Epic Rocking

24 minutes long. And it isn't even the longest song in their library.

"The longer a song is, the more epic it is."

— The 101 rules of Power Metal

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. Also quite common in many forms of Electronic Music, particularly in the realm of Ambient, Trance, and Techno, as well as most forms of Heavy Metal music (seriously, in the metal genre — apart from thrash, groove, and grindcore — long tracks are easily more the rule than the exception).

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. ^note  There are exceptions, however; The Velvet Underground was notorious for building epic-length songs on as little as a single chord. Lyrics can appear in these songs, but they're often sparse and the song is mostly instrumental. When there are lyrics, expect an Epic Instrumental Opener to precede them and Big Rock Ending to succeed them. Songs featuring this trope also often feature Uncommon Time, since changing time signatures helps maintain the listener's attention in a longer composition, and modulation (which is the same thing, but for key signatures).

Done right, they maintain the listener's attention and sound really cool, sometimes downright awesome. Done poorly, they just ramble, cause yawning, and suffer chronic Ending Fatigue. Because of this, bands often have a hard time thinking about where to place the longest song(s) when it comes to the final album order before the release goes gold; the usual place for the longest song is usually the last track in the album, before an outro (if there is one) and the hidden tracks.

Put Epic Rocking in a Rhythm Game and you have an instant Marathon Level.

A Super-Trope to "Epic Jamming", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and Limited Lyrics Song. 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 Awesome Music for that) or delete a long one because it's not awesome. The trope doesn't apply to compositions either, as any work involving an orchestra can be expected to last from ten minutes up to several hours with very little "rocking," although it certainly may be epic. Also, this trope only applies to songs 6 minutes or more, anything less is too short to qualify.

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Examples:

Psychedelic Rock, Blues Rock, early Heavy Metal

• The Grateful Dead: Their entire catalog. From their studio records, "Terrapin Station Part 1" (16:23) is probably their longest cut, with “Weather Report Suite” (12:41) and the opening and closing suites of Blues for Allah (“Help on the Way/Slipknot!/Franklin’s Tower”, 11:50, and “Blues for Allah/Sand Castles & Glass Camels/Unusual Occurrences in the Desert”, 12:33) not far behind (these are sometimes divided up into separate tracks, though). Anthem of the Sun also has several notable examples.
  • And their live material, too. Most of their songs get vastly expanded from their studio versions live with lots of improv; it’s probably a large part of why they were so famous as a live act, alongside their instrumental skill, their absolutely gigantic repertoire, and their habit of never playing songs the same way twice. Look at the tracklist for Dick's Pick's Volume 4. Note that the three longest songs are a continuous suite of music, meaning that they played for 90 minutes without stopping. It was commonplace for the band to string several songs together into an epic jam that lasted an hour or more, particularly in its final set.
  • "Dark Star" in particular gets expanded a lot in live performances. The version on the aforementioned Dick's Picks Vol. 4 is over a half-hour long, and longer versions do exist (such as the 41-minute version performed at the Cleveland Convention Center).
• Jimi Hendrix: "Third Stone from the Sun" (Are You Experienced), "Voodoo Chile", "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)" (from Electric Ladyland), "Bold as Love" (from Axis: Bold As Love), "Hear My Train A'Coming", "Machine Gun", "Country Blues".
• Led Zeppelin: "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You", "You Shook Me", "Dazed and Confused" (The version on the The Song Remains the Same soundtrack is nearly half an hour long — the guitar solo alone goes on for over 15 minutes!), "How Many More Times", "The Lemon Song", "Since I've Been Loving You", "The Battle of Evermore", "Stairway to Heaven", "When the Levee Breaks", "The Rain Song, "No Quarter", "In My Time of Dying", "Kashmir", "In the Light", "Ten Years Gone", "Achilles' Last Stand", "For Your Life", "Nobody's Fault but Mine", "Tea for One", "In the Evening", "Fool in the Rain", "Carouselambra"
• Black Sabbath: "Black Sabbath", "N.I.B", "The Warning" (From Black Sabbath (album)) "War Pigs", "Iron Man", "Hand of Doom", "Fairies Wear Boots", (From Paranoid (Album)) "Into the Void" (From Master of Reality) "Wheels of Confusion", "Under the Sun" (From Volume 4), "A National Acrobat", "Sabbra Caddabra" (From Sabbath Bloody Sabbath), "Symptom of the Universe", "Thrill of It All", "The Writ", "Megalomania" (From Sabotage), "You Won't Change Me", "Dirty Women" (From Technical Ecstacy) , "Johnny Blade", "Junior's Eyes", "A Hard Road" (From Never Say Die!), "Heaven and Hell", "Lonely Is the Word" (From Heaven and Hell), "The Sign of the Southern Cross" (From The Mob Rules), "Zero the Hero", "Born Again" (From Born Again), "Heart Like a Wheel" (From Seventh Star), "The Shining", "Eternal Idol" (From The Eternal Idol) "Headless Cross", "When Death Calls", "Nightwing" (from Headless Cross), "Anno Mundi", "The Sabbath Stones" (From Tyr), "Computer God", "Master of Insanity", "Too Late" (from Dehumanizer) "Dying For Love", "Evil Eye" (from Cross Purposes), "Kiss of Death" (From Forbidden), "End of the Beginning", "God Is Dead?", "Age of Reason", "Damaged Soul", "Dear Father" (From 13)
• The Black Crowes: they've got a handful of songs that pass the six-minute mark on their studio albums, but as their career went on, and they morphed into more of a jam band, their live songs frequently extended past ten minutes. They even toured with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page for a while and made him feel right at home.
• Iron Butterfly: The original version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" spans to 17 minutes.
• Eric Clapton (Derek and the Dominos): "Layla" (from Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs), "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), "Tunnel of Love" (8 minutes), "Money for Nothing" (8 minutes (Brothers in Arms version)), "It Never Rains" (8 minutes), "Why Worry" (8 minutes), and many others.
  • Their live shows also featured a few extended jams. The double album Alchemy features "Once Upon a Time in the West", "Romeo and Juliet", "Private Investigations", "Sultans of Swing", "Tunnel of Love", and "Telegraph Road", all 7-14 minutes long.
• The Doors: "The End", "Light My Fire" (from The Doors) "Riders on the Storm", "LA Woman", "Celebration of the Lizard", "When the Music's Over", "The Soft Parade".
• The Velvet Underground: "Heroin", "All Tomorrow's Parties" (from The Velvet Underground & Nico) "The Gift" (from White Light/White Heat), "The Murder Mystery" (from The Velvet Underground), "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" (from Loaded).
  • "Sister Ray" from White Light/White Heat is a 17-minute jam recorded in one take. Live performances often stretched to even longer amounts (two version, one on The Quine Tapes, another on The Complete Matrix Tapes, almost forty minutes long each), and sometimes they would also sometimes include an introduction called "Sweet Sister Ray" that itself was almost forty minutes long. A bootleg recording of "Sweet Sister Ray" exists, but unfortunately without the performance of "Sister Ray" that followed. (The band also performed plenty of other lengthy live songs, often improvised and stretching to half an hour or more; the ones that have been recorded can be found on the bootleg box set Caught Between The Twisted Stars).
• The Rolling Stones: "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (from Sticky Fingers), "Goin' Home" (from Aftermath), "Midnight Rambler" and 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'(from Let It Bleed), "Memory Motel" (from Black and Blue),....
• Queen: "Bohemian Rhapsody" (from A Night at the Opera), "Innuendo" "The Prophet's Song", "March of the Black Queen", "Father to Son", that 22-minute ambiance at the end of "Made in Heaven".
  • "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, and Dream Theater covered it in that format.
• "Station to Station" by David Bowie (from the album of the same name) clocks in at 10:15. 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. The whole album tends to fall under this trope, as only two songs are less than six minutes long.
  • Bowie also has "Width of a Circle" which could be 15+ minutes live. (The studio version from The Man Who Sold the World is 8:09).
  • "Cygnet Committee" (9:35), proof that not all rockers liked the sixties. Also on Space Oddity, "Memory of a Free Festival" is 7:09 and "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" is 6:12. The title track doesn't top the six-minute mark but otherwise has the feel of a condensed version of this trope, comprised as it is of several discrete sections à la "Good Vibrations".
  • The album version of "Heroes" is over six minutes long, and the instrumental "Warszawa" (on Low) is also over six minutes. It segues into "Art Decade" which is also instrumental, so they could be thought of as one ten-minute piece.
  • His final album, ★, gives us the 9:58 title track. It was over eleven minutes when originally recorded, but iTunes imposes a ten-minute restriction on singles and Bowie didn't want to use a different version of the single on the album. From the same album, "Lazarus" is 6:22.
  • Similarly to the Queen example above, "Sweet Thing"/"Candidate"/"Sweet Thing (reprise)" are usually considered one song and were usually performed together live. Together they reach 8:51 in their studio version on Diamond Dogs (they also segue directly into "Rebel Rebel", which brings the whole sequence up to 13:25, though that transition wasn't always replicated live). Meanwhile, the title track very nearly reaches six minutes and, when paired with the Album Intro Track "Future Legend", reaches 7:06.
  • "Somebody Up There Likes Me", from Young Americans, is 6:35. Two of the bonus tracks from the Rykodisc version, "It's Gonna Be Me" and "John, I'm Only Dancing Again", also top the six-minute mark.
  • From Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), "Teenage Wildlife" runs for 6:56.
• Jefferson Airplane: "Spare Change", "Hey Frederick".
  • Also, 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", and "Edward the Mad Shirt Grinder".
  • Who can forget the big one? Their cover of "Who Do You Love" reaches nearly 30 minutes. (The effect of 'Epic Rocking' is hampered a bit by the song being cheekily split into several cuts - "Who Do You Love Part 1", "When Do You Love", "Where Do You Love", "How Do You Love", "Which Do You Love", and "Who Do You Love Part 2". It's all one continuous song, however.)
• Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Free Bird", and "Sweet Home Alabama".
• 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".
• Peter Frampton: The live version of "Do You Feel Like We Do?" off of Frampton Comes Alive! 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. It took up two sides on the LP.
• AC/DC has "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.
    • The "Live at River Plate" version of "Let There Be Rock" is even longer, at a whopping 18:06. Most of it is Angus soloing.
• Modest Mouse: "Spitting Venom", "Stars are Projectors", and "Trucker's Atlas" all clock in over 8 minutes long. There's also "Night on the Sun" and "Other People's Lives".
• George Thorogood and the Destroyers: "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (11:25 for the extended version. Bonus points for being a cover.)
• Deep Purple and "Child in Time" from Deep Purple in Rock. It's over 10 minutes long on the album and a bit shorter live.
  • As with many '70s Hard Rock bands, they liked to expand their songs live. Just look at the lengths of the songs on this album and then compare it to the originals.
  • Two particular songs from studio albums by the original band lineup, "Mandrake Root"^note 6:09 long in its studio version and the instrumental "Wring That Neck"^note 5:13 long in its studio version, tended to run for much longer when performed live, especially in some of the Mk II lineup's earlier concerts. The archival^note originally recorded for a radio broadcast, then almost 18 years later released as a double-LP / double-CD live album Scandinavian Nights a.k.a. Live in Stockholm 1970 captures one such concert where those two songs ran to over 30 minutes each.
  • Also "April", at a whopping 12:03.
  • Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra: Well... how much more epic can you get? The tracks are veritable jams that stretch out several minutes, like the 25:13 "Symphony No. 6, Opus 95" and the title track, which goes on for 51:43 straight ahead!! All this backed by a huge classical orchestra.
  • Machine Head has two shorter examples with "Lazy" at 7:20 and "Highway Star" at 6:08.
• Golden Earring, "Vanilla Queen" (9:20).
  • "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.
  • Their Signature Song, "Radar Love", is also an example, though not an extreme one. The album version clocks in at 6:26.
  • The U.S./Canadian version of Moontan is worth mentioning for consisting exclusively of this trope, having five songs ranging in length from 6:12 ("Candy's Going Bad") to 9:32 ("Are You Receiving Me"). The European/UK version drops the 8:13 "Big Tree, Blue Sea" in favour of two shorter songs, however.
  • Also standing out is 1976's To the Hilt, which has four songs topping seven minutes, including the 10:21 "Violins".
• Creedence Clearwater Revival tended to have one or two longer songs per album that served as extended jams. Standouts include their covers of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" at 11:05 and "Susie Q" at 8:39.
• Traffic:
  • Studio material: "Glad" (6:59), "Freedom Rider" (6:20), "John Barleycorn (Must Die)" (6:20), "Every Mother's Son" (7:05), "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" (11:35), "Many a Mile to Freedom" (7:26), "Rainmaker" (7:39), "Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory" (6:05), "Roll Right Stones" (13:40), "Tragic Magic" (6:43), "(Sometimes I Feel So) Uninspired" (7:31), "Dream Gerrard" (11:03), "Graveyard People" (6:05), "Walking in the Wind" (6:48), "Far from Home" (8:33), "Nowhere Is Their Freedom" (6:57), "Holy Ground" (7:48), "State of Grace" (7:16). Several of the band's later albums consist almost exclusively of this trope, but oddly, none of the songs on their first two albums qualify, though "Dear Mr. Fantasy" (5:44) comes close.
  • The band live was definitely this trope. Last Exit, a half-studio, half-live collection released as a stopgap while the band had temporarily broken up, gives us "Feelin' Good" (10:43) and "Blind Man" (7:15). Welcome to the Canteen gives us a 6:21 "Forty Thousand Headmen", a 10:57 "Dear Mr. Fantasy", and a 9:02 "Gimme Some Lovin'". On the Road is exclusively this trope, with "Glad/Freedom Rider" (20:35), "Tragic Magic" (8:31), "(Sometimes I Feel So) Uninspired" (10:31), "Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory" (6:51), "Light Up or Leave Me Alone" (10:56), and "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" (17:47). The Last Great Traffic Jam has "Walking in the Wind" (7:12), "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" (14:37), "John Barleycorn (Must Die)" (6:57), "Dear Mr. Fantasy" (7:44), "Gimme Some Lovin'" (7:26), and "Light Up or Leave Me Alone" (16:27).
• Amon Düül 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 has "Soul Sacrifice" at 6:35 and "Dance Sister Dance (Baila Mi Hermana)" at 8:16.
  • And on Santana's live album with Buddy Miles (Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles! Live!), we have "Free-Form Funkafide Filth" clocking in at 24:54.
  • "Jingo" and "Fried Neckbones and Home Fries" clock in at around 10 minutes in various versions. "Freeway" off his Live at the Fillmore album clocks at 30:15.
• Grand Funk Railroad regularly exceeded the six-minute mark, with "I'm Your Captain/Closer To Home" clocking in at exactly 10:00. Their cover of The Animals' "Inside Looking Out" remains the longest 7" single ever to make the UK top 40 (longer songs have charted, but not on 7"): it runs 9:31, while its B side "Paranoid" runs 7:51 - both played at 33rpm.
• Ten Years After's "I'm Going Home" is a live classic that would frequently break the 10-minute barrier — all while being a high-speed rock & roll number.
• Kula Shaker's "Great Hosanna" is over 6 minutes, the first 2+ minutes being an instrumental intro.
• Manfred Mann's enormously popular cover of "Blinded by the Light" is just over 7 minutes (whereas the original by Bruce Springsteen is just over 5 minutes).
• The long version of The Chambers Brothers' psychedelicized rock/soul epic "Time Has Come Today" runs 11:02. It also counts in another medium, as film director Hal Ashby used the whole 11 minute song to soundtrack the tense climatic scene of his film Coming Home.
• "The Core", from Eric Clapton's album Slowhand, is 8:45 of blistering saxophone, organ, and...wait for it...guitar work.
• Eagles' "Hotel California" clocks in at 6:31. Most radio stations even play that version without any cuts. They fade it out a bit early eventually, but that still means almost six minutes of air time for one song.
  • And Journey of the Sorcerer (best known as the theme of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), which goes for about 6:37.
  • Their more recent release "Long Road out of Eden" nearly doubles that at 10:15. "Waiting in the Weeds" and "Last Good Time in Town" from the same album manage 7:45 and 7:06 respectively.
• Hawkwind manages to combine this with Three Chords and the Truth. "You Shouldn't Do That", "Brainstorm", and "Assault and Battery/The Golden Void" blast away for over ten minutes each.
• The Black Keys open Turn Blue with the 6:50 "Weight of Love", showing right away it's a depression-fueled New Sound Album.
• While none of the songs on The Beach Boys' Smile actually top the six-minute mark, thinking of them as songs is somewhat misleading; they are very nearly Siamese Twin Songs, and much closer to Queen's "Tenement Funster/Flick of the Wrist/Lily of the Valley" and Bowie's "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)" examples above. There are only two complete fade-outs on the entire album, with an incomplete one before "Good Vibrations". If one counts "Good Vibrations" separately, the album is, for all practical purposes, comprised of three movements ranging from ten to sixteen minutes, then "Good Vibrations"; if not, it's comprised of three movements ranging from ten to almost twenty minutes. For his part, Brian Wilson doesn't appear to have thought of them as separate songs when composing them but rather thought of the album as a "teenage symphony to God" inspired by George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, though he did regard "Heroes and Villains" and "Vega-Tables" as potential singles. On the other hand, he also recorded the album in brief segments that were shorter than many of the album's finished songs, often using several different studios to do so, and then selected his favourite versions from each segment and spliced them together. This technique, which his bandmate and sibling Carl Wilson likened to film editing, gave each segment a distinct sonic profile and had the consequence of creating ambiguity as to where most of the songs begin and end, particularly since they lack clearly defined song structures and there are Recurring Riffs throughout the album; correspondingly, it's much less disorienting to think of the album as a suite in three or four movements.
• Guitarist Samantha Fish usually does this about once per album:
  • The title track to her first studio album, Runaway, was mostly an excuse for her to show off some fiery blues licks; it clocked in just over 6 minutes.
  • The title track to Black Wind Howling was similar; with a blistering solo, the track was just short of seven minutes long.
  • The album Wild Heart featured three songs over six minutes long, but only one of them was really a rocker: the haunting post-grunge number "Lost Myself".
  • With "Somebody's Always Trying" from Chills & Fever, Fish took an old R&B number from the '60s and added a full-scale psychedelic melt into the middle of it, with lots of guitar and devices and sound-effects, nearly tripling the length of the just-over-two-minute original.
• Canadian band Black Mountain LOVES this trope.
  • Druganaut EP: "Druganaut (extended)": (8:17), "Buffalo Swan" (9:14)
  • Black Mountain: "Don't Run Our Hearts Around" (6:03), "Set Us Free" (6:45), "No Hits" (6:45), "Heart Of Snow" (7:59), "Faulty Times" (8:34)
  • In The Future: "Tyrants" (8:02), "Wucan" (6:02), "Bright Lights" (16:41)
  • IV: "Mothers Of The Sun" (8:45), "(Over and Over) The Chain" (8:48), "Space to Bakersfield" (9:04)
  • Destroyer: "Horns Arising" (6:50), "High Rise" (6:12), "Boogie Lover" (6:20)
• Psych/Garage genre busters King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have indulged a number of lengthy tracks. Although their first two albums featured nothing over four minutes, third album Float Along - Fill Your Lungs opens with the 16-minute jam Head On/Pill. Downplayed by the fact that's it's really two songs as a medley, Head On going for... four minutes and Pill for twelve. Maybe it's not so downplayed. Other notably long tracks include
  • Am I In Heaven at 7:05 and Her & I (Slow Jam 2) at 8:15 from I'm In Your Mind Fuzz
  • Sixth album Quarters is comprised of four songs each clocking in at 10:10.
  • None of the tracks on Nonagon Infinity are super long (besides maybe Evil Death Roll at 7:15) but the whole album plays in an unending loop without stopping, so you might consider it to have an infinite runtime.
  • Rattlesnake (7:48) and Open Water (7:13) from Flying Microtonal Banana.
  • Murder of the Universe features three suites of smaller chapters.
  • Towards the end of 2016, a shortish song called Crumbling Castle started to appear in the band's setlists, presumably to be released on the next album. But in the following year (in which five albums were to be released) albums came and went and Crumbling Castle never appeared... until it was posted to Youtube as the lead single for Polygondwanaland, now running for 10:44 and eventually preceding another album of song suites that ran together.
  • The ending version of KGLW is 8:28, ending the pair of microtonal albums "KG" and "LW"
  • Like many other artists mentioned here, their live versions can get carried away as the jam out improvised medleys of many different tracks, as seen on some of their "official bootleg" live recordings.

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 in 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. In live performance, "My Generation" is regularly extended by incorporating quotations from other songs in their catalogue.
• 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 clocks at nearly 7 minutes and gets faster and faster as it goes.
  • From Chinese Democracy, we have "There Was A Time", which clocks in at just above 6:30, and two other 6 minute tracks, "Sorry", and album closer "Prostitute", which is pretty epic in the same way as "Paradise City". Among the fans that actually like Chinese Democracy, "There Was A Time" is widely considered the most epic song, and during at least one of the concerts found on Youtube (from the LA Forum, December 21, 2011), you can hear the audience shout "THERE WAS A TIME" at several times, more and more frequently as the concert progresses.
• 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.
• 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.
• Mother Love Bone: "Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns"
• Neil Young absolutely loved this trope, and he was a rare example that merged it with Three Chordsand The Truth. Well known examples include "Cowgirl in the Sand", "Down by the River", "Spirit Road", "Cortez the Killer" and "Like a Hurricane". 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.
  • "Down by the River" has seen both a 19-minute version (with Phish no less) at Farm Aid 1996 and a 26-minute version at the Rock am Ring festival in 2002. The studio recording is already well over nine minutes, but live renditions tend to end up at least twice as long.
  • Equally "Like a Hurricane" has been stretched well past the 20-mark, with Neil playing a variety of instruments in the process.
  • "Cowgirl in the Sand", ten minutes of pure Neil Young goodness.
  • A rule of thumb: If the album is credited to Neil Young & Crazy Horse, chances are good that there will be at least one song that falls under this trope. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere has "Cowgirl in the Sand" (10:06) and "Down by the River" (9:13); Zuma has "Danger Bird" (6:54) and "Cortez the Killer" (7:29); Ragged Glory has "Over and Over" (8:28), "Love to Burn" (10:00), and "Love and Only Love" (10:18); Sleeps with Angels has "Change Your Mind" (14:39); Greendale has no less than six songs above seven minutes in length, with the longest, "Grandpa's Interview", running 12:57; Psychedelic Pill has "Driftin' Back" (27:36!), "Ramada Inn" (16:49), "Walk Like a Giant" (16:27), and, taking the cake, "Horse Back" (37:08, though it's only included on the Blu-Ray version of the album); and so on. Then there's the live album Weld, which consists of thirty-five minutes of guitar feedback, guitar noise, and vocal fragments that Neil assembled into a trippy sound collage. Even without Crazy Horse on the cover, he often extended his songs, as on On the Beach ("On the Beach" (6:59), "Ambulance Blues" (8:56)), American Stars and Bars ("Like a Hurricane" (8:28)), and Chrome Dreams II ("Ordinary People" (18:13), "No Hidden Path" (14:31)). In short, Neil might possibly be the king of this trope outside of Progressive Rock (and maybe The Grateful Dead).
  • "T-Bone" from Re-ac-tor clocks in at over nine minutes and along with some great jamming contains only eight different words (which get repeated.)
• Blue Öyster 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.
  • the live version of ME-262 on OYF!OOYK! goes on and on forever, though.
  • And the "Five Guitars" thing on both OYF!OOYK! and SEE both stretch for over eight minutes. This is the big show finale when all five Cultsters don an electric guitar each and go front of the stage to take turns doing solos.
• Alice Cooper:
  • "Halo of Flies". According to Alice Cooper himself, the song was written to prove that the band can perform long progressive suites.
  • "Black Juju" from Love It to Death is a nine-minute horror epic.
• Foo Fighters has the 7-minute long "Come Back" and "I Am a River". (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 its 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 dipped into this territory at least a few times. "Fortress" cuts at 7:32, their second album's title track "Blackbird"—clocking in at 7:58—stood as their longest until Pawns & Kings' "Fable of the Silent Son" became the first over 8 minute song in their discography, ending after 8 minutes and 22 seconds.
• Chuck Berry's "Concerto in B. Goode" at 18:43.
• Def Leppard have quite a few. Pyromania has "Die Hard the Hunter" at 6:17, Hysteria has two equally long songs with "Rocket" and "Gods of War" both at 6:37, Adrenalize chips in with "White Lightning" at 7:03, Slang gives up "Pearl of Euphoria" at 6:21 though they've dialed back the song lengths on more recent albums.
• Lynyrd Skynyrd has the iconic "Free Bird" clocking in at 9:08 on the album. The full version goes over 10 minutes and the demo version over 11. As the final encore song live, it lasts the best part of 15 minutes!
  • They also have "Tuesday's Gone" which is over 7 minutes.
• Shinedown: "Lady So Divine" (7:09)
• Disturbed: "Overburdened"
• Queens of the Stone Age: "Spiders and Vinegaroons", "You Can't Quit Me Baby", "Better Living Through Chemistry", "I Think I Lost My Headache", "A Song for the Dead", "God Is in the Radio", "Someone's in the Wolf", "The Blood Is Love", "I Appear Missing", "Un-Reborn Again", "The Evil Has Landed", "Villains of Circumstance".
• Aerosmith had one in their debut, "One Way Street" (7 minutes), but it got more common from Get a Grip on (more often than not, with a Big Rock Ending that goes too long): that album had three six-minute songs, including the singles "Living on the Edge" and "Amazing"; Nine Lives has five tracks surpassing 5 minutes, the longest being the album closer, the 8-minute long "Fallen Angels"; and Music from Another Dimension! has both "Street Jesus" and "Out Go the Lights" nearing 7 minutes.
• Thin Lizzy's "Roisin Dubh: A Rock Legend" is a five-minute song plus a bridge that lasts over two minutes and runs through several melodies, bringing it up to 7:08 total.

