate from a nearby prison dialed the studio's phone number to make an obscene phone call while the band was recording, and the producer very quickly patched the phone line into the mixing board during an instrumental break. It certainly did add to the uncharacteristic creepiness of the cover.
    • Mary and the Black Lambs song "Emily" has a phone call reenactment just before the final chorus.
    • Green Day throws one in at the start of "East Jesus Nowhere": "And we shall see how godless a nation we have become."
    • Godspeed You! Black Emperor does this often, perhaps most notably in "The Dead Flag Blues."
    • Mike Watt's "Heartbeat" ends with an answering machine message from Kathleen Hanna about how she refuses to appear on the album because another, unnamed guest on the album raped her friend when she was 13, as well as because the rest of the contributors are "just doing the whole, like, big-white-baby-with-an-ego-problem thing". As it turns out Hanna was the one who asked to be on the album in the first place, and the recording was deliberately submitted by her as an "art piece", and wasn't even recorded to an actual answering machine.
    • Self's Gizmodgery is an album recorded entirely using toy instruments (and noise-making toys in general), so talking toys are occasionally used this way. For instance, in "Pattycake" the lyric "So you called the chief of police" is followed by a computerized voice cheerfully announcing "This is the pig! This is the pig!".
      • "Cinderblocks For Shoes" starts with an answering machine message from someone who is either a genuine Loony Fan (at one point she gushes "I know where you live and everything, ha ha ha ha!") or just someone playing a prank on Matt Mahaffey.
    • The beginning of Kate Nash's Mansion Song.
    • The Divine Comedy uses this quite a lot. Generation Sex has clips from Katie Puckrik on a talkshow, Becoming More Like Alfie contains a clip from, well, Alfie and The Certainty Of Chance has Neil quoting La Dolce Vita.
      • There's also Dexter Fletcher's contribution to "Here Comes The Flood".
      • He continues this with future songs, including To Die A Virgin starting off with an appropriate exchange from The Camomile Lawn. Taken to the extreme in The Lost Art of Conversation, where the end of the song is comprised of near-indecipherable conversation between groups of people while the music plays out (even at live shows, he encourages the audience to start talking to one another as the song ends).
    • Too Much Joy's Son Of Sam I Am included these as introductions for most songs. In a somewhat infamous infringement case, a sample of a Bozo The Clown record ("I found something in one of my pockets. It was about as big as your shoe, but it was shaped like a rocket!") had to be removed from the song "Clowns" after the band were sued by Larry Harmon, one of the performers to portray Bozo himself.
    • The Byrds' "2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)".
    • Pretty much every song by The Ink Spots features a monologue in deep bass tones.
    • Cake's "Thrills" is what seems to be an old time sermon set to music, quite good actually.
    • My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult uses this constantly, citing and repeating lines from cult films to really up the strangeness.
    • Psonic Psunspot by The Dukes Of Stratosphear includes a little girl reciting odd, Alice in Wonderland-inspired prose at the end of a couple of songs ("The puffin sipped at his herbal tea and sighed 'you can't get the buttons these days!'"). Also, their song "My Love Explodes" ends with a an offended call-in radio show listener who sounds uncannily like Woody Allen complaining about a song played on air ("...What possessed you to write such a disgusting, degeneratized song as that? And I'm complimenting you by considering it a song...")
    • Supertramp's "Fool's Overture" includes a clip from Winston Churchill's most famous speech.
    • Sound Horizon's works, which albums tell stories through singing, narration and characters speaking. Since their major debut they have also invited mainstream voice actors to speak lines, such as Norio Wakamoto, Hikaru Midorikawa and Marina Inoue.
    • Bay Area progressive/death/black/folk/etc. metal band Cormorant has the interlude of their song Scavenger's Feast includes layered samples of members of the band (and other people who were at the studio at the time) reading from different books (in various languages). Good luck trying to out the words, though.
    • The Gorillaz song "Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head," narrated by Dennis Hopper, is basically a spoken word track with a little music spliced in.
    • The Starflyer 59 song "First Heart Attack" ends with what sounds like a couple of surgeons conversing mid-operation.
    • Hawkwind have a number of spoken word songs, most of them on the Space Ritual album.
    • Guns N' Roses has done this once or twice - most notably, their song "Civil War" opens with a soundbyte from Cool Hand Luke and, during an instrumental segment plays a rather chilling sample from an anonymous Peruvian militant general. ("As popular war advances, peace is closer.")
      • In the song "Madagascar" from their newest album, they reuse the Cool Hand Luke soundbyte, along with others.
    • The Mighty Mighty Bosstones' cover of "Detroit Rock City", from the Kiss tribute album Kiss My Ass: Classic Kiss Regrooved, starts out with an answering machine message from Gene Simmons: Ironically enough, it's Simmons telling Bosstones singer Dicky Barrett that they should cover something else, because "Detroit Rock City" was already being covered by another band for the album.
      • Meanwhile Kiss' original version starts with a radio anchor reporting the car crash that inspired the song itself.
    • The Paper Chase really loves this trope. It might be easier to list their songs that don't qualify.
    • Schoolyard Heroes did this in a few of their very early demo songs, such as at both the beginning and end of "Living Dead (Ravers)".
    • Mark Wills' "And the Crowd Goes Wild" has snippets of sports play-by-plays done by George Plaster, to keep with its theme of the crowd going wild over a sports event or a singer.
    • Quite a few of Space's songs qualify. 'No One Understands' has a sample from The Elephant Man as its middle eight; 'Bastard Me Bastard You' has an Alfred Hitchcock sample; 'I Am Unlike A Lifeform You've Ever Met' is entirely spoken word and ends with an American radio announcer talking about a zombie attack; 'Disco Dolly' starts with a car horn and a group of Scousers talking outside a club; 'The Man' and 'Juno' are instrumental tracks with sampled speech scattered throughout; and other songs have fragments of unintelligible speech, some apparently from the band themselves.
    • Soul Coughing's "$300" has a slowed down loop from a Chris Rock bit functioning as the chorus ("how much? she said for three hundred dollars I'll do an-"). Chris Rock's album Roll With The New had a track called "My Favorite Joke", where the joke itself is backmasked, and after loading the track into his sampler just to play it backwards, Mike Doughty also ended up making a loop and building a song around it.
    • Because it's about The Occupy Movement, Third Eye Blind's "If There Ever Was A Time" begins and ends with the sounds of protesters at Zucotti Park.
    • The Johnny Cash song When The Man Comes Around opens and closes with Cash reading from Revelation.
    • Sam Black has one in "Religion Song (Put Away The Gun)".
    • "Little Fluffy Clouds" by The Orb relies heavily on an interview with Rickie Lee Jones.
    • At The Drive-In's "Enfilade" starts with a simulated ransom phone call, fitting it's lyrics about a kidnapping. The "caller" is Iggy Pop, who also made a sung guest appearance on a different song on the same album:

