We begin with Creedence Clearwater Revival and “Lookin’ Out My Back Door.” In his 2015 book “Fortunate Son”, John Fogerty said the song came from wanting to write a children’s song for his son, Josh. One inspiration was Dr Seuss’s, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street”, another was a children’s book by Margaret Wise Brown, “The House of a Hundred Windows”, which his mother used to read to him.

And the detail that stayed with him was wonderfully simple: a kitty cat in a huge house, looking out of all the windows, seeing trains, parades, harbours and ships — and then, at the end, sitting by the open front door. Does the cat go through it? Fogerty says he doesn’t know whether that memory is happy or sad, but it chokes him up.

That’s where this episode starts: with a child looking out. A book becomes a window, and the song becomes a doorway.

This is Creedence Clearwater Revival and “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”.

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“Lookin’ Out My Back Door” begins with the imaginative power of children’s books: pictures, windows, doors, animals, movement — the world made larger by the act of looking.

Jethro Tull’s “Songs From the Wood” takes that idea out of the child’s room and into the older imagination of a whole culture. Ian Anderson told Rolling Stone magazine that he wrote the song from elements of folklore, fantasy tales and traditions of the British rural environment. The immediate spark was a book about English folklore, given to him as a Christmas present by their PR man, Jo Lustig. He thumbed through it and found ideas, characters and stories that he could evolve into a series of songs.

So the movement is from private childhood imagination to collective memory. Fogerty’s book gives him a cat at a door. Anderson’s book gives him a whole wooded inheritance: rural tradition, old tales, characters and atmospheres that seem to have been waiting in the landscape.

That’s one of the things books do. They preserve ways of seeing that might otherwise disappear. A folklore book isn’t just a collection of quaint material. It’s a storehouse of older fears, beliefs, jokes, and older ways of making sense of the world. When a songwriter opens it, the book doesn’t simply explain the past — it lets the past sing again.

So we move from the back door to the wood. From the child’s window to the forest of inherited stories.

This is Jethro Tull and “Songs From the Wood”.

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Jethro Tull gives us books as folklore — the collective imagination, handed down through tales and traditions.

Don McLean’s “Vincent” gives us books as biography: the life of another artist becoming the seed of a song.

McLean said he read a book about Van Gogh, written by Van Gogh’s brother Theo, and thought it would be a great idea to write a song about a painter and tell his story. He took Van Gogh’s most famous painting and used the colours, energy and forms to try to capture what he perceived as Van Gogh’s essence as a human being. For McLean, art was not just something Van Gogh produced. Art was his essence.

That’s a different kind of reading. A folklore book opens a shared mythic world. A biography asks you to enter another person’s life. And in “Vincent,” the book doesn’t become a summary of facts. It becomes an act of sympathy.

The important shift here is from story as inheritance to story as understanding. McLean is not just admiring Van Gogh. He’s trying to see him clearly — to use one art form to respond to another. The book gives him the life; the painting gives him the image; the song becomes the bridge between them.

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That was Don Mclean and the beautiful “Vincent”.

“Vincent” shows a songwriter reading about an artist and trying to translate that life into song — not as gossip, not as biography alone, but as human recognition.

Patti Smith Group’s “Birdland” goes even deeper into the strange space between reading and identification. Patti told Observer Music Monthly that the song was haunted by a section in The Book of Dreams, the childhood memoir of Peter Reich, son of radical psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich. In the section that stayed with her, Peter’s at a birthday party not long after his father’s death. He wanders outside and becomes convinced his father is coming down to take him away in a spaceship — only for what he thought were UFOs to turn out to be a flock of blackbirds.

That story haunted Patti Smith, and when they recorded “Birdland,” which was improvised, that’s where the track went.

But the meaning doesn’t stop with the book. She says the recurring idea of not being human was also about herself. From early childhood, she felt alien to the human race. She felt comfortable thinking she was from another planet because she felt disconnected — tall, skinny, unlike others, unlike even her own family.

So here the book becomes a mirror. The story of Peter Reich grieving his father becomes a way for Patti to explore her own alienation. The child in the memoir looks upward and imagines rescue from above. The singer recognises that feeling: the wish not simply to be comforted, but to be taken somewhere you belong.

That’s the connection from “Vincent.” McLean reads a book and reaches toward another artist’s pain. Patti Smith reads a book and finds a shape for her own.

Books do both. They take us outward into other lives, and then, without warning, bring us back into ourselves.

This is Patti Smith Group and “Birdland”.

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“Birdland” gives us reading as recognition: another person’s childhood vision becoming the shape of your own alienation.