Progressive Rock

• In general, the genre is built around this trope. Some acts like Gentle Giant may use it less frequently by the genre's standards (which is still pretty often). Others, such as Magma, use it almost exclusively.
• dEUS: They have several epic jams like these: "Suds & Soda", "Hotellounge" (Worst Case Scenario), "Theme From Turnpike", "Fell Off the Floor, Man" (In a Bar, Under the Sea), "Instant Street" (The Ideal Crash)...
• Emerson, Lake & Palmer: "Karn Evil 9", "Tarkus", "Memoirs of an Officer and a Gentleman". "The Endless Enigma" (incorporating "Fugue"), "The Three Fates", "Take a Pebble", and "Pirates" are all shorter but over 10 minutes.
• The Nice: "Ars Longa Vita Brevis" and "Five Bridges Suite" (both featuring orchestral accompaniment)
• Yes, being a prog-rock band, naturally are great at this.
  • The self-titled debut has a 7-minute cover of "I See You" by The Byrds, and the 6-and-a-half-minute "Survival".
  • Time and a Word has a 6-minute cover of Bufffalo Springfield's "Everydays", the 6-minute "Astral Traveller", and the 6-and-a-half-minute "The Prophet".
  • The Yes Album, their first album after the shift from Psychedelic Rock to Progressive Rock, has the 10-minute "Yours Is No Disgrace", the 9 and a half minute, 3 part "Starship Trooper", the 7-minute, 2-part "I've Seen All Good People", and the 9-minute "Perpetual Change".
  • Fragile has the 8 and a half minute "Roundabout", the 8-minute "South Side of the Sky", and the 11 and a half minute "Heart of the Sunrise", their longest song to that point.
  • Close to the Edge only has three songs. The 18-minute, 4 part title track, the 10-minute, 4-part "And You and I", and the 9-minute "Siberian Khatru".
  • Tales from Topographic Oceans is a double album with just four songs (you read that right). "The Revealing Science of God", "The Remembering", "The Ancient", and "Ritual". All are 20 minutes. Some critics claim it's best to regard them as a single 83-minute song that had to be split up for vinyl, although each has its own distinct style.
  • Relayer only has three songs. "Sound Chaser" is 9-and-a-half minutes, and "To Be Over" is 9 minutes, but the real winner is their then-longest song, the 22-minute (only one part!) "The Gates of Delirium".
  • Going for the One has the 8-minute "Turn of the Century" and 6-minute "Parallels", but they are eclipsed by the 15 and a half minute "Awaken".
  • Tormato has the 6-minute "Arriving UFO", the 7-minute "Future Times/Rejoice" and the 8-minute "On The Silent Wings Of Freedom".
  • Drama has the 10-minute "Machine Messiah", the 6-and-a-half minute "Does It Really Happen?", and the 8 and a half minute "Into The Lens".
  • 90125 has the 6-and-a-half minute "Changes" (No relation), and the 7 and a half minute "Hearts".
  • 'Big Generator'' has the 7-minute "Shoot High Aim Low", the 6-and-a-half minute "Final Eyes", and the 7 and a half minute "I'm Running".
  • Union has the 6 and a half minute "I Would Have Waited Forever" and "Lift Me Up", as well as the 7 and a half minute "Miracle Of Life".
  • Talk considerably scales up the epics. "The Calling" is 7 minutes long, "I Am Waiting" is 7 and a half, "Real Love" is 9 minutes, and "Where Will You Be" is 6 minutes, but the real champion is their first multi-part song since Close to the Edge, the 3-part, 16-minute "Endless Dream".
  • Keys to Ascension is a mostly live album, but the two studio tracks are epics. "Be The One" is 10 minutes long and 3 parts, and "That, That Is" is even longer, at 7 parts and 19 minutes.
  • The follow-up, Keys to Ascension 2 is nothing but apart from the 3 and a half minute "Sign Language". In order from shortest to longest, "Children of Light" is 2 parts and 6 minutes, "Bring Me to the Power" is 7 and a half minutes, "Foot Prints" is 9 minutes, and "Mind Drive" is 18 and a half minutes.
  • Open Your Eyes has "New State of Mind", "Universal Garden", and "Wonderlove", which are 6 minutes. It also features their new record longest song, "The Solution". The song itself only lasts 5 minutes but leads into 2 minutes of silence that follows into 16 minutes of nature sounds and vocal snippets. Overall, it is 24 minutes.
  • 'The Ladder'' has the 9 and a half minute "Homeworld", the 6-minute "Finally", and the 9-minute "New Language".
  • Magnification contains the 7-minute title track, the 6-minute "Spirit of Survival", the 8-minute "Give Love Each Day", the 6 and a half minute "We Agree", the 11 minute "Dreamtime" and the 10 and a half minute, 4 part "In The Presence Of".
  • After a 10-year hiatus, Fly from Here has the 7-minute "Into the Storm", but the real winner is Yes's longest song to date, the 24-minute, 6-part title track.
  • Most recently, Heaven and Earth has the 8-minute "Believe Again", the 7-minute "The Game", the 8-minute "Light of the Ages", and the 9-minute "Subway Walls".
• King Crimson: "One More Red Nightmare", "21st Century Schizoid Man", "In the Court of the Crimson King", "Larks' Tongues in Aspic Pt. 1 & Pt. 2", "Pictures of a City", "Epitaph", "Starless and Bible Black", "Fracture", "The Talking Drum", and more.
  • Indeed, the entire album In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) is epic rocking, with the shortest song being six minutes, and the longest being over twelve. Note that many fans feel the latter track ("Moonchild") is way too long even for King Crimson since it's two minutes of the actual song followed by ten minutes of instrumental noodling. On the remastered edition, about three minutes of this section were removed.
  • The B-side of the 1970 album "Lizard" is 23 minutes long and even features Jon Anderson.
  • Also, from their later albums: "The ConstruKction of Light" (2000) - the titular song and "Larks' Tongues in Aspic (Part Four)" - and "Level Five", "EleKtriK" and "Dangerous Curves" from "The Power to Believe" (2003) qualify just as well as the earlier compositions.
  • "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" is actually an ongoing rock epic, spanning nearly 30 years and featuring segments on the albums Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Three of a Perfect Pair, and The ConstruKction of Light.
  • Even their poppier songs are long, not just their weird instrumentals: "Dinosaur" is six and a half minutes, and so is "Thela Hun Ginjeet". Also, all of their 80s-era new wave albums had at least one long improvisation: "The Sheltering Sky" (eight and a half minutes), "Requiem" (seven and a half), and "Industry" (just over seven).
• Early Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. Most notably the 23-minute Mind Screw of "Supper's Ready", but also 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".
  • Speaking of Peter Gabriel, "Down to Earth" from the WALL•E soundtrack is almost 6 minutes.
  • Gabriel's album Up consists almost exclusively of this. There's only one song on it shorter than six minutes. Other examples include "Biko" (7:26), "Waiting for the Big One" (7:16), and "The Family and the Fishing Net" (7:08).
  • Genesis also composed two other twenty-plus-minute epics, but they ended up getting split on the albums for various reasons, including that the band didn't want them compared to "Supper's Ready". One, which goes for about twenty and a half minutes, consists of "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight", "The Cinema Show", and "Aisle of Plenty", and can be found on Selling England by the Pound. The other, which goes for about twenty-eight minutes, consists of "Behind the Lines", "Duchess", "Guide Vocal", "Turn It On Again", "Duke's Travels", and "Duke's End", and can be found on Duke. The latter, which is also known as "The Story of Albert", was still performed live in its original form, and has been bootlegged in that form.
• Gentle Giant, as noted above, used this a lot less than most progressive rock bands did, but they still have plenty of examples: "Giant" (6:24), "Alucard" (6:02), "Nothing at All" (9:08), "Pantagruel's Nativity" (6:52), "The House, the Street, the Room" (6:03), "Plain Truth" (7:36), "Prologue" (6:14), "Schooldays" (7:37), "Peel the Paint" (7:32), "The Runaway" (7:16), "Way of Life" (7:53), "Experience" (7:50), "In a Glass House" (8:26), "Proclamation" (6:56), "Playing the Game" (6:46), "Free Hand" (6:16), "His Last Voyage" (6:27), "Interview" (6:54), "I Lost My Head" (6:59), "Memories of Old Days" (7:18)
• 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.
• Rush were masters of this trope. "Here Again" (7:30) and "Working Man" (7:07) from Rush, "By-Tor And The Snow Dog" (8:37) and "In The End" (6:51) from Fly by Night all qualify, but they really began to show epics with Caress of Steel, which contained "The Necromancer" (12:34), and "The Fountain of Lamneth" (19:57). Subsequent albums continued the trend, with the title track of 2112 (20:34), "Xanadu" (11:05) and "Cygnus X-1" (10:25) from A Farewell to Kings, the title track from Hemispheres (18:08), as well as "La Villa Strangiato" (9:35), "Jacob's Ladder" (7:28) and "Natural Science" (9:17) from Permanent Waves, and "Red Barchetta" (6:10) and "The Camera Eye" (11:01) from Moving Pictures. Subsequent albums cut down on song lengths, but they still had longer songs: "Digital Man" (6:23) and "The Weapon" (6:24) from Signals, "Marathon" (6:11) and "Territories" (6:20) from Power Windows, "Animate" (6:04) from Counterparts, "Secret Touch" (6:34) and "Freeze" (6:21) from Vapor Trails, and "Armor and Sword" (6:38), "The Main Monkey Business" (6:01), and "The Way The Wind Blows" (6:28) from Snakes & Arrows. Clockwork Angels, a return to their '70s sound, featured some of their longest songs in years, "Clockwork Angels" (7:31), "The Anarchist" (6:52), "Seven Cities of Gold" (6:32), "Headlong Flight" (7:19) and "The Garden" (6:59).
  • Live, they would often extend songs further. "Working Man" and "By-Tor And The Snow Dog" frequently clocked in close to 15 minutes. Not to mention the drum solos, which clocked in at 10 minutes.
• Pink Floyd: "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", "Echoes", "Interstellar Overdrive", "A Saucerful of Secrets", "Atom Heart Mother Suite", "Dogs", "Pigs (Three Different Ones)", "Sheep", "Comfortably Numb", "Money", "Us and Them", "Time", "Welcome to the Machine". Many of these are over 20 minutes long!
  • Animals has a lot of this, excluding the "Pigs on the Wing" Book Ends.
  • Ummagumma has a live version of "Astronomy Domine" that lasts 8 minutes and 22 seconds, and every song on the studio disc also qualifies, with the exception of "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict".
  • "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast", from Atom Heart Mother also counts.
  • "Interstellar 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 (1975) 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" (early version of "Sheep", 12 and a half minutes) and "You've Got to Be Crazy" (early version of "Dogs", 18 minutes 10 seconds).
  • It could well be said that four or five minutes is considered a short song by Pink Floyd. Their most recent two albums hardly have any tracks less than five minutes long, partially due to David Gilmour's seeming preference for slower rhythms.
• 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. The 40-minute unedited version of Moonloop also counts.
  • "The Incident" is 55 minutes long, broken down into 14 parts, and it takes up the ENTIRE first disc of the album of the same name. 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 (except maybe the single "The Widow") 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.
  • Probably more than half of their songs are over the six-minute mark, especially on their earliest albums. None of their other studio work is as extreme as "Cassandra Gemini", but "Tetragrammaton" is a still-impressive 16:42. They really went to town during their live shows, though. "Cicatriz ESP" was known to go on for as long as forty minutes in live performances (the studio version was a still-impressive twelve and a half minutes). One of these is included on their only official live album, Scabdates, where it is extended by a further eight minutes with a very trippy sound collage. (One noteworthy aspect of this particular performance is that some of the lengthy instrumental jam they played during that particular show later made it into "Cassandra Gemini"; they had a habit of reusing these segments.) That's far from their only example, either; another jam they entitled "Abortion: The Other White Meat" went on for around fifty minutes.
• Anything where Alan Parsons is involved. Even at the very beginning of his career, he was a production assistant during the recording of The Beatles' Abbey Road, which features the 7:47 "I Want You (She's So Heavy)".
  • Speaking of "I Want You", the Flaming Lips managed a cover that lasted a full 16 minutes.
• 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.
• Pure Reason Revolution has "The Bright Ambassadors of Morning", a 12-minute psychedelic space rock song that slowly builds up to a giant rocking anthem.
• Supertramp: "Fool's Overture", "It's a Long Road", "Try Again", "Brother Where You Bound", "It's a Hard World", "A Soapbox Opera".
  • It can be safe to call "Rudy", "Asylum", "School", "Child of Vision", "From Now On", "Lover Boy", "Dead Man's Blues", "Waiting So Long" and "Another Man's Woman" mini-epics. Note that most of them are written by Rick Davies.
• Uriah Heep: "Salisbury", "The Magician's Birthday", "July Morning", "Why"
  • 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 has "Pioneers Over c.", "Childlike Faith in Childhood's End", "When She Comes", "A Place to Survive", "After the Flood", "Lost", the entire Godbluff and Pawn Hearts albums, and many, many others. Their longest songs are "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers" at around twenty-three minutes and "Meurglys III (The Songwriters' Guild)" at around twenty and a half. The former of these is a lot more popular than the latter.
• Can's "Yoo Doo Right" from "Monster Movie" 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. There's also "Soup", "Oh Yeah", "Peking O", "Amugn", "Halleluhwah", "Mother Sky", "Vernal Equinox", "Future Days", "Ibis", "Paperhouse", and many, MANY more.
• 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 80 minutes.
• Olitsky by Ian Mellish consists of four tape loops of slightly different lengths (around 44 minutes), that theoretically would take 1.6 million years (the least common multiple of the loops) to complete its cycle. Three excerpts of this ("Beginning Mix", "Middle Mix", and "End Mix") were compiled into a double album.
• 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".
  • Don't forget "Grendel", "Gaza", "The Invisible Man", "Montréal", "Goodbye to All That", "Blind Curve"... Marillion can really go on when they want to.
  • The album Misplaced Childhood was originally conceived as comprising "Side One" and "Side Two". Although these were split up into individual titles they still play continuously.
• Transatlantic is a supergroup made up of drummer Mike Portnoy, guitarist Roine Stolt, keyboardist Neal Morse, and bassist Pete Trewavas. Their third album, The Whirlwind, is a 12-part 78-minute suite; each movement is indexed as a separate track but it is performed live as a single composition and featured as a single track on their live albums. Their songs "All of the Above", "Duel With the Devil", "Stranger In Your Soul", "Into the Blue" and "Kaleidoscope" also all run for 20-30 minutes each.
• 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. That's the studio version; the live version is over twenty minutes. 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.
  • Todd Rundgren could get this way in his solo career as well. The A-side of Initation was a continuous six-song suite that lasted thirty-two minutes (two of which themselves exceeded seven minutes), but the B-side was where he really let loose, with a single thirty-five-minute song. There's also "Healing", which goes on for twenty minutes (and is divided into three tracks) and the A-side of A Wizard, a True Star, which is technically comprised of twelve separate tracks, but feels more like a lengthy suite (helped along by the fact that it's bookended by two versions of the song). The latter of these goes on for 26:23.
• "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.
• The Moody Blues go to town on several tracks. Their paean to drug pioneer Timothy Leary, "Legend of a Mind", goes on through eight and a bit minutes with a long cod-orchestral cello bit in the middle eight. Side two of the album On the Threshold of a Dream sees a long, long track called "Have You Heard?" which segues into a portentous Mike Pinder poem in the middle. Possibly 13 or 14 minutes, but it is quite good, all things considered.
  • Their most well-known track, "Nights in White Satin", is 7:38 in its original state, though they later released a single version that was much shorter (and a second single version that was a good bit longer than the first single, but still closer to it than to the original album version.)
• The extended cut of Argent's "Hold Your Head Up" (as opposed to the single) is over 6 minutes long.
• Big Big Train can usually be counted on to throw in at least one epic track per album: "East Coast Racer," "For Winter," and the title track of The Underfall Yard all approach or beat the 20-minute mark.
• Quebec prog-rock band Harmonium was known for its long songs. The average song length for the band is 7 minutes 13 seconds. Even after the band split up, singer Serge Fiori released a fourth album that also contained multiple tracks that qualify. Their second album has their longest studio track, "Histoire sans paroles", a 17-minute instrumental. Their magnum opus, "L'Heptade", also an Epic Album, sees all seven of its main tracks being over seven minutes in length, and four of them go past the 10-minute mark. Special shout-out to the live version of L'Heptade, which makes some tracks even longer, among them "Le premier ciel", originally 11 minutes and 24 seconds, now nearly 21 minutes.
• Caravan have several single-track suites that are longer than ten minutes, including "Can't Be Long Now / Françoise / For Richard / Warlock", "Nine Feet Underground" (their longest studio track, at 22 minutes), "Nothing at All / It's Coming Soon / Nothing at All (reprise)", "The Love in Your Eye / To Catch Me a Brother / Subsultus / Debouchement / Tilbury Kecks", "L'Auberge du sanglier / A Hunting We Shall Go / Pengola / Backwards / A Hunting We Shall Go (reprise)", and "The Dabsong Conshirtoe". They have several others topping seven minutes, such as "Where but for Caravan Would I?", "And I Wish I Were Stoned / Don't Worry", "With an Ear to the Ground You Can Make It / Martinian / Only Cox / Reprise", "Winter Wine", and "Memory Lain, Hugh / Headloss". Also worth mention is the aptly titled bonus track "Derek's Long Thing", which runs for 10:58. Some live versions of these tracks are even longer.
• X-Panda pretty much lives this trope, with their first, mostly instrumental album "Flight of Fancy" having 7 of the 11 tracks (including the short intro) over 6 minutes, and two of those ("Black" and "Journey Of A Dream") at about 11 minutes. The second album "Reflections" comes closer to regular song lengths, but still features "Denial" with a length of over 12 minutes, the title tracks(!) "Reflections: Inner Battle" and "Reflections: Silent Friend" going over 7 and 6 minutes respectively, and ending with a likewise 6-minute "Esivanemate Pärand."
• Japan's Koenjihyakkei (also romanised as Koenji Hyakkei and others) have pretty much built their entire career around this trope, with their longest studio track to date being "Dhorimvishka", from the album of the same name, clocking in at 11:47. They have several others clocking in past the nine-minute mark, such as "Grembo Zavia" (10:16), "Rissenddo Rraimb" (9:20), "Guoth Dahha" (9:46), "Lussesoggi Zomn" (10:26), "Gassttrumm" (9:26), "Vreztemtraiv" (10:19), "Levhorm" (9:11), and "Djebelaki Zomn" (9:49). Live, they also often frequently add running time to already long pieces, so "Fettim Paillu" (a still-impressive 7:48 in its studio rendition) can reach 10:46 in its 070531 rendition and 10:18 in its Live at Koenji High rendition. But arguably taking the cake is a series of improvisations from 070531. They're divided into six tracks titled "Improvisation A" through "Improvisation F", but there are really only three improvisations; the DVD producers simply divided each of them into halves for everyone's convenience. The third and longest of the three pairs runs for some 19:43; the first pair runs for 17:26 and the second for 16:14. Strangely, their first album is a case of Early-Installment Weirdness as they barely used this trope at all; only "Avedumma", at 7:26, passes the six-minute mark. Sister project Ruins also uses this somewhat, though not to the same extent; "Infect" from Symphonica bears mention, though, at 10:14.
• Australia's Karnivool may not be the most extreme example on this list, but they have two songs that top the ten-minute mark, though it's kind of complicated. If you look at the CD listing, you'll see "Deadman" listed as being 12:04 and "Change" as being 10:47. However, that's misleading. "Deadman" actually has the first part of "Change" indexed as a hidden track. "Deadman" proper is roughly 10:11 long, while "Change" runs for around 12:40. Their other long songs include "Some More of the Same" (8:57 or 9:06, depending on the release), "Featherweight" (8:21), "New Day" (8:21), "Umbra" (7:51), "Aeons" (7:18), "Sky Machine" (7:49), and "Alpha Omega" (7:57), and they also have a few cases of Siamese Twin Songs ("The Medicine Wears Off" and "The Caudal Lure" are particularly conspicuous since they contain similar chord progressions and the transition between them is almost impossible to notice; together they reach 8:06). Their first album, Themata, is their only full-length release without any tracks above the six-minute mark.