    "Hello?"
    "Hello, mother leopard. I have your cub. You must protect her, but that will be expensive. Ten thousand cola nuts, wrapped in brown paper. Midnight, behind the box. I'll be the hyena, you'll see..."

    • The Clash's "Capital Radio" starts with a few different lo-fi clips of band interviews. The unusual thing is that there's about two minutes of these clips before you get to the actual song.
    • "Foreclosure Of A Dream" by Megadeth and "Semblance Of Liberty" by Epica both use the "Read my lips" quote by George H. W. Bush.
    • Squeeze used snippets of The Shining in the intro to The Last Time Forever, including Jack Nicholson's line "A momentary loss of muscular coordination" and Shelley Duvall shrieking.
    • The Bonzo Dog Band used speech a lot, beginning their song "Shirt" with a lengthy man-on-the-street interview, and using nothing but in "Rhinocratic Oaths", as Vivian Stanshall narrates four very odd slice-of-life stories.
    • The Dingees' song "Street vs. State" consists of several recordings of protesters played over dub reggae backing music.
    • "Divorced", The Melvins' collaboration with Tool, splices in a phone conversation between Maynard James Keenan and Buzz Osborne, apparently regarding a mutual friend going out with a woman who Maynard describes as having "a voice like a fuckin' modem, dude!".
    • Black Flag's "Armageddon Man", which is placed right in between an album side's worth of spoken word tracks and an album side's worth of instrumentals (album being Family Man).
    • Weezer's "Undone - The Sweater Song" has a couple of sections of simulated crowd dialogue, although one of the participants is in fact a band member: bassist Matt Sharp is heard alongside band archivist Karl Koch and fan club co-president Mykel Allan. There's also a particularly bizarre Unplugged Version where they got their friend Tim "Speed" Levitch to recite his poetry during these sections instead.
      • There's also "Falling For You", where a snippet of a radio broadcast in Korean slipped into the recording due to interference with an amplifier and they decided to Throw It In.
    • Say Anything goes meta with this in "Belt."

    Max: I have to record the spoken-word introduction to the record. It's only a few lines, but I'm having anxiety about it.

    • Darkbuster's "Pub" begins and ends with vocalist Lenny Lashley reading from a pamphlet that warns about the risks of drinking alcohol, apparently recorded over the phone ("remember, just because others drink alcohol doesn't mean that you have to drink too"). It's done for irony's sake, since the song is one of their several odes to intoxication, and he sounds a little bit drunk while reading it.
    • Isaac Hayes' landmark album Hot Buttered Soul featured a cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" that turned this trope into an art form. The song itself follows a man, having just left his wife, describing what he thinks she will be doing as he reaches certain destinations by car. Hayes turned this three-minute country song into an eighteen-minute soul epic, including an eight-minute spoken introduction of how the man came to his decision to leave his wife.
    • Rebuild the Wall, Luther Wright and the Wrongs' country-bluegrass re-imagining of Pink Floyd's The Wall, recreates all the sound effects and spoken word parts of the original with a Southern/country flavor.
    • Similarly, Big Daddy's Sgt. Peppers album, which recasts The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band into a 1950s sound, adds its own version of the original's various spoken word interpolations and background crowd noises.
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