Rush’s “2112” turns reading into rebellion.

The band’s comments make the literary source very clear: they liked Ayn Rand’s “Anthem”, and that book inspired “2112.” In an episode of Classic Albums, Neil Peart explained that he had dreamed up a story about music being invented within a dystopian, totalitarian society. The core feeling was injustice: a mass force coming down, telling the individual to compromise. And compromise, he said, was the word he could not deal with.

When he realised the story paralleled Anthem, he acknowledged Rand in the published lyrics, which created its own controversy. But the song’s internal conflict is broader than a footnote. Peart describes the nature of the story as the individual against the mass.

That makes “2112” a different kind of book-born song from the ones before it. It’s not childhood wonder, folklore, biography or memoir. It’s a book becoming an architecture of resistance. A dystopian idea becomes a musical world where creativity itself is threatened — and the individual has to decide whether to submit or insist.

And that fits the arc perfectly. Because books don’t only comfort us or help us understand ourselves. They can also radicalise the imagination. They can make compromise feel intolerable. They can give form to a pressure you already felt but had not yet named.

So we move from the child looking up at the sky in “Birdland” to a different kind of sky: the vast machinery of a future society pressing down. And inside it, one person still hearing music.

This is Rush and 2112.

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Rush gives us the book as dystopia: a story where the individual is crushed by the mass, and art becomes the act of resistance.

Before moving on to our next song, it’s worth pointing out that Neil Peart did give 2112 a happy ending, describing it as, “That’s the good guys, that’s the cavalry coming in at the end so it actually, to me, had a happy ending as it were that the Solar Federation was going to be shut down by the vision that our hero has of this other way of living, the people coming at the end, that’s how I intended it.”

Bruce Springsteen’s “Ghost of Tom Joad” brings us back to earth — to roads, borders, workers, hunger and the people history keeps pushing to the margins.

Tom Joad, of course, comes from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Springsteen’s own explanation places the song firmly in a modern landscape of economic division and migration. He told The People Speak, a 2009 American Documentary Feature Film based on Howard Zinn’s Best-Selling Books, that he wrote it in the mid-nineties as a conversation with himself, when he was trying to fill his music with purpose again. Living in California, he was seeing migrant workers, immigration issues, and grass-roots organisations whose services were in greater demand even as the country was talking about an economic bubble.

That’s why the “ghost” matters. Springsteen isn’t simply borrowing a famous literary character as decoration. Tom Joad becomes a moral presence — a figure from a book walking into a later America and asking whether the old injustices ever really ended.

That’s the connection from “2112.” Rush imagines an individual resisting a totalitarian future. Springsteen turns to a literary figure from the past to look at the present. Both songs ask what happens when systems become too large, too cold, too willing to crush the people inside them.

But Springsteen’s world isn’t abstract. It’s not a science-fiction temple or a distant dystopia. It’s California in the nineties. It’s work, borders, food, services, need, and people whose lives reveal what the economy prefers not to see.

A book gives him the ghost. The present gives the ghost somewhere to walk.

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“Ghost of Tom Joad” shows how a character can outlive a novel. Tom Joad becomes a kind of witness — a literary figure called back because the conditions that created him haven’t disappeared.

U2’s “The Wanderer” closes the episode by taking us to a much older kind of book: wisdom literature.

Bono told Rolling Stone magazine that “The Wanderer” is based on the old Jewish Books of Wisdom, especially Ecclesiastes, or “The Preacher.” They wrote it for Johnny Cash, which already gives the song a particular kind of weight: a voice that can carry age, dust, spiritual fatigue and moral searching.

After the previous songs, Ecclesiastes feels like the natural ending. We have moved through childhood books, folklore, biography, memoir, dystopia and social fiction. Now we arrive at the ancient book that looks at human striving and asks what it all amounts to.

That is what wisdom literature does. It doesn’t always cheer you up. Sometimes it strips away illusion. It asks what remains after ambition, pleasure, labour, injustice, hope, failure and wandering. It knows that human beings keep searching, even when they’re not sure what they’re searching for.

So “The Wanderer” isn’t simply a religious ending. It’s a literary ending. The book becomes a voice moving through a world that’s already been disenchanted — a world after children’s wonder, after folklore, after artistic sympathy, after alienation, after rebellion, after social witness.

And still the figure wanders.

That’s the final connection: books begin by opening doors, but they don’t always lead to certainty. Sometimes they lead to better questions. Sometimes the most honest song is the one still walking.

This is U2 and The Wanderer with the, sadly missed, Johnny Cash.

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