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.
  • There's a joke that if you arrive at a drone gig fifteen minutes late you miss the first chord; if it's a grindcore gig, you miss the first six bands.
• 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 tracks, 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 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", with the 2012 reissue including an 11 and a half minute live performance of "Holy Mountain" instead of "Sonic Titan".
  • Similarly, but not that similar, many stoner metal bands have followed in Sleep's footsteps making overly long songs, such as Bongripper's Great Barrier Reefer, Boris Absolutego, and pretty much every song by the band Earthless.
• 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 "comeback" album, Death Magnetic, is a return to form. Only one song is under six minutes ("My Apocalypse" - 5:01, and the band later recorded a new intro for this that brings it up past the six-minute mark). Follow-up Hardwired... to Self-Destruct, which is even split into two disks, aside from the 3-minute Title Track that is the opener, is nine tracks at least 5:45 long.
  • Load also has a pair of long ones - "Bleeding Me" runs eight minutes and "The Outlaw Torn" just short of ten minutes (and originally, available as the "Unencumbered by Manufacturing Restrictions Version" - see Epic Albums below - was close to eleven minutes). Reload has the seven-minute "Where the Wild Things Are", the seven-and-a-half-minute "Low Man's Lyric", and the eight-minute "Fixxxer". Meanwhile, six of the eleven tracks on St. Anger are longer than seven minutes, while none are under five.
  • 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 four minutes long, each one of these was longer than eight minutes. Death Magnetic brought this back with a penultimate instrumental track called "Suicide & Redemption", clocking in at over ten 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).^note Some versions of the aforementioned Neurosis track are even longer, with an additional 10 minutes taken up by an Overly Long Gag. Swiss band Rorcal has 'Heliogabalus' which is over 70 minutes.
• Megadeth: "Good Mourning/Black Friday", "Holy Wars... the Punishment Due". 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. 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 minutes.
  • Don't forget "Disposition/Reflection/Triad". Conceived 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 because it ends with 10 minutes of chirping crickets, followed by an 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 "Ænema."
  • Their comeback album "Fear Inoculum" has all six of the non-instrumental tracks lasting longer than 10 minutes, as well as ending with "7empest", their longest individual track to date at a whopping 15 minutes and 43 seconds!
• Jane's Addiction: "Ted, Just Admit It...", "Three Days", "Then She Did...".
  • The live version of "Jane Says" goes on for over 6½ minutes (compared to just under 5 minutes for the studio version).
• Faith No More: "The Real Thing" (8:12), "War Pigs" (7:44), "Jizzlobber" (6:35), "King for a Day" (6:35). "Zombie Eaters" just barely misses the six-minute cut-off at 5:59.
• 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 likely 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; the song is long enough to constitute an entire second disc), "In the Presence of Enemies" (25:38 - split into two parts on the album), "Octavarium" (24:00), "A Change of Seasons" (23:06), "A View from the Top of the World" (20:23) and "The Count of Tuscany" (19:16). The average Dream Theater song probably lasts around 8 minutes and 47 seconds. Simply put, there's a reason why they provide the page image.
  • Their Twelve-Step Suite clocks in at 57:17 and features 12 parts over five songs, each on different albums, and each being fairly lengthy and epic in their own right; 13:52, 11:17, 8:26, 10:43, and 12:50, to be exact.
  • Similarly, the "A Mind Beside Itself" suite from Awake is split across three tracks, totaling at 20:26 long.
  • Funny, because they cite many punk rock 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.
  • Instrumental spinoff supergroup Liquid Tension Experiment has a song called "Three Minute Warning" that runs for over 27 minutes. The band lampshaded it on the back of the cd case, as seen in the page quote. Their second album includes three tracks ("When The Water Breaks", "Chewbacca", "Liquid Dreams") that all run for well over ten minutes.
    • 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.
  • "The Greatest Show on Earth" from Endless Forms Most Beautiful takes the cake with an epic length of 24 minutes.
• 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.
• DragonForce. They topped themselves with "The Edge of the World", which is just over eleven 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...
• 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".
  • And are we forgetting 'Lochness', longest of the lot at over 13 minutes?
• Shadow Gallery: "The Queen of the City of Ice", "Ghostship", "Cliffhanger 2", "First Light".
• Agalloch, who have a style pretty similar to Opeth. Their longest song, "Faustian Echoes", is over twenty minutes long. "Black Lake Niðstång" isn't far behind at around eighteen minutes long.
• Technical metal group Meshuggah only make music that embodies this trope... detuned guitar lines lance through each other at a 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. It lasts for about 47 minutes.
• 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.
  • It became a trend starting once Bruce Dickinson returned in 1999. The third reunion album, A Matter of Life and Death (featuring the aforementioned "The Longest Day") has only two of the 10 songs clocking under six minutes; follow-up The Final Frontier, only has two songs under 6 minutes ("The Alchemist" at 4:29, "Mother Of Mercy" at 5:20) ; and then The Book of Souls has three clocking over 10 minutes (album closer "Empire of the Clouds" is the band's longest ever at 18).
  • Even on their first album, where most of the songs were four minutes and under, they had "Phantom of the Opera".
• Finnish folk metal musician Antti Martikainen is a big fan of this trope. For example, all songs except one^note "Mead Hall Mayhem", which still qualifies for this trope at just over 6 minutes on both "Northern Steel" and its remastered edition are over 9 minutes long, with the longest track, "Kalevala", being 25 minutes flat.
• 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 a more modern sound.
  • Used to a great extent on their 2009 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 EP The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues: three songs, thirty minutes.
  • The Parallax II: Future Sequence has a lot of these too, with "Silent Flight Parliament" taking the cake at over fifteen minutes in length.
  • Coma Ecliptic and the Automata records both have their share, too. Bonus points for almost all of their discography going back as far as Colors containing mostly gapless song transitions, many subtle enough that listeners would be hard-pressed to even tell where one song ends and the next begins.
• Mastodon: While fans of very technical songs in general, "Hearts Alive" and "The Last Baron" qualifies at truly epic, both clocking at over 13 minutes long. "The Czar" is by no means short at 10:54.
• Black Metal bands do this a lot. Between the band Wolves in the Throne Room's first eight songs, the average length was 14-15 minutes long. As of 2017, the band has six official albums, one EP, and two demos in its studio discography. Apart from a few short ambient interludes, the band only has four songs that are shorter than six minutes: "Bridge of Leaves" at 5:08, "Woodland Cathedral" at 5:24, "Dea Artio" at 5:57, and "Initiation at Neudeg Alm" at 5:58. "Subterranean Initiation" at 7:06, "Wolves in the Throne Room" at 7:27, "The Old Ones Are with Us" at 8:36, "(Hands Pull You Through Purple) Black Tea" at 9:32, and "Born from the Serpent's Eye" at 9:37. After that, all the band's songs are in the double digits, with the longest being the demo version of "(A Shimmering Radiance) Diadem of Twelve Stars", which approaches twenty-six minutes in length. Around half of the band's songs (and almost all the songs on their first three albums and EP) take up an entire vinyl side (though Black Cascade could have been fit onto one record if the band had felt like raising the noise floor slightly); "Face in a Night Time Mirror" actually takes up two.
  • The U.S. black metal scene is full of this, perhaps due to the influence of late nineties band Weakling. Weakling had only five songs, the shortest of which was 10:28 and the longest of which was 20:39. Other bands notably prone to this include:
    • Fauna, one of the first bands from the Pacific Northwest and a major influence on Wolves in the Throne Room. The band's first album, Rain, consists of a single 63-minute long song. The band's second album, The Hunt, is either seventy-two or eighty minutes of continuous music (depending on the release) and was initially released as a single track, although later reissues have divided it into seven tracks. The band's third album, Avifauna, consists of three songs and two short ambient interludes; of the songs, the shortest is 17:02 (with the longest being 29:23), although it's also worth noting that, again, the entire piece is continuous.
    • Fauna's side projects are often prone to this as well; Echtra has a thing about all of his tracks being exactly twenty-three minutes long (as a reference to the 23 Enigma; on the two latest albums the two songs run together continuously), and the band's acoustic folk side project Fearthainne doesn't have a single song below thirty minutes in length (unless you count the intros to each album, which are three and five minutes respectively), with the longest being forty-five. Fauna's predecessor Threnos was prone to this as well, albeit to a lesser extent; two of their songs exceeded thirteen minutes in length.
    • Santa Cruz, CA's Fell Voices. To date (June 2013) they have recorded ten tracks, the shortest of which is a mere fragment at 15:20. Several of the band's songs break the twenty-minute mark and the first (untitled) track on their (untitled) 2010 album is over twenty-two.
    • Arcata, CA's Ash Borer. "Rest, You Are the Lightning" is a mere snippet at 7:54. All the band's other songs break the ten-minute barrier, with the untitled song from their split with Fell Voices and "My Curse Was Raised in the Darkness Against a Doomsday Silence" both breaking or approaching twenty.
    • Louisville, KY's Panopticon. While sole member Austin Lunn has been known to release shorter tracks, the large Post-Rock influence on his music means this trope is pretty frequent as well. A list of examples over ten minutes in length includes: "Flag Burner, Torch Bearer" (10:40), "I, Hedonist" (15:08), "...Speaking..." (12:51), "The Lay of Grimnir" (13:06), "...Speaking...(Collapsed Version)" (10:40), "La Passione di Sacco & Vanzetti" (11:37), "The Death of Baldr and the Coming War" (15:43), "Aptrgangr" (15:11), "Merkstave" (10:02), "Living in the Valley of the Shadow of Death" (11:29), "The Road to Bergen" (10:33), "From Bergen to Jotunheim Forest" (10:53), "The White Mountain View" (10:57), "Resident" (11:15), "Patient" (20:01), "Bodies Under the Falls" (10:25), "Black Soot and Red Blood" (10:04), "Killing the Giants as They Sleep" (12:19), "Where Mountains Pierce the Sky" (12:43), "The Long Road" (23:28, and in three movements), "Chase the Grain" (12:14), "A Superior Lament" (11:01), "Håkan's Song" (12:35). Every band Panopticon has recorded a split with to date - namely, Wheels Within Wheels, Vestiges, When Bitter Spring Sleeps, Waldgeflüster, Lake of Blood, and Skagos (the latter two of which are mentioned further down in this article) - has also exhibited this trope, though not always on the Panopticon splits.
    • Portland, OR's L'Acephale: "Against a Sea of Weeping Sleep" (21:02), "Euntes ibant et flebant" (16:50), "Stahlhartes Gehäuse" (18:43), "Psalm of Misery" (12:05 in the Stahlhartes Gehäuse version), "Perdition" (12:40 on vinyl, 24:42 on CD, although around eleven minutes of the latter is silence; note that the CD version is still longer with the silence trimmed), "The Book of Lies/Seventh Gate" (16:21), "From a Miserable Abode" (18:09), "November Song" (25:27), "Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted" (23:00). The remix of this last is even longer, being exactly 93 minutes long (which, as with Echtra's example, is a deliberate choice of length, in this case being a significant number in Thelema; it's quite possible the 23-minute length of the original is also deliberate in L'Acephale's case). This isn't a complete list. Additionally, "November Song" is from a split with another band, Huldrekall, whose side is itself an example of this trope, at 25:14 in length (although it contains four songs stitched together into one track as Siamese Twin Songs).
    • Related project Hail (which contains several of the same members as L'Acephale) also does this a lot, with examples including "Kalevala Rune" (10:17), "Crimson Madrigal" (29:56, although slightly over eleven minutes of this is silence), "Go Forth Through the Darkness - Marjatan virsi" (10:16 and 10:09 in each version), "Straasha" (10:23), "Isa - Abeille noir" (15:10), "The Autopsy I" (12:01), "Exit" (10:05), "The Autopsy II" (14:14), "The Autopsy III" (16:42), "Isa or the Bees Journey for Lemminkäinen" (25:08), "Barrows Embrace" (19:04), "Blood Revenge of Death" (35:22, although this is a live performance including three songs as one track), "Upon the Blackened Surface" (12:00), "The Feast - The Bleep" (14:35), "Wet Hat" (15:35), "Black Bûn Eclipse" (23:20). "Rocking" applies to some of these more than others, as they are prone to producing ambient music as well as Black Metal.
    • Los Angeles' Lake of Blood have used this trope pretty extensively in recent years. "Proxigean Arcanum" is 17:10, "Omnipotens" is 16:15, "Destroyer of Vices" is 15:23, "In Wells of Shadow" is 12:03 on The Burial Grounds Sesssions and 13:31 on Omnipotens Tyrannus, "Agape" is 13:21, "Tyrannus" is 12:09, "Blood & Mercy" is 11:13.
    • California's Petrychor have a number of good examples as well: "Dryad (I Make My Home)" is 10:56, "In Remembrance" is 10:44, "Of Grandest Majesties" is 13:18, "Beneath Highway and Street" is 14:20, "Tomorrow It Will Rain Over Bouville" is 13:04, "The Place Where the Red Stars Hang" is 14:04, "Planets Born of Human Ash" is 13:26, and the capstone, "Apocalyptic Witchcraft" is 26:19. Perhaps unsurprising since the sole band member plays in a Post-Rock group (Beware of Safety). He also has an ambient project called Carbonscape that exhibits this trope to an even greater extent, with an average song length of about twelve minutes (the longest track to date being "Time Is a Green Orchid", which runs for 23:44).
    • Illinois' Njiqahdda does an awful lot of this. It would be impractical to list all the band's songs that qualify since their discography pretty much defines Archive Panic, but as an example, The Path of Liberation from Birth and Death has six tracks, the longest of which is almost twenty-six minutes long on the CD (it's a few minutes shorter on the vinyl edition). All of the songs except the intro are at least ten minutes long. The band's other projects Njiijn, Oaks of Bethel, and Funeral Eclipse are, unsurprisingly, prone to this as well.
    • Brooklyn, NY's Krallice do this almost exclusively. Up until their 2015 album Ygg huur, and excluding the EP Orphan of Sickness, which was a Cover Album, and the single Traditional, they had only five songs shorter than seven minutes, and one of those was an Album Intro Track. Ygg huur is less of an example, as four of the songs clock in at 6:42 (they have exactly the same length down to the millisecond) and the others are even shorter, but they still have the complexity of Krallice's other material.
    • This list is far from exhaustive. Feel free to add more examples.
• Experimental black metal band Trist has a song called "Hin", which clocks in at 59:55!
  • Trist is an offshoot of the band Lunar Aurora, who are also prone to this. One example is their Concept Album Zyklus, which has four songs of lengths between just over seven and just over sixteen minutes. Even more extreme is their side of their split with Paysage d'Hiver (another band prone to this), which has one track entitled "A Haudiga Fluag" which goes on for over twenty-one minutes. Not as extreme as "Hin", but still.
• British Doom Metal band Esoteric does this. Exclusively. Most of their albums are two discs and well over an hour-long, and after their first album (where the shortest song is still over seven minutes long), they only have a handful of songs less than ten minutes in length. They have a grand total of two songs under five minutes in length, and their longest, "Awaiting My Death", runs for 26:07.
• Green Carnation's "Light of Day, Day of Darkness" clocks in at 60:06. No wonder the version featured on the Damnatus album was only an "excerpt"...
  • "9-29-045" from The Acoustic Verses is no slouch at fifteen minutes, either, and each of their other albums contains at least one example of this trope. As for The Rise and Fall of Mankind (the sequel to "Light of Day..."), it's been postponed, but will apparently be released at some point in the future.
• 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 EPs), and with the 4 other lengthy tracks following it, it reaches 68 minutes.
  • Their 2011 album Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa ("As Shadows We Walk in 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. Similarly, 2016's Jumalten aika ("The Age of the Gods") has five tracks, with "Suden tunti" being the shortest by far at 7:06; the others range from 12:43 to 16:00.
• Blind Guardian has some good examples, like "And Then There Was Silence" (14:06). 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.
  • Its sequel (Crimson II) is longer by three minutes. It was divided into forty-four tracks but the divisions are arbitrary (there are nine proper "movements" but the song is still a continuous piece).
• Helloween has "Halloween", "Keeper of the Seven Keys", "The King of a 1000 Years" and "Occasion Avenue", the only 4 songs over the 10-minute 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.
  • The "less" epic songs, like "Mission Motherland" and "The Dark Ride", clock in around 9 minutes.
• 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 sounds 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.
• 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 (an example of a Meaningful Name) 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 has one roughly every other album.
  • "Elizabeth", the last song on Karma, being about 12 minutes long.
  • "Memento mori", the penultimate song in The Black Halo, clocking in at just under 9 minutes.
  • "Poetry for the Poisoned", the title track for its album, being about 9 and a half minutes.
  • "Prodigal Son" for Silverthorn is just under 9 minutes.
• 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 - which has a length of 19:42.
  • Rhapsody of Fire is a record in itself. their first 9 albums (out of 11, the last 2 are separate from the rest) can be considered as one single story. One of their albums (the Cold Embrace of Fear) is actually one single continuous song.
• 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 (although roughly the last 10 of this is a repeated sample resembling a Broken Record). 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.
  • 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.
• Ensiferum does this from time to time, most notably with "Lai Lai Hei", which changes musical styles and tempos many times in its 7:15 run. Ensiferum have produced even longer songs beyond Jari's departure with "Victory Song" at 10:43, "Heathen Throne" at 11:09, "The Longest Journey (Heathen Throne Part II)" at 12:49 (listening to both Heathen Throne songs back to back makes it one hell of a journey) and "Passion Proof Power" at 16:59 making it Ensiferum's longest song to date.
• Wintersun has its share of long songs, too. The debut album's ending "Sadness and Hate" is over ten minutes long, while "Sons of Winter and Stars" from Time I is 13 and a half. The eponymous "Time" is almost 12 minutes, if counted with the ambient-esque outro.
• 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.
• 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 (originally released as Lysol) 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—nevertheless, it contains the 18-minute opener "Hung Bunny/Roman Dog Bird", both parts of which still qualify at about eleven and seven-and-a-half minutes, respectively.
  • 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 three solo EPs 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), "Let the Storm Descend Upon You" (12:10), "The Scarecrow" (11:12), "Savior in the Clockwork" (10:41), and The Great Mystery (10:03) 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. The Stage takes this even further having only two songs under five minutes, the title track spanning 8:30, and "Exist" topping out at 15:41.
• 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 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 minutes 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.
  • Ironically, most of those songs with absurdly long titles fall under Miniscule Rocking.
• Alice in Chains: "Love, Hate, Love", "Rooster", "Rotten Apple", "Sludge Factory", "Head Creeps", "Frogs", "Over Now", "A Looking in View", "Acid Bubble", "The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here", "Phantom Limb.
• 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 16½ minutes). A few of their other songs are over 6 minutes long.
• Progressive Neo Classical Guitarist 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 just under 11 minutes, not to mention "Zakuro" at 8 minutes and 37 seconds. Kisō has two songs over 6 minutes. UROBOROS has "VINUSHKA", clocking in at 9 minutes and 37 seconds, and "Ware, Yami Tote..." at 7 minutes and 1 second. Their 2011 release, DUM SPIRO SPERO, gives us "THE BLOSSOMING BEELZEBUB" at 7 minutes and 35 seconds, and "DIABOLOS" at 9 minutes and 51 seconds.
• Finnish black metal band Wyrd's debut album "Heathen" consisted of one track at 51:12.
  • Far from their only example of this trope either: "Ashes of Man and Oak and Pine" (13:02), "Misanthrope's Masterplan" (13:57), "Pimeyteen" (vinyl bonus track, 10:33), "The Lonely Sea" (12:42), "Vargtimmen" (8:13), "Sad Song of the Woods" (17:30), "The Wicker Man" (13:08), "Ominous Insomnia" (7:24), "Cold Son of the Wind" (9:20), "Deception" (8:44). And those are just the first four albums.
• WASP have tended towards this on many occasions. The Headless Children has "Thunderhead" at 6:49 and "The Heretic (The Lost Child)" at 7:22. There are three tracks on the Concept Album The Crimson Idol that qualify - "Chainsaw Charlie (Murders in the New Morgue)" clocks in at 7:36, "The Idol" at 8:40, and the climatic "The Great Misconceptions of Me" at 9:29. The unsubtly named Kill Fuck Die has "The Horror" at 8:26 and Helldorado chips in with "Damnation Angels" at 6:27. Unholy Terror has the unholy trinity of "Loco-Motive Man" at 6:03, "Evermore" at 6:10 and "Wasted White Boys" at 6:49. The first half of the double concept album The Neon God has "Sister Sadie (And the Black Habits)" at 7:42, "Asylum #9" at 6:19, and "What I'll Never Find" at 6:02 whereas the second half only has "The Last Redemption" but it clocks in at an insane 13:39! Dominator is relatively restrained with only "Heaven's Hung in Black" at 7:14 meeting the trope. Not bad for a band whose first single was a three-minute thrashout called "Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)"...
• Primordial have no more than ten tracks that last less than five minutes. The majority of their songs go for 6-9 minutes long.
• Ogre from Maine, USA recorded a 37-minute song called "Plague of the Planet" mixing elements of doom metal with hard rock and sounds like a collaboration project starring Black Sabbath, AC/DC and Rush.
• Augury: Oversee The Rebirth, an eleven-minute-long super-progressive-and-melodic song off of Fragmentary Evidence. Arguably their best song.
• Soulfly normally has fairly short songs, but "Soulfly V", the closing track on their 2005 album Dark Ages, clocks in at 10 minutes and 54 seconds.
• Theocracy has at least one song on every album that's over 10 minutes. "The Serpant's Kiss" from their self-titled album is just barely shy of 12 minutes, while "Mirror of Souls", the title track of their second album, runs for 22 minutes, 26 seconds.
• Mexian Progressive Death Metal band The Chasm (now relocated to Chicago). The Spell of Retribution and Conjuration of the Spectral Empire already displayed some impressive examples, but they really went to town on Farseeing the Paranormal Abysm, where, apart from a brief interlude, there wasn't a song under six and a half minutes and most of the songs exceeded eight. The longest track ("The Mission") is twelve minutes long on the CD and, thanks to an extended fadeout, even longer on vinyl. (The vinyl also contains a bonus cover of Sepultura's "Troops of Doom", which averts this trope and also isn't listed anywhere in the packaging or advertising for the album).
• New York Death Metal bands can get this way. Incantation's "Abolishment of Immaculate Serenity" is 8:14; their "Legion of Dis" is 11:17; their "Elysium (Eternity Is Nigh)" is 16:23; and their "Unto Infinite Twilight / Majesty of Infernal Damnation" is 16:47. (The last of these tracks features Daniel Corchado of The Chasm, listed above, so it's not surprising). They also have a twenty-three-minute ambient outro to one of their albums, though this is more of a subversion; it's something of a joke at Relapse Records' expense. Immolation has "Close to a World Below" (8:19) and "Unholy Cult" (8:02). These aren't the only examples from either band.
• Ruin Lust, also from New York (although a blackened death metal band and thus not typical of New York Death Metal), have a song called "Skin Hunger" that goes on for over twelve minutes before settling into a locked groove (making the song's running time therefore, theoretically, infinite).
• On Timeghoul's first demo they started displaying this trope, with most of the songs around the six-minute mark, but on their second they really let loose, with two songs averaging nine and a half minutes in length. Prime Progressive Death Metal.
• Finnish doom band Reverend Bizarre, unsurprisingly, liked this trope a lot. "They Used Dark Forces/Teutonic Witch" is almost half an hour long and two other songs from the same album exceed twenty-five minutes. Around half of their songs exceed ten minutes in length.
• Canadian folk/black metal band Skagos can get this way. More of their songs exceed ten minutes than don't, but Anarchic takes the cake, being comprised of either two or three tracks (depending on the release format) and exceeding sixty-five minutes in length. If you're feeling particularly adventurous you can splice the material from the two different releases into a continuous suite of music.
• Power Metal band Gloryhammer has a song titled "The Epic Rage of Furious Thunder" that clocks in at just over ten minutes. The band itself is an Affectionate Parody of Power Metal tropes and it's fitting that they have a song that takes up a quarter of the album's running time.
  • They close the second album with a similar 9-minute song, "Apocalypse 1992". It is basically the first album IN SPACE!, so it's only fitting.
  • The third album once again ends on such an epic song, this time lasting 12 minutes-to be fair, the last minute is taken up only by orchestral outro.
• Slipknot: "Gehenna," "Gematria [The Killing Name]," "Iowa." "Scissors" and "Skin Ticket."
• Not even Yousei Teikoku are immune - the title track of Gothic Lolita Agitator is a little under 9 and a half minutes.
• French avant-garde black metal band Deathspell Omega have indulged in this quite a bit throughout their discography. The album Fas Ite Maledicti in Ignem Aeternum consists entirely of this except for the two versions of "Obombration" that open and close the album (the shortest song other than those is "Bread of Bitterness" at 7:49). "Diabolus Absconditus", "Chaining the Katechon", and "Mass Grave Aesthetics" are twenty minutes each and are all contained on their own separate EPs (although all of them also appeared on splits with other bands, some of whom also displayed this trope), all three songs on Kénôse, with the shortest being 9 minutes long and the longest being 15:45, making it the longest single Deathspell Omega track not to solely comprise a release. "Carnal Malefactor" is 11:45, "Onward Where Most With Ravin I May Meet" is 10:12, you get the picture. Paracletus and Drought could be considered examples too if you consider the continuous song suites as one song; if not, the latter is a rare example in the band's discography of Miniscule Rocking instead, though two of the songs on Paracletus ("Abscission" and "Phosphene") qualify by themselves.
• Swiss band Darkspace. They only have one song under seven minutes long, and most of them break ten. Their longest track, "Dark 4.18", breaks twenty-seven.
• Paysage d'Hiver, whose sole member is also a member of Darkspace, also exhibits this. It's very rare for a song to last less than ten minutes, and quite a few break twenty. The cassette version of Winterkälte goes on for over ninety minutes despite only containing six tracks.
• L.A. Thrash Metal band Dark Angel had already started doing this by their second album, Darkness Descends, which contains the eight-and-a-half-minute "Black Prophecies", but they really went to town on their last two releases, Leave Scars and Time Does Not Heal. On Leave Scars more than half the tracks were at least seven minutes long, and on Time Does Not Heal all but three of them were, and the longest was 9:16. They also dialled up the Progressive Metal influences on these two records; the latter album's advertising famously declares that it contains 246 riffs.
• Greece's black metal band Astarte did quite a bit of this on their first four albums, with their longest song, "Rise from Within III", being nearly eleven minutes in length. They were also prone, as this song title likely indicates, to releasing multi-song suites (both their first two albums had them, as did Demonized). Their usage of this trope dropped off a bit with time, with their last album before frontwoman Tristessa's death, Demonized, having no songs over six minutes in length.
• Polish black metal band Lux Occulta like this a lot as well. Nearly all the songs from their first two albums are examples (with two of them breaking the eleven-minute mark), as are scattered songs from later releases. They're still at it as of their latest release, Kołysanki (which, it should be noted, is not particularly a metal release), with three songs over seven minutes in length and one of those over eight.
• Japanese Sludge/Doom Metal band Corrupted have several songs of an hour in length or longer. Their longest track probably is their collaboration with American Doom Metal band Asunder, which is over ninety-five minutes long. Similarly to their countrymen Boris, they also have several one-song albums, the longest of which is El mundo frio, at 71 minutes. They also have Paso inferior, at 41 minutes, and Llenandose de gusanos, a double album with one song lasting 50 minutes and another lasting 70 minutes. Some of their other albums don't go quite as far with individual song lengths but still have extremely long songs. Their most recent full-length, Garten der Unbewusstheit, is 63 minutes long with 3 tracks that all flow seamlessly into each other, so it might as well be one song anyway.
• Asunder also have their share of long tracks. Apart from the Corrupted collab, they also have "Rite of Finality", which is over fifty minutes long on the CD (the LP version omits a lengthy feedback-laden coda, but it's still almost 23 minutes long). That's not all, either.
• While they've always had tendencies of this, Immortal started doing this a lot with At the Heart of Winter, which consists exclusively of this (the shortest song is still over six minutes long, while the longest is nearly nine). Since then they have at least one track on each album at or exceeding seven minutes in length.
• The sludge/black metal band Inter Arma from Richmond, VA have a lot of examples, but The Cavern has to take the cake, being one song that lasts nearly forty-six minutes.
• Alcest have a lot of long songs. The longest would be either "Le secret", which clocks in at more than fourteen and a half minutes, or "Écailles de lune", which clocks in at nearly twenty but is divided into two parts.
• Funeral doom pioneers Skepticism use this trope extensively. Their average song length is around ten minutes long, and their longest track is the nearly 28-minute "Aes".
• Most releases by Japanese Avant-Garde Metal band Sigh have at least one or two really long songs. Their second album, Infidel Art, has five of them - only one song on that album ("Suicidogenic", at a mere 4:46) is less than eight minutes long. Their longest song on any of their albums, the five-part "Slaughtergarden Suite", is nearly eleven minutes long.
• Diablo Swing Orchestra has "Stratosphere Serenade" clocking in at 8:25 and "Justice for Saint Mary" at 8:17.
• Australian Progressive Metal band Ne Obliviscaris, being a Progressive Metal band, use this a lot, but the best example has to be the three-part "Painters of the Tempest", which is twenty-three minutes long. They have only released three songs under eight minutes in length: the 4:47 "All the Scarlet Tears", the 5:51 "Of the Leper Butterflies", and the 6:59 "Felo de se". (Note, however, that Citadel had two of the songs divided into multiple tracks, three of which were under four minutes).
• Austria's Summoning are fond of this, as befitting the "epic black metal" label that is often applied to their music. Their longest song is probably 2006's "Land of the Dead", which is nearly thirteen minutes long.
• Their disciples in Salt Lake City's Caladan Brood, if anything, take this to an even further extent than Summoning, with their shortest original song ("Echoes of Battle") still being nine minutes long and their longest ("Book of the Fallen") being nearly fifteen. They also have two Summoning covers, which are shorter than their original compositions but still eight and over nine minutes long respectively.
• Since they are a post-metal band, it's rare when Cult of Luna doesn't do it. If they aren't on an interlude track, then rarely does a song dip below six minutes. Most obvious in "Dark City, Dead Man" at 15:49 and "Vicarious Redemption" at 18:45.
• The Ocean is no stranger to this and regularly has extended slow, doomy tracks. Their most prominent example is "The Greates Bane" lasting over 14 minutes.
• Kayo Dot has done examples of this that fall under both metal and progressive rock. Their longest tracks are "Stained Glass" (20 minutes) and "___ On Limpid Form" (18 minutes). maudlin of the Well, more or less Kayo Dot's predecessor, also had songs that fell under this, but their longest songs topped out at around 12 minutes long.
• Cormorant have “Ballad of the Beast”, “Hanging Gardens”, “The Emigrant’s Wake”, “Funambulist”, “Unearthly Dreamings”, “Waking Sleep” and “A Sovereign Act” clocking-in around 9–12 minutes in length. On their latest album, Diaspora, they’ve really let loose, with “Sentinel” being nearly sixteen and “Migration” being more than twenty-six minutes long.
• Gorguts' EP Pleiades' Dust consists solely of the eponymous 33-minute song. They have other examples as well, especially "Clouded" from Obscura (9:32) and "Absconders" from Colored Sands (9:08).
• Japanese black metal band Imperial Circus Dead Decadence: "Nyx no Musumetachi no Shouzou", "Sangeki no Chi ni Kagayaku Somatta Ai ga, Zetsubou no Kuro wo Sukutta Saigo no Hi...", "Gekiai no Yobigoe ga Dekiai no Kyousei wo Kurau", "Chinurareta Miniku ni Fukeru Houmura.", "Haishita Shoujo wa, Hai Yoru Konton to Kaikousu.", "Uta", and "Yomi yori Kikoyu, Koukoku no Tou to Honoo no Shoujo."
• Australia's Black Metal band Midnight Odyssey is quite fond of this trope. To give an example, the band's 2015 album Shards of Silver Fade runs for over two hours. There are only eight songs, the shortest of which is over fourteen minutes and the longest of which is nearly twenty-two.
• Burzum has engaged in a fair amount of this. The longest track, "Rundgang um die transzendentale Säule der Singularität", is nearly twenty-six minutes, though it's arguably a subversion as it's pretty repetitive. Many of his songs are in the 7-14 minute range. His examples tend to be less complex from a songwriting standpoint than many of the other examples here because his aim is more to induce a state of trance in a listener than it is to rock their face off. That said, while they usually don't contain too many riffs, they're usually pretty technically demanding ones (either on drums, bass, or guitar - the synthesizer parts are simpler, however).
• Norwegian Viking metal band Sorgsvart also has quite a few examples (it's Viking metal, so it figures). The longest track on any of the commonly available releases is "Bleivikmaen ein Haglandsfaen", which runs for 15:41. Other lengthy tracks include "Vikingtid og anarki" (11:38), "Høst - paradokser i menneskesinn og kosmisk natur - et oppgjør med falske mann" (album version 12:23, demo version 12:52, both divided into two tracks), "Skog og mark - en frelse fra falskhet" (10:30), "Min grav i ensomhet..." (album version is 10:06, demo version is 13:43), "Sigerssong" (10:32), and "Seierssang" (LP version is 10:22, demo version is 7:50). His average song length is probably around eight minutes.
• "Sleepwalking" by the Chinese black metal band Zuriaake is about 20 minutes long.
• Running Wild's "Genesis: The Making and the Fall of Man." A fifteen-minute epic that combines Babylonian mythology, Biblical lore, and alien conspiracy theories.
• Brazilian band Angra's "Carolina IV" clocks in at over 10 and a half minutes.
• While drawn-out song lengths are nothing new for doom metal, funeral doom band Bell Witch put almost every other band here to shame with their third album, Mirror Reaper, which is a single song clocking in at 83 minutes. The band has several other songs that exceed 20 minutes in length as well, with their average song lasting somewhere around 12 minutes. Only two songs in their entire discography are below 10 minutes in length, with one being an interlude track and another being an album outro.
• Hate Forest is another example of a Black Metal band that does this regularly. Some of their longer songs include: "Our Fading Horizons" (10:33), "The Gates" (11:03), "The Immortal Ones" (11:26), and "In Cold Empty Darkness" (13:36). The longest is probably "Where the Flame Is Eternal" from a demo also entitled The Gates, but it's arguably a subversion since it's an ambient track that has nothing to do with metal.
  • Successor project Drudkh, which became their main project after they lost interest in the right-wing politics Hate Forest was associated with, also does this extensively. Their longest song is actually their first song on their first release, "False Dawn", which runs for almost sixteen minutes, and apart from intros or outros, it's rare that a song doesn't exceed the six-minute mark. Their average song length is probably around eight minutes long.
• Progressive Metal/Djent band Being have "The Singularity - Cosmists II" at 12:27. "Perpetual Groove", "Arcane Academic" and "Escape" also exceed 6 minutes.
• Insomnium's 2016 album Winter's Gate is a single track that runs just over 40 minutes long. They usually break up its seven movements into separate songs in live shows, but during their 2018 headlining tour they played the entire thing through.
• Victorian-themed Black Metal band A Forest of Stars has quite a few long songs, too. Depending on one's criteria, the longest is probably either "Delay's Progression", which runs for 16:29; or "Pawn on the Universal Chessboard", which runs for 21:22, but is divided into six tracks. Special notice should also be given to Opportunistic Thieves of Spring, on which "Delay's Progression" appears; it is essentially made of seventy-two continuous minutes of music, divided into six tracks. Honorable mention as well to "God" from their first album, which, at 16:27, is just a few seconds shorter than "Delay's Progression". The average song length on their first two albums is probably about twelve and a half minutes; since then, their songs have tended to be slightly shorter on average, but only slightly.
• Seminal Metalcore band Converge has a few examples of this, usually one or two per album. Choice examples include "Jane Doe" (11:34), "Grim Heart/Black Rose" (9:34), "Wretched World" (7:10), and "The Dusk in Us" (7:23).
• The German Folk Metal band Finsterforst has always engaged in this since their first album, which had a few ten-minute songs on it. Starting with their second album, the closing song on each of their full-length albums has lasted for at least twenty minutes, but the prize goes to their latest album as of this writing, 2019's Zerfall (Disintegration), which closes with "Ecce Homo" ("Behold the Man", possibly named after the book of the same title by Friedrich Nietzsche), which runs for a whopping 36:28, or nearly half the album's running time. The album runs for seventy-eight minutes and contains only five tracks, the shortest of which still exceeds the eight-minute mark. Their median song length by this point is probably about eleven minutes long.
• Æther Realm's "The Magician", an eight-minute track in the tradition of Ensiferum and Wintersun with multiple tempo and tonal changes, telling the story of a novice magician who was drawn into an evil cult, but has a Heel Realization and flees to the mountains to learn how to defeat them.

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 78 rpm records^note 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. 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.
  • Special mention must go to the 1956 performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" at the Newport Jazz Festival. 14 minutes long, half of that is Paul Gonsalves' legendary tenor sax solo.
• 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 us).
  • 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 taking this up a notch. 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). And that's not even getting into his live material, where he was known to stretch out to forty-five minutes per song or longer.
  • Kind of Blue, where all but one track were recorded "live" in the studio, while improvising, with no overdubs. While several band members 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", 11:33. 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!" Indeed.
• John Coltrane did many pieces longer than 10 minutes, but those were usually the exception, not the rule. Then came Ascension, a single 40-minute long free jazz piece, which turned things around. This reached its peak in the album Live in Japan, where the shortest song was 25 minutes long, and three were longer than 40 minutes.
• Herbie Hancock in his jazz-funk fusion era, especially on Head Hunters.
• 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's performances are all hypnotic and mystical performances of epic length, like for instance on the album The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra.
• 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.
• Most of GaMetal's music is only somewhere between 3 and 5 minutes long, but the medleys are always at least 11 minutes long. The longest GaMetal song, by far, is Legend Of The Seven Stars, which covers almost the entire soundtrack of Super Mario RPG and is about 37 minutes long.
• The first half of Nina Simone's Emergency Ward consists of an 18-minute medley of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" and the David Nelson poem "Today Is a Killer". On the same album, Simone drags Harrison's "Isn't It a Pity" (the original version of which is itself an example) to 11 minutes.
• Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing" ran for 8:38 in its original recorded version, while a live performance at Carnegie Hall stretched it to 12 minutes.

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 and 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".
• About a quarter of the songs in the discography of guitarist Buckethead falls under this. His longest song to date is "Track 1" from his In Search Of The compilation of discs clocks in at 45:01.
• Zapp & Roger's early albums have several songs that go way over the 6-minute mark. Special mention goes to "Dance Floor", which is 11 nonstop minutes of electro-funk.

Post-Rock

• The average Sigur Rós song would be somewhere around 6-8 minutes long. They have a few songs that are notably lengthy even for them, however, such as "Sigur Rós" (9:46) and "Hafssól" (12:24) from Von, "Svefn-g-englar" (10:03) and "Viðrar vel til loftárása" (10:16) from Ágætis byrjun, "Untitled #5" (9:57), "Untitled #7" (13:00), and "Untitled #8" (11:44) from ( ), "Mílanó" (10:25) from Takk..., and "Festival" (9:24) from Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor is all over this trope. For example, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven has tracks that run, on average, twenty minutes, with each divided into several movements.
  • On 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!, there are two drone pieces that are around six minutes long - pretty long by most bands' standards, but snippets by Godspeed's. The two actual songs on the album, though, are about twenty minutes each.
  • Their album, 'Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress', is a forty-minute song divided into four tracks.
  • The longest individual track in Godspeed's catalogue is "Motherfucker=Redeemer" at over thirty-one minutes on the CD version and nearly thirty-seven on the LP, thanks to an extended intro to the second half of the song on the vinyl edition. (A Hidden Track on the LP edition, the very creepy "George Bush Cut Up While Talking," could be considered to extend the piece's length by another three and a half minutes, depending on one's stance on hidden tracks). Then there's "Providence" at 29 minutes, though that does include about four minutes of silence before the outro plays.
  • Luciferian Towers has "Anthem for no State" and "Bosses Hang" each divided into three tracks, and while a couple of the tracks by themselves avert this trope, the whole pieces are firmly in this trope's territory, though they aren't especially long by Godspeed standards, which makes one wonder why they are divided up in the first place.
    • They are divided only on the digital edition.
• Silver Mt. Zion, a spinoff band of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, retains the tradition of writing lengthy songs, albeit to a less extreme extent. This is Our Punk Rock and 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons are both albums comprised of four songs each, ranging from 12 to 17 minutes per song. Notable examples outside of those two include "Ring Them Bells (Freedom Has Come and Gone)" (13:59) from Horses in the Sky, "There is a Light" (15:19), and "'Piphany Rambler" (14:18) from Kollaps Tradixionales, and "Austerity Blues" (14:18) from Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything.
• 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).
• Some examples from God is An Astronaut include: "Forever Lost", "Frozen Twilight", "No Return", "Snowfall", "Golden Sky", "Helios Erebus", and "Worlds in Collision". Their longest song is "Loss" at 10:51; "When Everything Dies" (10:01) is not far behind.
• Post-Rock/Math Rock band Pretend are no strangers to lengthy songs, as their songs tend to consistently hit the 7- to 9-minute mark. Some of their more standout examples are "Bones in the Soil, Rust in the Oil" (13:06), "Flairs" (12:38), "Spiral Born Black into the Upwards Night" (10:33), "Blessings" (10:06), "Record of Love" (10:41), and "Longer Repose" (20:53).

Pop

• Michael Jackson had a few, starting with Off the Wall opener "Don't Stop 'Til Get You Enough". Thriller had "Thriller" and "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" (5:57 and 6:04, respectively). Bad was more straightforward (No songs over 5:20)... then Dangerous had 7/14 songs at least 6 minutes long (two clocking in 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"
  • Then, of course, there's the Jacksons' "Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)", clocking in at just under 8 minutes.
• Madonna has done this a lot.
  • Her debut has "Holiday" (6:08) and "Physical Attraction" (6:39)
  • True Blue has "Live to Tell" at 5:51.
  • Erotica has "Where Life Begins" (5:59), "Words" (5:57) and "In This Life" (6:23)
  • Ray of Light has "Skin" (6:22) and "Frozen" (6:09)
  • Music has "Paradise (Not for Me)" (6:33)
  • Confessions on a Dancefloor has "Issac" (6:00)
  • Hard Candy has "She's Not Me" (6:05) and "Incredicle" (6:20)
• 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. Even without the intro bits, "Welcome to the Pleasure Dome" itself is over 14 minutes.
• Prince would stretch out if he felt like it, with many songs surpassing the nine-minute mark with ease. In particular, at least half the songs on 1999 are examples of this trope; it is an eleven-song album with a seventy-minute running time.
• The live version of Taylor Swift's "Better Than Revenge" ends with a lengthy instrumental outro that allows guitarist Grant Mickelson to show off his chops.
  • As originally released, "All Too Well" was five and a half minutes - the longest song to have appeared on one of her albums at that point but not really qualifying for the trope. Red (Taylor's Version) includes the fittingly named "10 Minute Version" - this is the song as she originally wrote it, with many additional verses that ended up getting cut for the album version. The extended track as released clocks in at 10:13, while the acoustic "Sad Girl Autumn" version is slightly shorter at 9:58, with both releases constituting her two longest recordings to date.
  • Before being gloriously dethroned by "All Too Well (10 minutes version)", two of her songs fit this trope, with "Dear John" being 6:43 and Last Kiss being 6:07 long.
• Justin Timberlake's "Mirrors" stretches to 8:05, although this was done by combining two differently-styled tracks together.
• The Pointer Sisters' "How Long (Betcha Got a Chick on the Side)" runs for 7:21.

Jam Bands

• Phish: In concert, the band has several songs that they can stretch to 10, 20 or even 30 minutes long. Even just counting their studio recordings, there's "You Enjoy Myself", "Esther", "The Divided Sky", "Fluffhead", "Reba", "Run Like an Antelope", "Tweezer", "Maze", "It's Ice", "Guyute", "Pebbles and Marbles", "Time Turns Elastic", "Fuego" and "Petrichor". There's also several long songs that they only play live, such as "Harry Hood", "Mike's Song", "Runaway Jim" and "Harpua". The band also has songs that were relatively short as studio recordings, like "Bathtub Gin", "Split Open and Melt" and "Down with Disease", but can turn into jamming epics during their concerts.
• Dave Matthews Band: "Dancing Nancies", "Warehouse", "Two Step", "#41", "Say Goodbye", "Proudest Monkey", "Rapunzel", "The Last Stop", "Don't Drink the Water", "The Stone", "Crush", "The Dreaming Tree", "Pig", "Spoon", "Bartender", "Snow Outside", "Drunken Soldier"
• The Allman Brothers Band was probably the Southern alternative to Grateful Dead (no surprise considering Duane Allman idolized Garcia), mixing blues, rock, and touches of jazz. The greatest example is probably "Mountain Jam", which tracks at 33:41, covers two sides of an LP, 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.
• The Grateful Dead: See above under Psychedelic Rock.

Punk

• "Starship" by MC5.
• "Welcome to the Black Parade" by My Chemical Romance
• The live version of "The Ocean" by Against Me! clocks in at 8:36, thanks to audience participation.
• "Endless Night" by Misery Loves Me
• "Nothing Left Inside", "Scream" and "Three Nights" by Black Flag
• "24 Beats Off" and various instrumental riffs by Fugazi.
• "Marquee Moon" (10:47 on CD versions, just under ten minutes on vinyl editions) by Television (though granted they were mostly punk by association rather than sound). "The Dream's Dream" (6:45), "Torn Curtain" (7:10), and "Little Johnny Jewel" (7:09) were pretty long too. On remastered versions of Adventure, there's also an instrumental demo of "Ain't that Nothin'" that reaches 9:48.
• "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 Adolescents.
• "Glazed" and "Ghost Shark" by Rocket from the Crypt.
• The Stooges' "We Will Fall" (from The Stooges), "Fun House" and "Dirt" (from Fun House). On some versions of Raw Power "Death Trip" qualifies as well, but on others, it fades out before the six-minute mark.
• 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.
• "Reoccurring Dreams" by Hüsker Dü clocks in at 13:47 or 14:01 depending on the pressing. The band's early single "Statues" is 8:45. Finally, "Hardly Getting Over It" is 6:07.
• "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, 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.
  • The song's length is actually related to the concept of the album, believe it or not. In the wake of The Falklands War, the band felt that their previous approach to writing Protest Songs was fundamentally flawed. They had previously been writing songs that critiqued one specific aspect of society, but this carried with it the implication that these were separate struggles. The band, by this point, wholly rejected this interpretation, and instead considered all political struggles to be interrelated,^note In academic and activist circles this is referred to as intersectionality. so they felt their music should reflect this. Thus, they composed and performed a single, epic-length piece critiquing aspects of society such as religion, war, capitalism, sexism, government, police brutality, censorship, and even the punk movement itself, and the album closes (apart from a brief news excerpt featuring the source of the album title) with an appeal to the listener to take direct action.
  • The band have other examples as well, such as "Ten Notes on a Summer's Day" (there are two versions, both over ten minutes), "Nagasaki Nightmare" (8:23), "Reality Asylum" (6:38), "Bloody Revolutions" (6:18), "Big A, Little A" (6:13), and "What the Fuck?" (6:46).
• 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. These vary in length from just over eleven to just over fourteen minutes. Their longest actual song is "Cure for the Coprlite" (11:04); other songs that apply are "The Falklands War" (7:14), "Children Who Know" (7:50), and "Footprints in the Snow" (6:17). However, thanks to their liberal use of Fading into the Next Song and Siamese Twin Songs, these come off more like movements of longer songs than actual songs themselves. Their longest continuous piece of music is side two of Uncarved Block, which is eighteen and a half minutes long.
• Poison Girls, also associated with Crass, also have their fair share of examples of this trope, such as "Bremen Song" (7:16), "Persons Unknown" (7:15), "Promenade Immortelle" (6:56), "Alienation" (6:51), "Fear of Freedom" (6:22), and "Desperate Days" (6:21).
• "The Decline" by NOFX, 18 minutes.
• "Pay the Man" by The Offspring, 8 minutes (and in the CD, it was 10, given after one minute of silence, there is a Hidden Track).
• 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"). Even on their non-Concept Albums: the former category has "Forever Now" off Revolution Radio, the latter, "Dirty Rotten Bastards" on Tré!.
  • Earlier on Warning, they had the five-minute song "Misery"; a series of vignettes focusing on the pain of others, it's arguably the most epic song they've done lyrically besides "Jesus of Suburbia".
• Nomeansno accomplish this several times: "No Big Surprise" on the Generic Shame album is 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. Their collaboration with former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra also has "Chew", at 8:48, and "Sharks in the Gene Pool", at 6:34. And let's not forget their cover of Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew" from One (titled "Bitch's Brew" in their version), which, while not as long as the original's twenty-seven minutes, is still probably their longest track ever at just over fifteen minutes. 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".
• Showbread's "Anorexia Nervosa" is over 90 minutes of music.
• Shellac's 1998 song "Didn't We Deserve a Look at You the Way You Really Are" clocks in at 12:19 and is the longest track by the band.
• Chiptune punk band Anamanaguchi gives us "Mermaid," clocking in at around eight minutes.
• Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop" (10:27).
• "Face It" by Moby, from his Animal Rights album, clocks in at exactly 10 minutes.
• Jello Biafra (erstwhile Dead Kennedys leader) did a collaboration album with D.O.A. entitled Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors. The last song was a condemnation of the War on Drugs entitled "Full Metal Jackoff" that ran for almost fourteen minutes.
  • Other examples from his discography include "Buy My Snake Oil" (9:07, with Mojo Nixon), "Halo of Flies" (7:43, with Melvins), "I Won't Give Up" (21:13, with the Guantanamo School of Medicine, though the actual song is 7:14 and it ends with an 8:01 Hidden Track featuring all the songs played at once), "Miracle Penis Highway" (32:03, with the Guantanamo School of Medicine, though the actual song is 7:38 and it includes the 18:23 "Metamorphosis Exploration on Deviation Street Jam" as a Hidden Track), "Shock-U-Py!" (14:34, with the Guantanamo School of Medicine, though around half of that is silence; the actual song is about 7:20), and "Walk on Guided Splinters" (12:37, with the New Orleans Raunch & Soul All-Stars). He also has an example with Nomeansno which was covered in their section above. As for Dead Kennedys, they had the 6:23 "Stars and Stripes of Corruption".
• Catharsis, from Chapel Hill, NC, had quite a few lengthy songs in their discography. The longest is a track called "Live in the Land of the Dead" that runs for almost fifteen minutes, but other examples include "The Evolution of Dying", "Duende" and "Deserts Without Mirages", "Arsonist's Prayer", and "Absolution", all of which exceed the seven-minute mark with ease.

Various other rock & pop

• Cheech & Chong: Parodied with the latter half of their 1974 single "Earache My Eye." Following the first half of the song ^note — a rebellious teenager who plays a glam-rock record (from "Alice Bowie," a hybrid of rock stars Alice Cooper and David Bowie) and disturbs his father to the point where the two get into an argument about getting ready for school — the second half of the song is essentially an extended, trope-fitting electric guitar coda. During this portion of the record, the father can be heard knocking on the door several times demanding that his son "turn that thing down and get ready for school".
• Oasis:
  • Definitely, Maybe has "Columbia" (6:17) and "Slide Away" (6:32).
  • (What's the Story) Morning Glory? closes with "Champagne Supernova" (6:57).
  • Be Here Now has several examples, including opener "D'You Know What I Mean" (7:43), "Magic Pie" (7:10), "Fade In-Out" (6:51), "All Around The World" (which is also the longest single to hit number one in the UK) (9:19), and "It's Gettin' Better (Man!)" (7:03).
  • Examples from their post-BHN albums include "Gas Panic!" (6:08), "Roll It Over" (6:31), and "Born on a Different Cloud (6:08), and "Listen Up" (6:31).
  • Also, the 22-minute-long "Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Mix" of "Falling Down", by Amorphous Androgynous (a side project of The Future Sound of London).
• Boom Boom Satellites: "On the Painted Desert," "Caught in the Sun."
• Sloan: Before I Do (7:04) since most of their songs aren't more than 5 minutes.
• The Stone Roses: "I Am the Resurrection", "Fool's Gold", "One Love", "Something's Burning", "Breaking into Heaven".
• The Smiths have "The Queen is Dead" (6:27), "Barbarism Begins at Home" (6:53), "Meat is Murder" (6:13), and (most infamously), "How Soon is Now?" (6:48).
• Franz Ferdinand have the mind screwy "Lucid Dreams", which is just a bit under 8 minutes long.
• Radiohead: "Paranoid Android" from OK Computer.
  • And even better, this six-minute epic was the first single from the album.
  • "Supercollider", a song released as a single in 2011, is seven minutes long.
  • "Daydreaming", from A Moon Shaped Pool is just a few seconds longer than "Paranoid Android".
  • "Ful Stop", also from A Moon Shaped Pool, is just over six minutes.
• Typhoon: Many of their songs segue together.
• 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 (Come Out Tonight)", "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.
  • "Drive All Night" is over 8 minutes long.
  • His longest studio song is probably "New York City Serenade" (9:55), the last song on his second album The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (which has four songs topping seven minutes, in something of a case of Early-Installment Weirdness). However, "Jungleland" (9:33), the last song on Born to Run, comes close. Bonus points, however, to "Incident on 57th Street" (7:45) and "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" (7:04), which fade together to make a nearly fifteen-minute epic, making the second side of his second album the most sustained case of this trope in Springsteen's solo career.
• 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.
• German rock band Tocotronic used the concept on their third album to provide a juxtaposition to the band's usual short punk songs. The 6-minutes long So jung kommen wir nicht mehr zusammen with a massive overdubbed solo surely steals the show.
• 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 Music nerds, Terry Kath's "Free Form Guitar" runs the table for Side 3.
• Muse: "Knights of Cydonia"
  • Also, "Exogenesis: Symphony". 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.
  • And "The Globalist", which is their longest song to date, clocking at 10 minutes.
• 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 has "Misunderstood" (6:28), "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" (6:58), "Art of Almost" (7:16), and "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" (10:42).
• 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)" from Abbey Road.
  • And the unreleased (but apparently recorded) 27-minute version of "Helter Skelter" that was the source of Ringo's famous blisters on his fingers at the end of the 5-minute version.
    • That take wasn't done in the same session as the 27-minute version, but it was the 18th take of the day. Ouch.
  • There's also the 13:47 "Carnival of Light" which remains out of the hands of even the most devoted Beatles collectors. Paul McCartney has expressed a desire to release it, but it hasn't happened yet (permission from all four Beatles' estates would be required for its release).
  • Not to mention "Hey Jude", the longest 7" single back then. Of seven and a half minutes, however, the last four are the outro sung by every single person present at the Abbey Road studios during the recording session. George Martin protested its length, saying no radio station would play it. John Lennon replied, "They will if it's us."
  • "It's All Too Much"'s album version? 6:28. The full version? 8:11.
  • From the Beatles' solo careers, George Harrison's "Isn't It a Pity (version one)" clocks in at over seven minutes. The last disc of All Things Must Pass has even lengthier tracks; "Out of the Blue", the longest of them, tops eleven. John Lennon did this sometimes as well; "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama" and "Well Well Well" are both around six minutes long. Of course, his Avant-Garde Music albums with Yoko Ono feature even longer tracks, but it's debatable whether these qualify as songs.
• Al Stewart: Much of his catalog is longer than average; for instance, "Song on the Radio" (6:19), and "Time Passages" (6:43). He reaches truly epic length with the historical ballads "Murmansk Run/Ellis Island" (7:41), "Roads to Moscow" (8:00), "Trains (8:17), and "Nostradamus" (9:43).
  • All of these pale in comparison to "Love Chronicles", which runs for 18:04. As an added bonus it was also one of the first pop songs to feature the word "fuck", and did so in its literal sense.
• Bob Dylan has done a number of long songs over the years: "Desolation Row" (from Highway 61 Revisited), "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (from Blonde on Blonde), "Hurricane" (from Desire), etc.
  • "Highlands" from 1997's Time Out of Mind, which at 16:31 was the longest song Dylan recorded until "Murder Most Foul" in 2020.
  • The title track of 2012's Tempest is a few seconds shy of 14 minutes. 45 verses and no chorus.
  • 2020's Rough and Rowdy Ways, his first original album since Tempest, features "Murder Most Foul", Dylan's longest song yet at 16:54, surprise-released as the lead single off the album.
• 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," a 9-minute-long song (with 42 stanzas and no choruses or solos) about a poor boy from the countryside who moves to the country's capital and becomes an outlaw folk hero (it even earned a movie adaptation!). 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, consisting of seventy-two different riffs and other odds and ends put together for sixteen minutes of insanity, followed by roughly seven minutes of the seventy-third riff.
• 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.
• Animal Collective have quite a few of these. Over half of the total run-time of the debut Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished is made up of 4 songs, "Penny Dreadfuls" (7:59), "Chocolate Girl" (8:28), "La Rapet" (7:52) and "Alvin Row" (12:40). The whole of Campfire Songs could be said to be one forty-odd minute-long guitar drone. "Banshee Beat" (8:22) off of Feels and the combination of "For Reverend Green/Fireworks" (total 13:26) from Strawberry Jam are the main examples of this trope, however.
• 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. Similarly, the original 12" version of "Blue Monday" is 7:23, and "True Faith (The Morning Sun Extended Mix)" is 9:01. All of those, however, pale in comparison to the 17 1/2 minute extended version of "Elegia".
• 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.
• Tears for Fears examples:
  • Songs from the Big Chair gives us "Shout" (6:35), "The Working Hour" (6:34), the "Broken/Head Over Heels/Broken (live)" suite (8:02, divided into two songs on most CD pressings, but basically a single composition), and "Listen" (6:55).
  • They really went to town on The Seeds of Love, which gives us "Woman in Chains" (6:30), "Badman's Song" (8:33, currently their longest studio cut), "Sowing the Seeds of Love" (6:19), "Swords and Knives" (6:20), and "Year of the Knife" (6:55) - so five of the album's eight songs. As an added bonus, some of these songs got even longer when performed live; Going to California gives us an 11:46 version of "Badman's Song".
  • Elemental gives us "Mr. Pessimist" (6:17).
  • The odds and ends compilation Saturnine Martial & Lunatic has "Johnny Panic & the Bible of Dreams" (6:21) and "Deja Vu & the Sins of Science" (6:24).
  • There are also the expected extended remixes (one of "Shout" reaches 8:18, for instance), plus a number of other songs that come close to the six-minute mark but don't quite reach it.
• Ween has a few examples, including "Nicole" (9:20), "L.M.L.Y.P." (8:48), "Buenas Tardes Amigo" (7:06), and "Woman and Man" (10:48).
  • Some of their live performances have been known to include extended jam versions of songs. The second disc of double Live Album Paintin' The Town Brown consists of just three tracks totaling 59:39: "Poop Ship Destroyer" (26:08), "Vallejo (30:48)... and then just to wind things down, "Puffy Cloud" (a mere 03:08).
• Tame Impala has several examples, including "Runaway Houses City Clouds" (7:15), "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" (6:03), "One More Hour" (7:12), and most infamously, "Let It Happen" (7:47).
• 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 eight minutes, from ballad to honky-tonk to a fast-paced rocker, back to ballad.
• Blondie: The full version of "Call Me" (originally the theme song for the film American Gigolo) runs for eight minutes. "Rapture" runs for six and a half minutes, with the "Special Disco Mix" of the song clocking in at an even ten minutes.
• 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.
  • One version, at least. Combining all available versions (the album and 12" versions, the latter of which features a longer "One Of A Kind", as well as the full-length version of "Heaven Knows") results in a 20+ minute track.
  • Also, from her first album, the 17-minute version of "Love To Love You, Baby". The story goes that Neil Bogart, the head of Casablanca Records, played the song at a party and everyone loved it, but he hated having to restart the song when it was over and had her re-record it long enough to fill up an album side.
  • Patrick Cowley's remix of "I Feel Love" clocks in at 15.45.
• 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.
  • And they did it again with their cover of "The House Of The Rising Sun".
• 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 of "Maggot Brain" with Mike Watt and Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic.
  • Examples from the Dinosaur Jr. catalogue include "Not the Same" (6:00), "Alone" (8:01), "Pick Me Up" (6:32), and "Plans" (6:40).
• 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.
  • It's worth noting that much of their oeuvre is comprised of songs of a standard 3-4 minute length that end up running for 6 minutes or much longer when you account for the segments of ambient noise, experimental intros and outros that sometimes might as well be songs on their own, abrupt tempo changes, and detours such as tangential bridges that last far longer than usual.
• 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 long.
  • 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.
  • More conventional examples include "In The Morning of the Magicians" (6:19), "The Sound of Failure" (7:19), "It Overtakes Me" (6:51), and "Powerless" (6:57).
• "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.
  • His cover version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is almost 7 minutes long.
• Deerhunter use this in "Desire Lines" and "He Would Have 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 three, "Avalanche," "While we Were Hunting Rabbits," and "Near Fantastica," White Light Rock and Roll Review has "Blue Skies Over Bad Lands,"^note And "Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra", but only because of a hidden song Hospital Music has the opening track "Champions of Nothing"; Vancouver has "The Boy Who Could Explode," "The Vancouver National Anthem" and "Empty's Theme Park"; and Lights of Endangered Species has "Non Populus." Arrows of Desire also has a song that just barely fits into this category, clocking in at 6:45, called "Letters in Wartime."
• English post-punk revival band The Horrors has three songs that fit into this trope: "I Only Think Of You", "Sea Within A Sea", and "Oceans Burning". They're all very atmospheric, and the last two make for strong album closers (for Primary Colours and Skying, respectively).
• Crosby, Stills & Nash, "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes".
• Asaki: His album Tentei features the full version of "Tentei", the only song on the album to hit the 10-minute mark.
• Sound Horizon's CD "Marchen" launches (though in the live performances, it's usually the fourth piece, due to the inclusion of the prologue single "The Ido that Leads to the Forest that Leads to the Ido" in the Marchen concerts) with "The Song of Dusk," which ultimately clocks in around ten minutes and contains a mashup of all sorts of rock, pop, dialoguing, monologuing, and Rock Me, Amadeus! moments. It's by far the longest track on the album, although there's only one track that dips below five minutes.
• My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" (8:47) and the extended version of "Glider" (10:16). Also worth noting is "You Made Me Realise", which live can extend to ridiculous lengths due to the band's habit of inserting a section they call "the holocaust", which is exactly what you'd expect: ten minutes or more of nothing but solid noise and guitar feedback. Performances of this song have been noted to extend to twenty minutes or longer, and have been noted to induce hallucinations in the audience (which is exactly the intention).
• The full version of "Lollipop~Candy~Bad Girl~" by J-pop singer Tommy Heavenly 6 is over 10 minutes long.
• The full version of "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" by The Temptations is nearly 12 minutes long - a lot of that length is due to a four-minute Epic Instrumental Opener. Even the single edit only cuts it down to about 7 minutes.
• Snow Patrol's "The Lightning Strike", the closing track off their A Hundred Million Suns album, clocks in at over sixteen minutes long; it's made up of three songs that began composition separately, but the band found that they tied in nicely as a "lighting storm into calm into daybreak" epic piece. The song has its own special visual setpiece presentation during live performances.
• Primal Scream's "Loaded" runs to just over 7 minutes.
• Phosphorescent's "Song For Zula" runs about 6 minutes.
• Sakanaction's "Mekaaku Aoiiro" is just one second shorter than 7:00.
• Verdena's album Solo Un Grande Sasso consists mostly of these, with an average length of 7-8 minutes. Their album Requiem features two songs, "Il Gulliver" and "Sotto Prescrizione del Dott. Huxley", which are both around 12 minutes long.
• The Cardigans had a B-side called "Cocktail Party Bloody Cocktail Party". It was 15:50 long and was an instrumental lounge piano medley of most of the songs on their then-current album Life.
• Holy Ghost!'s "Dumb Disco Ideas" is 8:03.
• Roxy Music had a tradition of putting at least one or two long songs on their early albums, such as "If There Is Something" and "Sea Breezes" from their first album; "The Bogus Man" and "For Your Pleasure" (both off their second album); "Psalm" from their third; "The Thrill of It All" off their fourth, etc. It was only on their last two or three albums that they stopped doing this and rarely if ever included a song longer than five minutes. In fact, their last album Avalon includes a couple of tracks that are barely two minutes long.
• Lights doesn't generally write songs longer than three or four minutes, but one experimental track from her second album ''Siberia", called "Day One", is nine minutes long. In this case, it's not really a song at all but rather more of an ambient noise jam.
• Japan's Mass of the Fermenting Dregs have "End Roll" (9:25).
• Cat Stevens had "On the Road to find Out" (slightly more than five minutes) on Tea for the Tillerman, "The Boy with the Moon and Star on his Head" on Catch Bull at Four (just under six minutes), the Foreigner Suite (over eighteen minutes, covering all of side one of the album — and an edited version still clocks in at seven-and-a-half minutes) and "King of Trees" on Buddha and the Chocolate Box (a little over five minutes).
• Lower Dens have "In the End is the Beginning", the final track on their second album, Nootropics.
• Built to Spill are especially known for this in indie rock circles, mostly because of their album "Perfect From Now On" and their tendency to extend songs into lengthy jam sessions when playing live.
• Most songs by Deerhoof are rather short, but their song "Look Away" is nearly 12 minutes long.
• In the emo/pop-punk scene, you can't mention long songs without bringing up Something Corporate's "Konstantine", a meandering piano ballad that clocks in at 9:37.
• Jimmy Eat World's emo breakthrough album Clarity closes out with the 16:12 long "Goodbye Sky Harbour."
• Marianas Trench like to open and close their albums with epic songs around 6-7 minutes long, full of musical and lyrical references to their older songs and complex melodies and harmonies. For a good example, see “Masterpiece Theatre III” (6:41), or “End of an Era” (7:40).
• Noise Rock band Laddio Bolocko have several examples, but the longest on record would have to be "Y toros", which runs for over thirty-four minutes. Granted, about three minutes and forty-five seconds of that is silence, but even with that cut out the song is still nearly thirty-one minutes long. Interestingly, most of the song is constructed around a single chord, much like The Velvet Underground used to do with some of their jams. Laddio Bolocko also have a track called "Forty-Three Minutes Of...", which is apparently Exactly What It Says on the Tin, but only an excerpt has been officially released (the excerpt is still over twenty-three minutes long). Successor project The Psychic Paramount have some examples as well, but theirs tend to hover around the ten-minute range.
• Angel's eponymously-titled album contains the track "Tower," clocking in at just under 7 minutes.
• A good rule of thumb for The Cure is that the gloomier they get, the more epic their rocking becomes. Most albums have at least one song over six minutes, but it wasn't until their eighth album Disintegration that they broke the 7:00 barrier, which they did with four tracks - the average track length is only a couple of seconds under six minutes, and the longest, "The Same Deep Water As You", runs 9:19. They topped the latter with "Watching Me Fall" from Bloodflowers (11:13). Also worthy of note is "The Promise" from The Cure (10:21). The soundtrack to "Carnage Visors" (a short film they used in place of a support act in the early 1980s) runs 27:51 and can be found on the Faith reissue CD.
• Ride: Every full length album (and their Today Forever EP) has an example:
  • Nowhere has "Seagull" (6:08) and "Dreams Burn Down" (6:04)
  • Today Forever has "Today" (6:26).
  • Going Blank Again has "Leave Em All Behind" (8:17), "Cool Your Boots" (6:01), and OX4 (7:03).
  • Carnival Of Light has "Moonlight Medicine" (6:49) and "Birdman" (6:39).
  • Tarantula has "Mary Anne" (6:49).
  • Weather Diaries has "Weather Diaries" (7:00), "Cali" (6:30), and "White Sands" (6:08).
  • This is Not a Safe Place has "In This Room" (8:40).
• "The Asphalt World" from Dog Man Star by Suede is 9:25. The extended version on the 2011 reissue is 11:27.
• Car Seat Headrest have garnered some infamy for writing really, really long songs. Some of the more egregious examples include "Beach Life-in-Death" (12:08) and "Famous Prophets" (10:15) from Twin Fantasy, "Souls" (9:42) and "Anchorite" (14:04) from Monomania, "Boxing Day" (15:34) and "The Gun Song" (16:05) from Nervous Young Man, "The Ending of Dramamine" (14:18) and "Hey, Space Cadet!" (11:29) from How to Leave Town, and "The Ballad of the Costa Concordia" (11:30) from Teens of Denial. The 2018 remake of Twin Fantasy goes a step further, stretching "Beach Life-in-Death" to 13:18 and "Famous Prophets" to 16:10.
• "(I've Had) The Time Of My Life", Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes' smash hit from Dirty Dancing, clocks in at an unbelievable 6:47. Yes, it's that long. If it's played uncut on the radio (which many pop stations don't do anymore for good reasons), even if the outro is faded away, it still takes up quite a bit more than five minutes of air time.
• "Am Fenster" by the East German band City is 20 minutes long. At least one hard cut in that song (which is more of a suite) suggests that it may originally have been even longer but had to be shortened to fit onto one LP side.
• Cornershop marked the launch of their official website by livestreaming a 24-hour remix of "Spectral Mornings". The original version is a mere 14:24 long, which isn't even their longest song; “The Turned-On Truth” runs to 16:43.
• Gorillaz made 2 versions of their single DoYaThing, one that's 4 minutes long and an uncut explicit version that's 13 minutes long.
• While their older, Peterpan version of "Ku Katakan Dengan Indah" falls below the 6-minutes mark (5:34, still their longest song), Noah's version plays this straight with the 6:11 duration.
• "Long Season" by Fishmans is a 41-minute-long Dream Pop behemoth (technically, it's split into multiple tracks on the identically-named album, yet is one track on the live album 98.12.28 男達の別れ) that has a Recurring Riff playing throughout nearly the entire piece, yet it never becomes boring.
• "Self-Righteous" by Third Eye Blind (from "Out of The Vein") clocks in at 6:18.
  • The full version of "The Red Summer Sun" from "Blue" clocks in at 6:12 (the original track is only 5:25 and removes the guitar solo at the end).
• Bersuit Vergarabat's "La Mujer Perfecta", from Dom Leopardo, is an improvisation that clocks over the 12-minute mark.
• Stereophonics: "Rooftop" (6:13), "Help Me (She's Out of Her Mind)" (6:54), "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (6:50) and "This Life Ain't Easy (But It's the One That We All Got)" (6:12)

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.
• In 1965 when there was hardly any popular music that even reached the three-minute mark and songs shorter than two minutes were not frowned upon, Bob Dylan deliberately made "Like a Rolling Stone" six minutes long. And he insisted the song be released on a 7" single in its full length.
• 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.
• Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" clocks in at 18:34.
• Afro Celt Sound System has numerous extended songs, the longest being “Eistigh Liomsa Sealad / Listen to Me / Saor Reprise”, “Mojave”, and “Rise Above It”, each 10 minutes. And “Rise Above It” is half of a Siamese Twin Song—if we include its other half, “Rise”, then the total length is 13 minutes.
• The full version of "Lollipop~Candy~Bad Girl~" by J-pop singer Tommy Heavenly 6 is over 10 minutes long.
• Peter Ostroushko's "Miracle" is nearly 7 minutes.
• Fairport Convention spin out their version of the traditional ballad "A Sailor's Life" to 11:20. A good half of that is an extended jam featuring electric guitar and folk fiddle.
  • Also qualifying, in approximate chronological order, are "Reno, Nevada" (7:44), "Percy's Song" (6:57), "Matty Groves" (8:10), "Tam Lin" (7:14), "Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (10:17, although part of this is a Hidden Track; the actual song is still around eight minutes long, though), "Sloth" (9:15), "Flatback Caper" (6:22), "Bonny Bunch of Roses" (10:48 in its 1970 recording, and 12:38 in its 1977 one), "One More Chance" (7:59), "Jack O'Rion" (11:04), "Sigh Beg Sigh Mór" (7:16), "Red and Gold" (6:45), "The Wounded Whale" (6:43), "The Golden Glove" (6:05), the 1997 recording of "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" (6:32), "Wat Tyler" (6:31), "Portmeirion" (6:01), "The Crowd" (6:13), the 2002 recording of "The Deserter" (6:59), "The Light of Day" (6:15), "I'm Already There" (6:42), "The Fossil Hunter" (6:16), and "Mercy Bay" (6:47). Also of note is "Babbacombe" Lee, whose vinyl edition listed five tracks and ran for forty-one minutes, with the longest track being 13:20 (however, these could be considered to consist of multiple songs or song fragments; CD reissues broke them into multiple tracks apiece). On the whole, they did this less often from the mid-seventies through The '90s, but they began demonstrating more willingness to stretch out again by the turn of the millennium.
• Neutral Milk Hotel recorded "Oh Comely" from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which is eight minutes long.
• Steeleye Span do this to old English folk songs; King Henry is over eight minutes long. And it rocks. Even without drums. Things like Drink Down The Moon and Thomas The Rhymer are not far behind.
• Debout Sur Le Zinc: the 2010 live version of "La Déclaration" is over 9 minutes long.
• Heilung are rarely short. In the interest of brevity, we will only list songs over ten minutes.
  • "Othan" 10:18
  • "Galgaldr" 10:21
  • "In Maidjan" 12:33
  • "Afhomon" 13:41
  • "Hamrer Hippyer" 14:16
• Many Child Ballads are very lengthy. Battlefield Band recorded Lang Johnnie Moir in over five minutes, but only seventeen out of some fifty verses.
• Blues/folk musician Josh White's 25th Anniversary Album (1957) starts with "The Story of John Henry", a 23 and a half minute song that combines spoken narration, original music, and existing songs. It takes up almost half the album's runtime, while every other song is under 4 minutes.

Afrobeat

• Babatunde Olatunji, famous for Drums of Passion, was well known for long epic drum jams with his band.
• Fela Kuti: Most songs are longer than 10 minutes, some live versions take more than one side of an LP.
• Possibly the Ur-Example, Nigerian/Black British band Osibisa did some seriously long (and listenable) West African stuff way back in the 1960s and 1970s, popularising African music to new audiences.

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", "Changeling", "Stem/Long Stem", "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain", "In/Flux", "What Does Your Soul Look Like" and "Blood on the Motorway".
• R. Kelly's bizarre, overblown, hilarious "Trapped in the Closet" saga.
  • It currently has about 33 parts and a total running time of TWO HOURS AND 13 MINUTES.
• Demain, c'est loin, by French group IAM has epic rapping, with 9 minutes of uninterrupted rhyming. The two 4-and-a-half-minute long verses were initially written as separate songs, but they were so complementary that they decided to combine them.
  • 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.
• "Oldie" by OFWGKTA clocking in at 10 minutes and 36 seconds.
  • "Pyramids" by Frank Ocean clocks in at 9 minutes, 52 seconds.
• InsaneClownPosse covered Too $hort's "Freaky Tales" - except that their version is 60 minutes long.
  • Violent J also once allegedly recorded a 30-minute song called "Public Service Announcement", but no one has heard it.
• Kanye West: "Last Call" (12:41), "We Major" (7:28), "Gone" (6:02), "Say You Will" (6:14), "Pinocchio Story" (6:03), "Monster" (6:18), "So Appalled" (6:37), "Runaway" (9:07), "Blame Game" (7:49), "See Me Now (6:03), "Illest Motherfucker Alive" (8:23) and "Blood on the Leaves" (6:00).
• Arguably, "B-Boy Bouillabaisse" by Beastie Boys, which is 12 minutes long. However, it's really a suite of short songs that flow into each other and are indexed as one track. In fact, the 20th Anniversary Edition of Paul's Boutique separates it into nine different tracks.
• Die Antwoord "Beat Boy" (8:20)
• Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's classic singles The Message and "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" both exceed seven minutes in length. Ironically, the full group appeared on neither of the tracks. Even then, both are outdone by their first single, "Superappin'", which clocks in at twelve minutes.
• Immortal Technique has "Dance with the Devil" (9:39), "You Never Know" (7:50), and "Últimas Palabras" (7:36). Technically, "Dance with the Devil" includes what could be considered a hidden track, but even without that the main part of the song is still 6:56 long.
• dälek: "Untitled" (43:54) takes the cake, but they have plenty of others, such as "Black Smoke Rises" (12:02), "Images of .44 Casings" (10:27), "Praise Be the Man" (12:01), "Music for ASM" (16:37), and "Abandoned Language" (10:13). dälek are perhaps unusual among hip-hop groups in that while they are a vocal group, they also have a strong emphasis on instrumental passages. (They're also unusual among hip-hop groups for their sound, but that's another story...)
• Kendrick Lamar has several of the songs on good kid, m.A.A.d city, the most obvious being "Money Trees" (6:26), "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" (12:03) and "Real" (7:23). The follow-up, To Pimp a Butterfly, has the 12:06 album closer "Mortal Man".
  • DAMN. has the song "FEAR." (7:40) while demo album untitled unmastered. has "untitled 07" (8:16).
• Eminem has two notable stand-out songs on his album, The Marshall Mathers LP 2. That includes "Bad Guy" (7:14) and "Rap God" (6:03), with the former being the sequel to The Marshall Mathers LP track, "Stan" (6:44).
• DJ Screw has a number of these, but the most famous of these being the Freestyle set to Kris Kross' "Da Street Ain't Right" on the June 27th tape (35:44).
• Death Grips songs don't often last more than 5 minutes, but "Steroids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber)" is an exception, clocking in at about 22 minutes. They also have "Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)", which is 7 and a half minutes.
• "Nordisch By Nature", northern German rap group Fettes Brot's first big hit, measures 9:10, going through quite a number of guest appearances in the course. The real kicker, however, is the radio edit that announces its fade-out at about 3:30 for radio DJ convenience.
• Black Thought's absolutely fire 10-minute freestyle.
• Cult rapper RXK Nephew has a number of very long songs, most notably "The Real Lil Reese" (13:44), "Mr. Immune" (10:44), his Signature Song "American tterroristt" (9:44), and "Unsubscribe Me and Don't Buy My Music" (8:45). This is largely down to his Signature Style of taking random beats and freestyling over them as long as he wants. On that note, his friend and collaborator Rx Papi gives us "Therapy Session", which clocks in at 18:50. He even lampshades the length of the song midway through.
  "They be like Pap how many times you looped the beat?
  As long as I fucking want to speak"

R&B/Soul

• Rotary Connection did "I Took a Ride (Caravan)," an early showcase of Minnie Riperton on lead with an orchestral jam in the middle led by Charles Stepney.. At 6:04, this Cover Version is double the length of the original by Japanese Psychedelic Rock artist Harumi.
• Isaac Hayes: Every cut off his Hot Buttered Soul album qualifies. Particularly noteworthy are his covers of "Walk on By" (12:03) and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (18:42).
• Luther Vandross has "A House Is Not a Home" (7:11), especially unusual because that is the radio version that gets played on oldies stations to this day.
• Stevie Wonder has "Living for the City" which is 7:23 in total length. And what a beautiful 7 minutes and 23 seconds it is.
• "Cause I Love You" by Lenny Williams is 7 minutes and 11 seconds, including 1 minute of Williams just talking about how much he misses the girl.
• The Spinners' "I Could Never (Repay Your Love)" comes in at just under seven minutes long.
• The album version of Anita Baker's "Fairy Tales" runs for just under eight minutes, coming in at 7:53.
• Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "Wake Up Everybody" lasts for 7:33.
• Nina Simone's rendition of "Sinnerman" runs for 10:20.
• The Weeknd has Kiss Land (7:35) and Tears in the Rain (7:24) on his album titled Kiss Land.

Electronic/Industrial

• St Germain is notable for tracks that often stretch from 6 to 12 minutes and more. Tourist has several tracks of six to seven minutes in length.
• Deadmau5 with songs such as Strobe and Cthulhu Sleeps (both are 10 minutes). most of his songs range from 4 to 8 minutes.
• The industrial group Einstürzende Neubauten has the 8:04-minute-long Kollaps, a song about the collapse of civilization, complete with chainsaws, screaming, and references to Genghis Khan. They also have Headcleaner (15:04), Perpetuum Mobile (13:42), and Pelikanol (18:34).
• In the case of Bull of Heaven, the latter half of 2013 saw the band releasing several extremely lengthy neo-prog/jazz-rock pieces such as "299: Self-Traitor, I Do Bring the Spider Love," which clocks in at just under 2 and a half hours. Still, other pieces were released as lengthy collections such as "Quasi Una Fantasia," which is an hour and 45 minutes. They also have a habit of shattering records for the longest piece of music with their procedurally generated pieces. Examples include:
  • "The Chosen Priest and Apostle of Infinite Space": 1,453 hours long, two months long.
  • "Blurred with Tears and Suffering Beyond Hope": 4,723 hours long, or six months.
  • "Like a Wall in Which an Insect Lives and Gnaws": 50,000 hours long. That's almost six fucking years.
  • "0": 29,236,388 hours (3,335 years) long and a file size of 382.9 terabytes.
  • "n": 87708958333333 hours (10,005,798,727 years, which is just over 10 billion years.) Nearly as long as the age of the Universe, itself 13.75 billion years old, but compressed into the mother of all zip bombs: an 85kb archive file, containing 1.3 zettabytes (or over 1,395,864,370 terrabytes) of sound. The files in the archive are all identical, so it's just the same piece repeated countless times over.
  • Their lcm series of pieces take loops of varying length and plays them until they meet up again. For example, the second piece, "lcm(2,3)", which uses a two-second and a three-second loop, lasts six seconds. The series finishes with "lcm(2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71,73,79,83)": 8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955 years (8.46 septillion years) long. That's 8.458033*10¹⁴ times longer than the universe has existed. The entire lcm series is only available as .swf files that play the loops for you.
  • As of 2020, their longest song is "ΩΣPx 0(2^18×5^18)p*k*k*k": 3.343*10⁴⁸ years.
  • Bull of Heaven provides downloadable excerpts of most of their longer pieces, alongside zip bombs or .swf files of the full deal.
• Burial's songs post-Untrue tend to get quite lengthy. Notable examples are "Kindred" (11:26), "Ashtray Wasp" (11:44), "Truant" (11:47), "Rough Sleeper" (13:48), "Rival Dealer" (10:47), "Come Down to Us" (13:08), and his remixes of the Massive Attack songs "Four Walls" (11:57) and "Paradise Circus" (12:32).
• Kraftwerk's Autobahn is over 24 minutes long, and was one of the first hits of the band that pioneered techno in the '70s.
  • 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'", "High Fidelity", "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.
  • On Random Access Memories there are rather more: "Giorgio by Moroder", "Touch", "Get Lucky" and "Contact", as well as a few that push the six-minute mark.
  • Non-album single "The New Wave" is 7:30, its B-side "Assault" is 6 minutes exactly, and "Da Funk" B-side "Musique" is 6:54. ("Da Funk" itself isn’t an example.)
• 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. That said, this piece is an assembly of soundbites created for an exhibition that 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-track suite "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) raised the maximum running time for a chart-eligible single from 25 minutes to 40 minutes. The Orb's response to this? They created a 39:57 mix of the song for single release. And a four-minute edit for radio play.
• Covenant's "Subterfugue for Three Absynths", from the Skyshaper bonus disc, is 43 minutes and consists of three industrial noise loops phasing in and out with each other, hence the name.
  • "Cryotank Expansion" (25:46) from Dreams of a Cryotank. Not surprising, since it's part of the industrial dark ambient genre.
  • "Flux" at the end of Sequencer is 11 minutes, but the last three minutes are just random noises going off every few seconds.
  • Also from Sequencer is the 8:46 "Figurehead".
  • "Modern Ruin Part II" and "Leaving Babylon II", the closing tracks to Modern Ruin and Leaving Babylon, respectively, are both in the 9-10 minute range.
  • The 2-disc limited edition of Leaving Babylon includes "Jag är Fullständigt Tung", which is 75 minutes and takes up the entire second disc.
• 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.
  • Earlier, Sasha did a 12-minute remix of "Remember," which has a rather creepy 5-minute intro with time-stretched vocal samples. And before that, his 13:10 remix of "Embracing the Sunshine."
  • Songs in the Goa trance subgenre are generally in the 9-12 minute range.
  • On top of that, many trance DJ mixes and sets are famous for going for hours on end. Markus Schulz in particular is known for his extended open-to-close sets (usually clocking in at nearly 8 hours long at minimum).
• Skinny Puppy songs usually aren't more than 5-6 minutes, but "The Centre Bullet" from the CD Updated Re-release 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.
  • Can't forget "Download", which is twelve minutes long, although it's a bit atypical in that, like most of the latter half of Last Rights, it's mostly an ambient/noise piece.
• 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.
  • They love this trope. Their most recent albums have only a few songs under 6 minutes With another track being nearly an hour long.
• The 12" mix of Mike Mareen's "Agent of Liberty", included on the CD reissue of Dance Control, is about 9 minutes. Ditto "Love Spy (Salutation Mix)".
• 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 Protonic Storm (Krzysztof Radomski) has produced three particularly epic tracks: "Above the Zenith" at 8:41, "Skylab Poetry" at 9:21, and "The Shrine" at 9:55. Other epic tunes in the genre include Anders Lundqvist's "The Ordeal"(about 7 1/2 minutes), and many of Everdune's tracks.
• 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 6 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. The latest EP, Add Violence, has to date NI Ns longest song "The Background World" at 11:44.
• Hexode's first EP has "Beginnings" and "Hope", 10:47 and 13:07, and on Melancholy there lies a 26-minute long drone piece entitled "Please Help Me". It's worth noting that the latter mostly consists of the same riff repeated over and over again.
• 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.
  • The concept behind 45:33 is based on the album E2-E4 by the German progressive electronic musician Manuel Göttsching, which is made up of a single song just forty seconds short of an hour long. As well as both being made up of one long track, both albums feature very similar artwork.
  • Their album This Is Happening is just dripping with this. For starters, only two of its songs are under 5 minutes, and special mention has to go to "You Wanted A Hit" and "Dance Yrself Clean", which are both 9 minutes long, and the final track "Throw", which is 10 minutes long.
• The intelligent drum'n'bass genre made this a particularly common trope, but special mention must be made for Goldie, whose debut album Timeless was what gave the genre its breakthrough. Timeless opens with a title track 21 minutes long, and while none of the other tracks are that long, the majority of the songs still fall under this. However, an attempt to escalate on that in Goldie's follow-up album, Saturnzreturn, made for an opening track that literally lasted over an hour. This kind of Epic Rocking gone overboard was arguably what killed the genre's success in the UK.
• Front Line Assembly's hard-to-find demo tape Nerve War has the 11-minute "Oppression" concluding Side 1.
• Ricardo Villalobos is known in techno circles for going on nearly forever. His debut album opened with the 10:06 "Easy Lee" and closed with the 9:11 "Dexter". His second album opened with the 14:47 "Hireklon"^note An edited version, at 9:01, graced the CD version and closed with the 14:19 "True to Myself". Two of his biggest singles are "Enfants (Chants)", which is 17:03; and "Fizheuer Zieheuer", which is 37:09 and is accompanied by a 35:30 dub mix. Even his remixes for other artists, including Beck and Señor Coconut, are of extended length; his longest as of 2015 was for DJ Pierre, whose "What Is House Muzik (Ricardo Villalobos What Is Dub)" lasts for over 36 minutes across two sides of vinyl (18:33 per side, with some amount of overlap between sides.)
• E-Type's "Set The World On Fire (UK Biff & Memphis Remix)", featured on their two-disc Greatest Hits Album, is 12:45. The original extended and Amadin Boeing mixes are also rather long, at about 8 minutes each.
• The KLF's album Chill Out was originally released on CD in the UK as a single, 45-minute-long track. (The US version of the album is divided into separate tracks, but still sounds exactly the same as the UK version thanks to plenty of Fading into the Next Song.)
• Clan of Xymox has "Stranger"(7:41), "A Day(remix)"(9:12), "There's No Tomorrow(The Frozen Autumn Remix)"(7:52), "Something Wrong"(7:18), and the Siamese Twin Songs "Once in a Blue Moon/She Is Falling in Love"(12:28 total).
• Brian Eno, as more or less the inventor of the ambient genre, has quite a few songs that fit into this. "Neroli" is almost fifty-eight minutes long, and it's not his only example. 1975's "Discreet Music" is over thirty minutes long; the longest song on Ambient 1: Music for Airports is over seventeen minutes long on some versions of the album, his first collaboration with King Crimson's Robert Fripp has two twenty-minute songs while his second had a twenty-eight-minute song on the second side, "Charm (Over 'Burundi Cloud')" (a collaboration with Jon Hassell) is over twenty-one minutes long, and this list could go on for a long time if it were truly exhaustive.
• Patrick Cowley's Megatron Man is 9:05.
• Justice has "Planisphere," an EP that clocks in at 17:39. While it's technically divided into 4 parts that can be listened to individually, the full effect is reached from hearing it in order.
• Delta Brony's "Smile Smile Smile(Euro Rainbow Road Mix)" is 9:22, which is unusually long for a Eurobeat song.
• The shortest song on Gift by The Sisterhood is "Rain From Heaven" at 6:42. Three of the album's total five songs are over 8 minutes long.
• Tangerine Dream and their alumnus Klaus Schulze were fond of this trope. Many of their albums consist of no more than two songs, and both tracks on Schulze'sTimewind are at least twenty-eight minutes long (the A-side breaks thirty). This is from an era in which it was uncommon for album sides to surpass twenty-three minutes in length, mind you. Better yet, the 2-CD reissue of Timewind includes the forty-minute "Echoes of Time", an alternate take of "Bayreuth Return" that was too long to fit on a vinyl LP.
• Yellow Magic Orchestra had a few relatively long tracks on their debut album: "Simoon", "Tongpoo", "La Femme Chinoise" were all around six minutes in length.
• Merzbow has been known to make tracks of an hour in length or longer.
• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 is probably the most triumphant example of this in vaporwave. His earlier albums had track running up to 7 minutes, which is already long enough to qualify for the trope, but as time went on, his tracks became longer and longer, often averaging between 15-22 minutes, with at least two tracks almost and exceeding an hour. Also, see the Virtual Dream Plaza entry in "epic albums" below.
• "Infatuation" by Solarstone & Basil O'Glue is just short of 10 minutes.
• Princess Century, the Solo Side Project of Austra's Maya Postepski, has the 22-minute "Discoset" on her Lossy EP.
• Myndy K's "Where U R" (not to be confused with the aforementioned Jessica Simpson song) is 11:49. Likewise, Hani's remix of "Love from Above" is 12:18.
• Carbon Based Lifeforms has a lot of tracks that run from the 7- to 10-minute range, but special note goes to the following songs:
  • The full version of "20 Minutes", which is as long as the title implies. The original version is shorter, but still qualifies at 7:40.
  • "VLA": in addition to the 10-minute version on the album Twentythree, there's the 45-minute EP edit that's used on streaming services and finally, the full version that's one hour long!
• Jon Hopkins' songs run 5-8 minutes on average. Standout songs include "Light Through The Veins" (9:18) from Insides, "Collider" (9:22), "Sun Harmonics" (11:54), and "Immunity" (9:57) from Immunity, and "Everything Connected" (10:30) and "Luminous Beings" (11:51) from Singularity.
• Minimal Techno producer The Field mostly creates songs in the 7-10 minute range. Songs notably long even by his standards include "Sequenced" (15:40) off of Yesterday and Today, "Reflecting Lights" (14:05) off of The Follower, and the entirety of Sound of Light which is comprised of four tracks, each about 15 minutes in length.
• Deepspace's "Another Empty Galaxy" is a little over 59 minutes of cosmic ambiance.
• All of the tracks on Eguana's Tranquility album are each 12 to 15 1/2 minutes long.
• Solar Fields' Ourdom, though shorter in total length than his "Epic Albums" mentioned below, features "Mountain King" clocking in at 14:24.
• Color Theory, most of whose songs are under 5 minutes, has the 10-minute instrumental "The Past Yet To Come" closing out The Majesty of Our Broken Past.
• Progressive house/trance group Blue Amazon, as mentioned under "Epic Albums", have quite a few 9+ minute tracks, but the original mix of "And Then The Rain Falls", at 16:04, takes the cake as their longest single release, and their second-longest song overall after the 16:34 "Searching" on the vinyl edition of The Javelin.
• Describing it as "rocking" probably doesn't make much sense, considering most of it is some of the most terrifying drone and noise music ever made, but the second half of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the End of Time is made up entirely of 20-minute tracks of "post-awareness confusion". Mind you, this is on a six and a half-hour-long album.
• Real Life's 2020 album Sirens has a 17-minute Title Track suite, a la FGTH's Welcome to the Pleasuredome, which occupies the whole of Side 1 on the vinyl edition.
• Most of SleepResearch_Facility's songs exceed the ten-minute mark. His album Dead Weather Machine: ReHeat consists of a 51-minute-long track as its sole song.
• goreshit songs don't usually go into this, but it can happen occasionally. Examples include it's sad, i don't give you new shoes, one way to hannover and burn this moment into the retina of my eye.
• Royksopp's songs tend to be between four and six minutes, but there are some outliers. These include "Röyksopp's Night Out" (7:30), "Alpha Male" (8:11), "Tricky Two" (7:51), "The Fear" (7:01), "Monument" (9:57), "Inside the Idle Hour Club" (9:54), "You Know I Have To Go" (7:35), "This Time, This Place..." (7:44), and "Breathe (Royksopp Remix)" (7:25).
• DJ Sakin & Friends produced a bevy of epic trance tracks during the genre's golden era, notably "Dragonfly"(11:58), "Protect Your Mind (Suspicious Remix)"(10:41), "Nomansland"(12:02), "Dark Man"(10:04), and "Miami"(10:28).
• Italian Eurodance group Double You have "Dancing With An Angel (Angel Mix)", at 7:46. The Fast Piano Mix, clocking in at 6:53, also qualifies.

Reggae / Dancehall

• The long version of Yellowman's "Zungguzungguguzungguzeng" clocks in at about 6:30.

Country & Bluegrass

• Alabama's "My Home's in Alabama." Six-and-a-half minutes of midtempo eighties country rock.
  • Also: "Changes Comin' On" (Mountain Music) 6:47
  • "If It Ain't Dixie (It Won't Do)" (40 Hour Week) 7:34
  • "Pony Express" (The Touch) 7:53
  • "You're My Explanation For Living" 6:52 & "Fallin' Again" 7:41 (Tar Top (CD Version))
• Keith Urban does this a lot. The album versions of "Somebody Like You", "Once in a Lifetime", "Stupid Boy", and "Everybody" all hit six minutes, of which nearly half is solos.
• Brothers Osborne did this on "Stay a Little Longer". The original version on their debut EP ended in a long guitar solo, which got even longer when the song was re-recorded for their full-length album. "Shoot Me Straight" goes even further, clocking in at 6:24.
• Zac Brown Band's "Junkyard" is 7:15.
• The album version of "When I See This Bar" by Kenny Chesney is 6:03 thanks to a drawn-out coda. Similarly "El Cerrito Place" is 5:52, although it's a ballad.
• "Heaven Help My Heart" by Wynonna Judd goes 6:08 thanks to a very long ending.
• Brad Paisley, being a guitarist, can do some really long outros. "Welcome to the Future", "Southern Comfort Zone", "Start a Band" (featuring Keith Urban), etc.
• "Born to Fly" and "Backseat of a Greyhound Bus" by Sara Evans both have very long instrumental codas that bring them up to five-and-a-half minutes.
• "Been There" by Clint Black and Steve Wariner. The two trade off on harmonica and acoustic guitar solos respectively, bringing the song to 5:28.
• Eric Church's "Mr. Misunderstood" has a very "American Pie"-esque arrangement that leads through a myriad of tempo and verse changes, including a large anthemic close that finishes the song at 5:18.
• "Pirates of the Mississippi/Jolly Roger" by Pirates of the Mississippi. An epic surf-rock instrumental that transitions into an anthemic Singer Name Drop.
• Johnny Cash's "The Legend of John Henry's Hammer" is an impressive exercise in musical storytelling that clocks in at eight and half minutes, an incredible feat for a country song recorded in 1963.

Disco

• The Trammps' "The Night the Lights Went Out" clocks in at 7:13, while the long version of "Disco Inferno" hits 10:49.
• The unedited version of First Choice's "Doctor Love" runs for 8:20.

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.
  • "Smooth in the Shell (no disc break)" technically both plays this trope straight and at the same time averts it. Even after 5 solid albums and 1 mini-album dedicated to the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex soundtrack, there were still numerous songs that hadn't been covered yet, including a rap song that never even made it into the series. Smooth in the Shell was created as a limited release bonus to the fans, and included all of these unlisted leftover songs. The trope is averted in that it flows from one song to the next, as they are all technically different compositions. It plays it straight in that the entire song file is 49 minutes long without any pauses or breaks between songs, and it doesn't list the names of the songs that it covers.
    • And no, there isn't a broken-up version of the song file either. None of the songs played within were ever given any information as to what their official song titles are. It's all just one long song.
• 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 second-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 in 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. And it's not even the longest song in the game; see below.
  • The One-Ups, a semi-famous orchestra group that played video game music, used a 13-minute arrangement of "Dancing Mad" 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.
  • The Black Mages did it again. In their third album, Darkness and Starlight, the track of the same name clocks in at a second or two over fifteen and a half minutes, as it's a combination of three/four other tracks. It's also about two minutes longer than all of those tracks if they were stuck end-to-end.
• Pirates of the Caribbean's The Kraken.
• Most tracks in the expansive Homestuck soundtrack typically last from around 1 minute to just over 4, with a few on each album that go for less than 1 or more than 5, and a few notable ones that go even longer: Midnight Crew: Drawing Dead's "Ace Of Trump" and Homestuck Vol. 4's "Three In The Morning (RJ!'s I Can Barely Sleep In This Casino Remix)" are both 6:29, The Felt has "Variations" (6:03), AlterniaBound has "Rex Duodecim Angelus" (6:39), Medium has in particular "Rain" is 6:34 and "Wind" a whopping 8:03, The Wanderers has "Carapacian Dominion" (7:20), Homestuck Vol. 8 has the longest one in the official soundtrack, "Cascade" (13:14, though it's technically a medley of four tracks from the same album rewritten and meshed together to accompany the second-longest animation in the story), coloUrs and mayhem: Universe A has Nine Lives One Love (6:33), Homestuck Vol. 9's penultimate track, "A Taste For Adventure", is 8:24, Symphony Impossible To Play opens with the 7:00 "Overture", One Year Older has "The Scratch" (7:34) and "Negastrife" (6:29), Genesis Frog has "Pondsquatter (Live Chamber Version)" (6:02), and Cherubim ends with "Eternity Served Cold" at 8:20. [S] Collide solely consists of the four tracks that accompany the longest animation, but since they're listed separately on the album the only one to reach this territory is the last one, "Heir Of Grief", which is 6:12. Act 7 consists solely of the exactly 9:00 track "Overture (Canon Edit)", the third longest in the soundtrack. The final canon album, Homestuck Vol. 10, has "Creata" (8:12), "Moonsweater" (7:57), "Ascend" (6:12), the second-longest track "Renewed Return" (9:10), and the final track "Conclude" (7:47).
  • From the Gaiden albums, Land Of Fans And Music has "Beginnings (Press Start To Play)" at 6:18, "MeGaDanceVania" (6:04), and "Heir-Seer-Knight-Witch" at 7:59.
  • The Unofficial MSPA Fans albums have few: the Sburb OST with "Sburban Prelude [Main Menu]" (6:35), "Layers Upon Layers [Build]" (11:47), "Endgame Execution [Black King Battle]" (8:50), and "Gods Of The New World [Universe Creation]" (7:19), Land Of Fans And Music 2 with "Chronology" (7:44), "Who Mourns For Jack Noir?" (7:21), "Dance-Stab-Dance" (11:12), Land Of Fans And Music 3 with "Emissary Of Dance" (9:12), "The Metamorphosis Of Rose Lalonde" (9:56), and "Garden Of Eden" (Part 1 is 8:15, Part 2 is 10:39). Beforus has "MOG^3" (7:01), "For Beforus" (8:02), "Caligomancy" (6:12), "Dear Heart" (6:42), "Thief Of The Ring" (6:06), "Rex Duodecim Daemonia X (ReDuX)" (7:40), 『H☯MESTUCK VAP☯RWAVE 2016 RUH​-​RUH​-​RUH​-​ＲＥＭＩＸ』アンドレア・ヒューシー・グーグル翻訳 has －私はあなたを騙しました－( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) at 6:43. Ancestral has "Spider's Eclipse" (10:00), "Protector" (6:12), and "Handmaiden's F(l)ight" (6:01). Land Of Fans And Music 4 has "Crystalendofgames" (6:55), "HOMOSUCK. DIRECTOR'S CUT, OF THE YEAR EDITION." (6:40), "Dance Of The Dead" (13:04), "Noble Ascendance" (6:31), "The Sin And The Salvation" (8:53), "Pseudumbra Phauxtasm" (6:30), "Crystalmethequins (Broken Bad)" (6:33), "Revisit/Rewind" (6:13), "Homestuck Sonata" (7:46), and "Skaian Rebirth" (8:31). Xenoplanetarium has "Depths And Water" (7:15). Moons Of Theseus begins with the 10:25 "Home" and also includes "The Return" (6:12), "Negligent Murmur" (6:29), and ends with "Violet And Gold" (7:20). DIVERGING DELICACIES includes "Gone in a moment" (7:12), "I Am Ascending (And It Is Terrible)" (7:09), and "Heritage For The Future" (6:30). Friend Symphony has "Dumbass Terminal" (6:01). Land of Fans and Music 5" has "Firefly Storm" (6:46), "A Dream Of Broken Clocks" (6:31), "Blood Rite" (6:13), "One Hour Later (6:54), "Infinite Zest" (6:00) and "Ophiuchus (Full Suite)" (28:27). Land of Fans and Music 5 Act 2 has "The Deceased Friends And Family" (07:36), Stuck (10:25), "Light in the Darkness" (07:52), "GALACTIC INCOHERENCE ~ Cosmic Na N Propagation" (09:46), "'Til Death, We Grieve" (06:48), "Lost Memories" (07:20), "Stargazing with Gods" (9:45) and "Home/Stuck (a compilation of "Home" from Moons of Theseus and the aforementioned "Stuck") (20:09)
  • Beyond Canon, the first official album of the "Post-Canon" era, "only" includes one track that qualifies, the 7:12 "Light Burns Out (Gestalt)".
• Homestuck Fancomic VastError also has its fare share of long songs: "Vast Error Vol. 1-3" has "Ultima Hoc Fatum" (6:09). "Repiton" has "Only the Beggining" (6:59). "Vast Error Vol. 4 has "Pandora" (7:12). "Sound Test 1" has "Godroot [Demo] (8:08). "Vast Error Vol. 5: Side 1" has "Storyteller" (7:29), "Searching for Answers" (6:32), "Mx. Misery" (7:10) and "Negative Feedback" (8:43). "Vast Error Vol. 5: Side 2" has "Kingdom Come" (10:00), "Ghost Writer (Extended)" (8:09), "Jettison (Redux)" (6:40), "Fictionalized" (6:22) and "corruptedcultist" (6:03). "Magnum Opus" has "Insecurity" (6:21), "Kheparia" (7:24) and "Analemma" (9:20). "Faux Dramatica" has "Turncoat" (6:00), "Requiem For A Dying Planet (Ft. The Emek Hefer Choir)" (8:11) and "Naught" (6:04). "Fighting Further" has "Go Beyond and Fight Further" (13:22)
• Halo:
  • The Delta Halo Suite on Halo 2's OST is the longest piece in the series, at over 11 minutes.
  • Also the "Truth and Reconciliation Suite" from the Halo: Combat Evolved soundtrack, an 8:26 piece that combines several game themes including the series' main Recurring Riff.
• 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.
• Most Friday Night Funkin' songs last about one or two minutes, but Triple Trouble from the Sonic.EXE mod clocks in at eight and a half minutes.
• Celeste has Resurrections (9:38), Checking In (7:04), Golden (8:28), Quiet and Falling (7:27), In the Mirror (9:37), Reach for the Summit (11:09), Heart of the Mountain (6:22), Summit (No More Running Mix) (8:37), Fear of the Unknown (6:00), and Farewell (8:21)
  • The Strawberry Jam mod has this too:
    • Bluebird (6:24), Blueberry Bay (Ebb and Flow Mix) (7:52),Horizon (6:30), Cyberstrider Madeline (8:11), Raspberry Roots (Tree of Life Mix) (6:59), Exquisite Corpse (Bonus) (8:14), Glide (7:08), Tectonic Trenches (7:52), Warm Fish (7:55), Mango Mesa (Relics of the Past Mix) (10:21), Impeded (6:22), Bounded by Thoughts (7:17), Jaded (PsyCabob) (7:36), Starfruit Supernova (Pillars of Creation Mix) (14:23),Shattersong (6:10), Flying Lanterns (8:16), Cabinet Madeline (Pumber Edition) (6:20), Passionfruit Pantheon (Apotheosis Mix) (13:28), and Shatter the Pantheon! (8:15)
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The Sonic R soundtrack features remixes of "Work It Out" and "Super Sonic Racing" that clock in at 7:24 and 6:04, respectively.
  • The Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack features the Chao Race and Chao Garden medleys, the former clocking in at 6:45 on the original Japanese soundtrack and only a few seconds shorter on later releases and the latter, released only on the original Japanese soundtrack, coming in at 8:10.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) has Kingdom Valley at 6:49 and My Destiny at 6:10.
    • Originating from the same game, the 2009 compilation album "True Colors: The Best of Sonic the Hedgehog Volume 2" has Dreams of an Absolution (Starry Night Remix) which comes in at 6:18.
  • Sonic Unleashed has Dear My Friend at 6:09.
  • The Sonic Generations soundtrack has the End Roll medley version 2, at 7:22.
• 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.
• The final boss track of Persona 4, The Genesis, is nearly 8 minutes long with no looping. It's one of the longest tracks in Shin Megami Tensei history, if not the longest.
• Portal 2 makes use of procedurally generated music, which is produced in real-time by the game's engine (the extra melodies made while the player accomplishes a task, for example.) Mike Morasky, the game's composer, said that one piece of music "only repeats itself every 76,911 years, 125 days, 7 hours, 56 minutes and 30.3 seconds." The soundtrack naturally contained excerpts of all of these pieces.
• Doom 64 uses an ambient soundtrack, and makes use of this trope quite often because of it, with three of the tracks reaching 17 minutes each.
  • Ditto the PlayStation/Saturn port of Doom, also scored by Aubrey Hodges. The 20th Anniversary Extended Edition of the OST, including the unused bonus tracks, totals about 5 1/2 hours long.
• Fire Emblem: Awakening has Id ~ Purpose at 8 minutes even and Don't speak her name! at 7:52. Old Battlefield, which immediately follows the former on the OST, also narrowly qualifies at 6:05.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has "Skyrim Atmospheres," a forty-minute piece that takes up an entire CD on the soundtrack album.
• Justified in RayCrisis. The arcade version, as well as the home ports' Original Mode, have background tracks that are 11 to 16 minutes long each. This is because the same track plays for four of the five stages you play each playthrough, or in the case of the home ports, jumps from one section to the next when moving to a boss or the next stage. Extra Mode in the home ports goes further, with a 23-minute and 18-second track, designed to accommodate the usage of two more stages.
• Hell March by Frank Klepacki from Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Over six minutes long, and about halfway through it changes from metal to ambient electronica.
• The studio version of God Only Knows -Secrets of the Goddess-, as used in The World God Only Knows: Goddesses Arc is pegged at nearly 13 minutes.
• Journey to Silius' Stage 2 theme, "Underground Concourse," runs for nearly five minutes before looping.
• Hans Zimmer has more than a few, but some of the notable ones are Waiting for a Train from Inception at 9:30; Hello Beastie from Pirates of the Caribbean at 10:12; A Dark Knight from the soundtrack for The Dark Knight, which is 16:15; and the king of them, Man Of Steel (Hans' Original Sketchbook) from the film of the same name, which is just over 28 minutes.
• Bear McCreary is fond of this. Some examples:
  • From Battlestar Galactica (2003): "Assault on the Colony" (15:09), "Something Dark Is Coming" (8:55), "Prelude to War" (8:26), "Storming New Caprica" (7:50), "Among the Ruins" (7:45), "Violence and Variations" (7:35)
  • From Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome: "The Last Battle of Osiris" (8:39)
  • From Caprica: "Capricoperatica" (8:42)
  • From Defiance (TV series): "Battle of the Volge" (8:33)
  • From Defiance (video game): "Mount Tam" (7:50), "Theme from Defiance (Extended Version)" (7:03)
  • From Human Target: "Flipping the Plane" (10:54), "Skyhook Rescue" (7:05), "Confronting Baptiste" (8:51), "Gondola" (8:44), "Bertram" (7:00)
• Legendary maestro Jerry Goldsmith who was well known for being economical and thrifty in scoring, still has some of these:
  • The 13th Warrior: Valhalla/Viking Victory (10:35)
  • The Mummy (1999): Rebirth (8:33) and The Sand Volcano (9:26)
  • Air Force One: The Hijacking (7:30)
  • Chain Reaction: Out of the Hole (9:12)
  • Innerspace: Gut Reaction (7:46)
  • Star Trek: First Contact: The Dish (7:05)
  • Star Trek: Insurrection: The Healing Process (7:15)
  • Total Recall (1990): End of A Dream & A New Life (8:00)
  • Extreme Prejudice: The Plan (9:24)
  • The River Wild: Vacation's Over (9:51)
  • Hoosiers: The Finals (13:21)
• Starbound's OST is mostly this:
  • Horsehead Nebula is 7:36, Stellar Formation is 7:49, Eridanus Supervoid is 7:33, Haiku is 7:35, Cygnus x1 is 13:22, Large Magellanic Cloud is 6:14, Epsilon Indi is 10:58, Europa is 6:04, Casiopeia is 6:06, Mercury is 6:26, Temple of Kluex is 8:36, Mira (the longest in the soundtrack) is 20:04, Procyon is 9:08, Nomads (Passacaglia) is 10:08, Tranquality Base is 11:55, Arctic Constelation 1 is 11:04, Arctic Constelation 2 is 9:25, The Apex (Apex Theme) is 7:13, The Deep (Hylotl Theme) is 7:09, Drosera (Floran Theme) is 8:18, Event Horizon is 07:15, Impact Event is 6:55, M54 is 10:37 and Starbound is 10:30
• From Ennio Morricone's soundtrack for The Hateful Eight, "L'ultima diligenza di Red Rock (versione integrale)" (7:32) and "Neve (versione integrale)" (12:17) definitely qualify for this trope. He's been using this trope for a long time; for example, "Il triello" from what is likely his best-known soundtrack, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, runs for 7:14.
• Motoi Sakuraba has been known to do this on occasion, which probably isn’t surprising given his Progressive Rock roots. For one example, “Highbrow”, the final boss theme from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, runs for over ten minutes on the OST. If it looped like most other video game soundtracks do, it would be over twenty minutes – the loop itself is over ten minutes long.
• Yasunori Mitsuda is no stranger to this. In fact, one of his magnum opus, Small Two of Pieces, the ending song for Xenogears is one, clocking at 6:21.
• Mirror's Edge Catalyst's OST, produced by the aforementioned Solar Fields, totals nearly 5 1/4 hours in length, and more than half of the tracks are suites between 15 and 25 minutes long.
• Cytus, being a Rhythm Game of Eastern origin, usually averts this trope due to primarily using songs around 2 minutes long, but exceptions exist:
  • "Disaster", "Buried", and "Vanessa" from the Alive chapter are 6:13, 6:14, and 7:10, respectively, Incidentally, before the Chapter L update, "Vanessa" only had the second most notes of any track; the record holder for most notes in a chart went to a track that is a little under half as long.
  • From Chapter L: "L2" and "L3" are 7:37 and 6:36, respectively.
• Blinx: The Time Sweeper's final boss theme has eleven separate sections for every single hit you score against it (plus one ending crescendo after you score the final hit). The full song uninterrupted clocks in at just over nine minutes.
• Cirque du Soleil soundtrack albums usually have at least 1 7+ minute piece, but by far the longest are the 10:30 "Suite Chinoise" from Nouvelle Experience and the 10:06 "Rumeurs" from Mystère.
• Hypnospace Outlaw combines this with Mundane Made Awesome with in-universe musician Chowder Man's Ready to Shave. The player can listen to it in its entirety. It's a fairly complex Prog Rock song, almost seven minutes long, and, this bears repeating, it's about shaving. As a comically convoluted metaphor for Order Versus Chaos, maybe; it's hard to tell with anything in Hypnospace.
• The ending credits song of Fate/EXTRA CCC, "Memories of CCC", is easily the longest song in Fate Series history, clocking in at 18:14 as a rearrangement of all the key themes into one medley.
• Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII's final boss theme is 13 minutes long.
• The theme tune of the Commodore 64 game Light Force, composed by Rob Hubbard, runs over 7 minutes before looping.
• Vagrant Story has Climax of the Graylands Incident which clocks in at just shy of 12 minutes.
• Haven (2020) has "Until the End of Time", an extended remix of "The Beginning of Something" played during the game's finale, clocking in at 10:01.
• Undertale has the song of the same name, clocking in at 6:21 on the soundtrack.
• The D4DJ franchise has the song "LOVE!HUG!GROOVY!!", which features all 24 members of the series' original six units, and is about 6 1/2 minutes long. When the song was added to D4DJ Groovy Mix, a Rhythm Game designed with two-minute songs in mind, it was split into three separate songs, with each one representing two of the units, although the full version can be played through an Easter Egg.
• Tetris on Commodore 64 out of all systems has a single soundtrack spanning to 26 minutes long without a single loop!

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" from Just Another Band from L.A., 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. There was a loose sequel entitled "The Adventures of Greggary Peccary" from Studio Tan, also available on Läther, which is of similar length and possibly even better. He also wrote complex jazz pieces like "Willie the Pimp" or "Son of Mr. Green Genes" (both from Hot Rats, where the longest track are "The Gumbo Variations".)
  • A pre-album live incarnation of "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow" (made popular by a bootleg recorded at an Australian show) stretched to an astounding 45-minutes in length. This massive version encompassed the brief song later known as "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow", "Nanook Rubs It", multiple variations on "St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast" and "Father O'Blivion", and a twenty-minute instrumental portion called "Farther O'Blivion."
  • And then there are, of course, Zappa's instrumental guitar albums Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar and Guitar, which also have nothing but lengthy guitar solos.
• 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.
• Devil Doll, just listen to any song from them, most last at least one hour.
• Foetus has "Slung", which is notably an 11-minute swing song in the middle of an album that otherwise sticks to an industrial rock sound.
  • 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".
• Beck has done this a few times in different genres:
  • "Heartland Feeling" on Golden Feelings is a 7:11 spoken word section followed by a folk song.
  • "Bonus Noise" is a rather experimental noise track from Stereopathetic Soulmanure that clocks in at 16:40 (although the first 5 minutes are silence).
  • "The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton" is the three-part 10:36 conclusion to The Information, the first part fitting with the hip hop theme of the album, "Landslide" is a more rock-oriented song, and "Exoskeleton" is a Mind Screw conversation set to droning keyboards.
• Van Morrison is capable of dragging a song out once the Muse takes him. "Madame George" - almost ten minutes. "Haunts of Ancient Peace" - thirteen minutes. The admittedly mellow and rather good "Autumn Song" - eleven minutes. his cover of "It's All In The Game" - fourteen minutes. "Listen to the Lion" - eleven minutes. "Almost Independence Day" - ten minutes. And so on. It's worth noting that at least half of the songs on Astral Weeks qualify for this trope.
• Sufjan Stevens, also listed in the "Epic Albums" folder, also has some lengthy individual compositions, such as "Impossible Soul" (art-rock/electropop), clocking in at over 25 minutes, and "Year of the Horse" (instrumental electronica), which is 15-ish minutes long.
• John Zorn:
  • His album Music for Children has a 20:54 track which is nothing but three wind machines playing with some feedback.
  • The longest track in his work so far is the 47:49 "The Dream Membrane" on the album "The Dream Membrane" (2014) with David Chaim Smith and Bill Laswell.
• "Long Strange Golden Road" by The Waterboys clocks in at 10:22.
• Ulver, in addition to their Genre Roulette, do this a lot. Perhaps the best examples are "Silence Teaches You How to Sing" from the EP of the same name (the band's longest composition at just over twenty-four minutes in length), every song on its companion EP Silencing the Singing, "Ulvsblakk" from Kveldssanger, "Proverbs of Hell, Plates 7-10" and "A Memorable Fancy, Plates 17-20" from the Blake album, "Providence" and "Stone Angels" from Wars of the Roses, most of Bergtatt, and about half of Perdition City, Messe I.X-VI.X, and ATGCLVLSSCAP. Terrestrials consists exclusively of this too, although not so much the rocking part. This is not a complete list of examples.
• Cherax Destructor has a few epic-length tracks under her various aliases, such as "and we drown" (6:49) as Daiku Industries, "there are worlds beyond our own" (8:26) as Helpful Kappa, and Lost No Longer (6:31), as well as the so-called "Mahou Shoujo Suite" (9:56) as simply Cherax Destructor. Then there are her contributions to the split // EP with fatherfake, "harbourside" and "alone at sea" (both 9:07).
  • One of fatherfake's own contributions to the aforementioned split // EP, "everlasting boy," is no slouch either, coming in at 8:42.
• Negativland:
  • Helter Stupid has an 18-minute title song that focuses on the media and how murder has been associated with music in the past. This is the longest song they have made.
  • The ABC's of Anarchism is a collab with Chumbawamba. The title track on this EP is 13 minutes long.
  • The title track of True False is 10 minutes long.
• La! Neu?'s discography includes such lengthy pieces as "Autoportrait" (32:05, and a live version running 32:26), "Notre Dame" (33:20) and "D.-22.12.95" (33:39), but they really excelled themselves with the Cha Cha 2000 Live in Tokyo double CD, which consists in its entirety of a single live performance of "Cha Cha 2000" running just short of an hour and three quarters.
• Calvin Wilkerson is a master at this. Broken down by album:
  • Calvin Wilkerson: The Album: "When I Go Up, I Come Down in Slow Motion" (15:15, his longest song to that point).
  • Good to Me: "The Music" (7:10).
  • Evolution EP: "We Built This City" (6:19).
  • The Day is Done has the 8:13 "Family Affair", but the real kicker is his new longest song, "Gumball Watterson", at a staggering 18 minutes and 52 seconds.
  • The Connie Maheswaran Experience opens with the 25:52 title track, his longest song to that point. To a lesser extent, "Eminem Can Create Life Out of Butter" (7:11).
  • Wendy Corduroy: "Me and the World" (11:39), "Layla" (8:10).
  • After Hours: "American Pie" (6:06), "Mabel Pines" (10:31), "When Twilight Sparkle Takes Over, We're All Eating Lasagna" (6:17), the title track (6:16).
  • Made In Heaven: "The Bad Man" (6:46), "Blooz" (7:06), "Got To Take You Higher" (6:30).
  • Rainbow Dash: the title track (7:08), "Glory" (13:00), "Hobbyist Pilot" (6:06), "I Feel Love" (6:11).
  • 13: "Marceline the Vampire Queen" (17:04), so long it takes up an entire side of the vinyl version.
  • Is This Summer: "Trampled Underfoot" (6:38), "21st Century Schizoid Man" (6:23), "Electric Car Goes To The Beach" (9:26).
  • Together At Last: "You're Out of Touch" (7:28), the title track (8:04), "Marceline the Vampire Queen" (6:03), "The Recollection" (11:13).
  • It Spills Over: "Princess Bubblegum" (11:28).
  • Marceline's Closet: the title track (16:42), "It's Because The Pringles Detected The Fascism In Your Saliva, And Mutated Into Bad Juju" (10:32), "If It Takes All Summer, It'll Be More Fun To Wait For The Season's Greetings" (9:47). Those are the only three songs on the album.
  • On Top of Spaghetti: "Twilight Sparkle" (8:17), "I Am Not Jesus" (6:51), "Children" (7:16), "Long Tall Sally (The Thing)" (7:32).
  • From Here to Timbuktu: the title track (9:54), "Jamaica Jerk-Off" (6:05), "There Exists a Burger from Wendy's" (9:34).
  • Korea Does What It Is Determined To Do!: "The Bad Bee" (6:37), "Mr. Grub T. Mudstuck" (7:48).
  • Simon & Marcy, being a triple album and being a Calvin Wilkerson album, naturally has quite a lot of these, including two 10-minute pieces: the title track (10:34) and "Fluttershy" (10:03).
  • The ultimate example is Wilkerson's most recent proper album, The End. The only song that isn't an example is "Nickelodeon Productions" (5:29).
  • All Hail Aunt Nancy, The Red Album, and Shut Your Fuck Up don't have examples (unless you count "Allah Hates You/I Hate Brenda" from Shut Your Fuck Up as one song running 7:19 instead of two songs running 2:47 and 4:32). However, the re-recorded version of Shut Your Fuck Up does indeed have examples: "You've Gotta Friend in Me" (7:30) and "Geico's Jam" (17:03).
• Ten of the 12 songs on ''Knife Culture'' by The Chewy Knickers count, with the longest song running for nearly 20 minutes.
• The Mechanisms have a few songs that reach over ten minutes. "Alice" is twelve minutes long, and "Gunpowder Tim vs. the Moon Kaiser" and "Frankenstein" are ten minutes. All three songs consist of different musical interludes separated by spoken word and are basically shrunken-down versions of the band's full albums, which are Rock Operas with a similar alternating structure.
• The Long Now Foundation, which is all about multi-decade (or century) projects, has got two musical performances in production.
  • Longplayer is a recorded loop of music that a computer algorithm permutates each playthrough. The idea is to keep it going for the entire millennium (the project started at midnight on December 31st, 1999).
  • The foundation then turned their attention to a John Cage composition titled As Slowly As Possible. Someone raised the idea of playing it on an organ, which will continue emitting sound as long as air keeps flowing through the pipes. So in 2001, they began a performance in a German church that will last until 2640.
• Erik Satie's "Vexations" normally runs just under a minute. But because of an enigmatic comment the composer wrote on the score, the idea of playing it 840 consecutive times has been put forth, and even attempted, most notably in 1963 by a team of pianists whose total performance time ran to 18 hours.
• Several of the songs on Vylet Pony's Carousel (An Examination of the Shadow, Creekflow...) clock in at over 6 minutes, but the 8-minute long "Hush!" is easily the standout. It also starts with a full-out "The Reason You Suck" Speech in the form of a slam poem overlaid on top of harsh electronic drawls before morphing into chill ambience and hard rock.

Epic Albums

• Quadrophenia by The Who.
• Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber 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 (!)
• tool:
  • Lateralus. The songs are plenty long (more than half are 6 minutes or longer), but the real whopper is the album itself, at 78:58.
  • "The manufacturer would only guarantee us up to 79 minutes... We thought we'd give them two seconds of breathing room." - Danny Carey
  • Most of their other records are also over 75 minutes long.
  • Many of their earlier songs are also long: "Eulogy" is over eight minutes, "Pushit" is ten (and the live version on Salival is fourteen), and "Third Eye" is about fourteen as well. They also did a cover of Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter" (a long song to begin with) and stretched it to eleven minutes.
  • Fear Inoculum is 78:10 long, and all tracks but one are over ten minutes long. The digital release adds three short instrumentals, totaling 86:38.
• All of Michael Jackson's post-Bad records.
• Madonna's Erotica is over 75 minutes long on the explicit version.
• Janet Jackson's Janet and The Velvet Rope.
• Christina Aguilera's Stripped.
• Black Sabbath's first record with Ronnie James Dio Heaven and Hell.
• Light of Day, Day of Darkness by Green Carnation
• Misplaced Childhood, Brave and Marbles (especially the double-disc version) by Marillion.
• Freak Out!, Absolutely Free and We're Only in It for the Money by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Not to mention later live albums like Roxy & Elsewhere, Zappa in New York, ... where the performances often take up more than 12 minutes! His double albums Joe's Garage, Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar and triple album Läther also have long jams. (Läther runs for almost three hours, by the way; the longest song is twenty-one minutes long.)
• Bryan Adams' Waking Up the Neighbors is nearly 75 minutes long, but at nearly half that length, Reckless is still more epic in the eyes of some fans.
• 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. Also marketed as an EP was All Delighted People, which clocks in at 59 minutes.
  • 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. It's a 5 song ep, that's close to an hour long in total. 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 very nearly seventeen minutes.
  • Ys fit this trope pretty well, but Have One on Me, a triple album, stands out. Eighteen songs, over two hours of music. Fourteen songs on the album are over six minutes long, with the longest exceeding eleven minutes in length.
• Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, Conversation Peace, and A Time to Love.
• "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 (1975), 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. This is only the first track.
• Shania Twain's Up!
• Junta by Phish. Half of the album's 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".
• Alanis Morissette's Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.
• Bat Out of Hell, by Meat Loaf. In the sequels, the CD format allowed for running times surpassing 70 minutes.
• 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...
• Bruce Springsteen's The River, and, more recently, The Rising.
• 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 into 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!) Likewise Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn, Incantations (a double album), Tubular Bells II (although sections are titled individually) and Return to Ommadawn.
• U2's Rattle and Hum has several songs that approach or exceed 6 minutes, the three longest being "All I Want Is You", "Love Rescue Me", and "Hawkmoon 269".
• 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.
  • 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 Keys to Ascension, a pair of double albums from the 90s that put together are roughly one-third studio tracks (two of which were nearly 20 minutes each) and two-thirds live tracks, three of which also approach 20 minutes each. iTunes put the two double albums together into one titanic super-set, resulting in an album that contains 218 minutes worth of music.
  • Their first live album, Yessongs, was a triple-LP set included over two hours of music.
• All of Eminem's album's starting with The Marshall Mathers LP
• 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 & 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. And then The Book of Souls had to be spread across two disks, as it featured three songs over 10 minutes (18 in the case of the album closer). Senjutsu followed suit, with the second disk having only four songs given 3 pass the 10 minute mark.
• 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 Special Edition of Timewind includes a bonus disc with the 40-minute "Echoes of Time"(a prototype of "Bayreuth Return"). Predating those, Cyborg (1973) is a double LP totaling 96 minutes and comprised of four 24-minute tracks.
• Vladislav Delay's Anima album, in CD format, consists of a single 62-minute experimental ambient track, while the vinyl version is divided into six movements across 3 LP's.
• Most of the tracks on Blue Amazon's The Javelin album are 11-16 minutes long, and they are seamlessly mixed together on the CD edition, which has a total length of 75 minutes. The vinyl version is a triple LP totalling around 90 minutes.
• Sasha's Xpander EP. All of the tracks, except for the radio edit of the title track, are about 10-12 minutes in length. Although designated an EP, it is more than long enough to qualify as an LP. The vinyl edition is tracked as a double EP with one track per side.
• 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 aforementioned 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, and both discs are also gapless.
• The Andy Warhol tribute album Songs for Drella by Lou Reed and John Cale of The Velvet Underground fame is one long, connected piece.
• Freaky Chakra's Lowdown Motivator and Moonroof Operator albums each have several long multiple-track suites, while FC vs. Single Cell Orchestra and Blacklight Fantasy segues all of their songs into gapless mixes. 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 (with three songs exceeding ten minutes in length), Swans Are Dead is a collection of two epic shows from tours they performed near the end of their career (with six songs exceeding ten minutes in length), and Soundtracks for the Blind is a two-and-a-half-hour double CD of lengthy, dark, atmospheric post-rock epics (with four songs exceeding ten minutes in length).
  • The band's 2012 opus The Seer takes these tendencies to the extreme, with three songs exceeding nineteen minutes and the title track exceeding thirty-two. Live, they're often even longer. To Be Kind takes it even further, with only one song clocking in at under seven minutes and "Bring the Sun / Toussaint L'Ouverture" exceeding thirty-four. The Glowing Man continues the trend, with 3 songs surpassing 20 minutes and 2 more lasting over 10 minutes. The entire album has just 8 tracks but is just shy of 2 hours in length. Michael Gira said in an interview that it was "the musical equivalent of Ben-Hur." Overall, the trilogy of The Seer, To Be Kind, and The Glowing Man comes out to 6 hours total of Epic Rocking.
• The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, a Rock Opera which lasts 94 minutes spanning two discs.
  • Every Peter Gabriel Genesis album to a lesser extent too, as every album from Trespass to Selling England by the Pound has multiple songs topping seven or eight minutes, including the 23-minute "Supper's Ready".
  • Far later in their career, We Can't Dance, which at 71:30 was their longest album since The Lamb, with two of the songs from the album topping ten minutes.
• 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.
  • Later, they released The Astonishing, a Rock Opera which totals to 2 hours and 10 minutes long (or 130 minutes)
  • Their other double album, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence is also quite epic; besides the eponymous 42-minute suite, three out of the five songs on the first disc top ten minutes.
• Stardust We Are, Flower Power, Unfold the Future and Paradox Hotel by The Flower Kings, all double-CD sets with over two hours of music each. All four albums have multiple songs that top 10 minutes, and each has at least one song that tops 20 minutes, the nearly hour-long "Garden of Dreams" suite from Flower Power being the biggest.
• Every album released by progressive rock supergroup Transatlantic. SMPT:e, Bridge Across Forever and Kaleidoscope top 75 minutes each with just four or five songs each, with each album having at least one 20-30 minute song. The Whirlwind, while split into twelve tracks, effectively consists of one long song, and The Absolute Universe takes the format of The Whirlwind even further by offering three versions to choose from (A 90-minute version called "Forevermore", an hour-long version called "The Breath of Life" and a 100-minute Blu-ray called "The Ultimate Version" that combines elements of both).
• Miles Davis's Pangaea has only two songs: "Gondwana" (46 minutes) and "Zimbabwe" (41 minutes). It's not the only example in his discography either. Perhaps the most extreme is Get Up With It, which lasts for over two hours despite having only eight songs (two of which exceeded 32 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).
• The Blood Brother's "Young Machetes" comes in right at an hour.
• 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, containing a single 61-minute track, which is pushing it even by ambient/dark ambient standards.
• 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 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, but the shortest track lasts over 26 minutes.
  • The band's EP Tulimyrsky has five tracks and lasts sixty-eight minutes (yes, it's longer than many of their albums). However, two of those songs are re-recordings and two are covers. The one new song is just barely under half an hour in length.
  • Moonsorrow in general is prone to this. Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa only has four proper songs (there are also three short ambient interludes) and the shortest of them is 11:43; the album lasts for over an hour. Verisäkeet has five songs, the shortest being 8:19 and the longest being 19:28; the album lasts for over seventy minutes.
• Autechre's Untilted has eight tracks, most at least 8 minutes in length, with its piece de resistance, Sublimit, clocking in at 15:52.
  • Their four-EP set Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae clocks in at a total of 2 hours and 29 minutes, including the 58-minute "Perlence subrange 6-36" listed above. This EP was a companion to the album Quaristice, which was already 73 minutes long, as well as Quaristice (Versions), another 68 minutes.
  • Exai is a total of 2 hours 10 minutes.
  • Topped with Elseq 1-5 21 tracks in roughly 4 hours.
  • Topped once more with "NTS Sessions" 36 tracks at exactly 8 hours. With only 5 of them being under 6 minutes in length and one of them nearly an hour long.
• The Downward Spiral and The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails. Especially the latter, which is a double album.
• Kesto (234.48:4), by the Finnish experimental techno duo Pan Sonic, lasts for exactly 234 minutes and 48 seconds (nearly four hours), as the title suggests. It is split over four discs, the last of which is comprised of a single hour-long song.
• Robert Rich's Somnium is a seven-hour ambient album made up of three tracks, the shortest of which being just under two hours. The idea behind such a lengthy album is for it to be listened to during sleep, starting as the listener settles down to sleep and ending with birdsong intended to wake the listener up.
• Ricardo Villalobos goes for maximum groove. His three albums, in order: Alcachofa, 77:36; Thé au Harem d'Archimede, 86:14; Dependant and Happy, 151:31. Even his singles and EPs are of enormous length: 72:39 for single Fizheuer Zieheuer (two 30+ minute songs) and 70:04 for EP Vasco.
• Not Bleeding Red by Nothing But Noise, an ambient side project of Front 242, is a total of 96 minutes(105 with the iTunes-exclusive bonus track "Happy Demons"), and two of the tracks clock over 18 minutes in length.
• Binary Finary's The Lost Tracks is 2.3 hours long, and the download includes a 1 hr 43 min DJ mix track of the songs.
• The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It runs for nearly three hours.
• Paulo de Rox's New Life is over 2 1/2 hours.
• Todd Rundgren was fond of stretching the vinyl format to its limitations, to the point where several albums had to be EQ'd and mastered more quietly to make them fit on a single record. A Wizard, a True Star is over fifty-six minutes long; Todd Rundgren's Utopia is over fifty-nine; Initiation, depending on the release, is nearly sixty-seven minutes long or even longer. Initation was even printed with a technical warning indicating that playing it with a worn needle would ruin the disc and recommending that the album be recorded to tape to preserve the sound quality. His double album Something/Anything? didn't stretch the vinyl format's limitations as badly, but came in at nearly ninety minutes long. Rundgren really likes this trope.
• Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka is an album that was merely produced by Brian Jones, but it doesn't feature him on vocals or instruments at all. Instead we hear the wonderful performances by the Master Musicians of Jajouka, a Moroccan folk group. All music on this album was performed live and plays out as one long epic performance, but shortened somewhat because in Real Life the actual length of these chants can stretch out to several hours!
• The Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat is a 76-minute album, and about half the songs are multi-part epics.
• Solar Fields' Random Friday is a total of 86 minutes long, and most of the songs are over 8 minutes, with the longest two, "Daydreaming" and "Perception", reaching 11:21 and 12:16 respectively. Likewise, Earthshine is 80 minutes, with three songs over 10 minutes in length, and none dropping below 8.
• Vaporwave artist t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 (already discussed above), as a side project, released the Self-Titled Album Virtual Dream Plaza^note Offically, 仮想夢プラザ, on which all 31 tracks are a little over 31 minutes long, resulting in the album having an approximate 16-hour runtime.
• Norwegian musical chameleons Ulver are fond of filling up a CD with as much audio data as possible. Their live album The Norwegian National Opera runs for 79:53 (the DVD/Blu-ray version is even longer), while their latest album ATGCLVLSSCAP (comprised of live improv overdubbed with studio compositions) runs for a few seconds beyond that. The band's album Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was even longer and had to be split over two CDs; even if you discount the silence before the hidden track at the end of the album, it's still over eighty-one minutes long. For the record, the maximum capacity of a CD is 79:58.
• Kayo Dot's Hubardo runs for almost 100 minutes. It's also a really weird Concept Album with some of band's most ambitious material to date, so it fits the other definition of "epic" as well.
• maudlin of the Well's Bath and Leaving Your Body Map were released separately, but are considered by the band to be two halves of a Distinct Double Album. Together they reach a running time of two hours and two minutes.
• Prince has the albums 1999 (70:33), Sign O The Times (79:52 across 2 discs/LPs), the Love Symbol album (74:56), but if that's not enough, Emancipation takes the cake for being seconds away from the 3-hour mark across 3 discs.
  • Early CD copies and digital releases of Lovesexy is one 45-minute track, everywhere else it is nine individual tracks.
• Australian atmospheric Black Metal band Midnight Odyssey has, to date, two full-length albums, both of which top the two-hour mark. As mentioned above, the second one, Shards of Silver Fade, only has eight tracks, the shortest of which is fourteen minutes long, and the longest of which is nearly twenty-two.
• As mentioned above, the British Doom Metal band Esoteric engages in this a lot, with several of their albums being double-disc affairs (Epistemological Despondency, The Pernicious Enigma, The Maniacal Vale, Paragon of Dissonance) that surpass the hour-and-a-half mark, and several songs climbing past the twenty-minute mark with ease (the longest, "Awaiting My Death", is twenty-six minutes long). The length of their albums does mean that they often take a while in between releases, but it also means that new releases are veritable goldmines for fans.
• Wolves in the Throne Room has a lot of albums that could qualify. The best example is probably the vinyl edition of Two Hunters, which has five songs and runs for around seventy minutes. The CD edition has four songs and goes on for about fifty.
• Sigur Rós's first three albums are all around 72 minutes in length. ( ) is especially noteworthy as it manages to achieve that length with only 8 songs, the shortest of which is still over 6 and a half minutes long. The Hvarf half of Hvarf/Heim is also impressive — despite only containing five songs, it comes in at almost 37 minutes long, coming close to what would typically be expected of a full-length album for most bands.
• Panopticon has a few examples, but The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness stands out as a Distinct Double Album (the first half being mostly Black Metal, the second half mostly Bluegrass, Folk Music, or Country Music) with a running time of more than two hours.
• The Field's Sound of Light is officially considered an EP, as it only contains four tracks. Each track, however, is around 15 minutes in length, making it around as long as (and in one case, even longer than) his full-length albums. Less impressive but still notable is his album The Follower. It's around 66 minutes long with only six tracks, four of which exceeding 10 minutes in length (and one of the remaining two just a few seconds shy).
• DR's album Drone Music (which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin) is over 4 hours long. All bar one (which barely misses the cut, being 5:56) of its 15 tracks qualify as this trope by themselves, 13 of which are over 10 minutes and 5 of which exceed 20, with the longest being 28:37.
• 天気予報's album ひまわり画像: the tracks themselves are not long (with the exception of "Into The Abyss..." at 10:42) but there are 360 of them, creating an album which lasts for over 6 hours.
• Brian Eno's Music For Installations is 5 hours and 25 minutes long and spans six discs. While it does have a lot of standard-length tracks, it also has several tracks that are at least 20 minutes long, with the longest being "77 Million Paintings" at 44 minutes, which is on its own disc!
• Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is seconds short of 75 minutes long.
  • The CD version of Selected Ambient Works Volume II is 2:36:42 in length, while the vinyl version increases the length by ten minutes with the LP-exclusive track "Stone in Focus".
  • drukQs is just over 100 minutes in length.
  • The eleven extended plays in the Analord series have a combined length of 3:24:04.
• μ-Ziq's debut album Tango n' Vectif has three versions: a CD version that runs for 78:24, a vinyl version with a different tracklist that runs for 90:35, and a CD reissue that combines all the songs from both original versions - alongside new tracks - for a total length of 2:23:21.
• Matmos' album The Consuming Flame: Open Excercises in Group Form is almost three hours long, spread across three discs consisting of 44 songs.
• The Orb's debut album The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld is a double album lasting 1:49:41. There are only ten songs, with four of them exceeding ten minutes and only one lasting less than eight minutes.
• The CD version of Amon Tobin's album Bricolage is 79:20, while the vinyl version that doesn't include "Chomp Samba" is still 73:13.
• Miles Davis' album Bitches Brew clocks in at 1:34:11, spread across only six songs. Only one song is under ten minutes, while two songs exceed twenty minutes.
• Squarepusher's album Ultravisitor runs for 79:41.
• The vinyl edition of Information Society's sophomore album Hack manages to shoehorn 15 tracks totalling over an hour in length onto a single LP.
• Cygnus X's Hypermetrical, totaling 65:27, has four of its seven songs break the 10-minute mark, namely "Kinderlied Parts 1 & 2"(11:33), "Deliberation"(12:11), "Turn Around"(10:09), and "Synchronism"(10:04), with only the Title Track clocking in at under 6 minutes.

Comedy/References/Parodies

• The song "6969" by Ninja Sex Party is an Affectionate Parody of Rush's 2112. The song clocks in at just under nine minutes, and shifts gears five separate times. It's quite the departure coming from a comedy band whose other songs often barely pass the three-minute mark.
  • Their next original album starts with "The Mystic Crystal", which likewise has 5 distinct movements, and tops "6969" by coming in at about thirteen minutes.
• Parodied in the Homestar Runner CD Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits 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 Spın̈al 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", "Jackson Park Express".
  • "Albuquerque" is a special case. On the rare occasions that Al performs it live, he'd sometimes start singing it, get almost to the end (where the singer forgets what he was talking about), and would thus decide to start the song over, making it even longer.
• Jello Biafra/Ministry side project Lard have "70's Rock Must Die", which lyrically is a rant against '70s 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, an overly repetitive chorus, and of course a Big Rock Ending). They also have straight examples with the 7 and a half minute "The Power Of Lard", the 15 minute "I Am Your Clock" and the 32-minute "Time To Melt" (the latter two don't really go through a lot of changes though, they're just deliberately punishingly slow)
• Bob's Burgers: In "Ears-y Rider", a biker gang holds a wake for their former leader, Horny Dave, at the mortuary next door to the restaurant. The song they play for him is at least 21 minutes long.
  Mort: This memorial jam has been going on for 21 minutes. I just wonder if I should fade it out.
  Biker: This was Horny Dave's favorite jam. Keep it cranked.
  Mort (nervously): Horny Dave's favorite jam? This is my favorite jam. Keep it cranked, Eddie!
• 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.
  • Parodied again on the same show years later by Jack Black and the cast; in an attempt to make a response to the overly trite birthday song everyone knows and hates, a 7-minute "epic" was written with plenty of pretentious lyrics set to a mixture of medieval and progressive rock, full of druids and witches, and signifying... nothing.
• "The most unwanted song" by "Komar & Melamid and Dave Soldier". Its length supposedly contributes to its unwantedness.
• Referenced in Rock Band World. One goal is named "Play For Long Time", and you have to play some of the longest songs in the Rock Band catalogue.
• Referenced in Mitch Benn's "Never Mind the Song (Look at the Stage Set)", in which a Hair Metal band's epic guitar solos are to allow the lead singer to nip offstage to the toilet in the middle of the song.
  • Also in a Led Zeppelin parody:
    And now everyone here is staring at me in fear
    'cause this is meant to be Stairway, obviously
    And the original song's a good eight minutes long
    He's not going to do all of it, is he?
• "We're Still Rockin'" by Da Yoopers is a rare straight example from a comedic group. The song is 5:57, starting with a slow tempo and building to a frenetic B-section before resuming its original tempo.
• The first verse of My Party Now by the Irish comedy band Dead Cat Bounce involves a guy finding a guitar and hijacking a party to perform for them. As part of what the attendants are subject to:
  I move on to
  Redemption Song;
  The version I do
  Is 20 minutes long!
• In the Broad City episode "Fattest Asses," Abbi and Ilana go to a party whose music includes a church bell techno song that lasts at least 27 minutes.
• Parodied in this article by The Hard Times: "Metal Song Not Even Close To Being Over". A punk accidentally wanders into a metal show and is overwhelmed by their 12+ minute songs. The same article ends with a punchline about how all Hardcore Punk songs are <90 seconds.
• While not itself an example, the song "Where It's At" in the Bend-Aid episode of Futurama becomes this accidentally when Beck sings it. The song starts normally enough, and there's a slight fade indicated a time jump after the characters are done talking, and then Beck comes on.
  Beck: Wooo. Normally that song doesn't go for three hours, but I got kind of into it. And then I forgot how it ended.

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.
    • And then Skaven, another Future Crew member, made a 30-minute, looping mod file named Beyond the Network as the soundtrack to Bejeweled 2, named after its opening movement.
• An interesting little open source program can stretch any audio file out to many, many times its original length.
  • Justin Bieber's 'U Smile' got the same treatment, becoming a 38-minute opus.
  • And here is Pogo's "Bloom" at 22 minutes.
• Most of, if not all of Kurzgesagt soundtracks are more than 4 minutes long.
• The Internet Is For Music is a 30-minute long mashup of nearly every Internet meme/viral video that existed at the time the song was created.
• Baseball, America's Pastime is a 9 hour long song that consists of one continuous song played on two different kinds of rock organs mixed in with western classical, Japanese, and Latin American instruments, occasionally sampling from classic baseball songs. You know those "10 hours of X" videos? You only need to play this once and add about 40 minutes of blank space at the end.
• This is a symphony composed entirely out of rock rearrangements of various Castlevania songs. The whole symphony is a hour and a half long, and each movement? At least 10 minutes long.

Further Reading

• These two Discogs lists, both quite long themselves (Archive Panic in full effect here), but to save you the time looking through them, the longest entries of both lists are 10^100 years & 9×10³⁶²³ years long, respectively. ^note  you can also just skip to the end: load page 2, click the address bar to show to the full web address for the page. At the end, where the text reads "=2", change the number to 103 for the first list or 47 for the second, and load the new address.

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