Best Earth Day Songs: 20 Tracks That Make The World A Better Place – uDiscover Music

Every year, on 22 April, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement. Songs about the natural world, including those by Woody Guthrie, have been around since the 40s, and many of the greatest songwriters have penned compositions about the planet on which we all exist. The best Earth Day songs, then, reflect not only the ways in which our planet has changed over the years, but also the ways in which we have expressed concern over its survival.

To mark Earth Day, we have selected our 20 best environmental songs. Though we werent able to squeeze in all our favourites and had to leave out wonderful songs by Ken Boothe (The Earth Dies Screaming), The Byrds (Hungry Planet), Miley Cyrus (Wake Up America), Bo Diddley (Pollution), Peter Gabriel (Here Comes The Flood) and Country Joe McDonald (Save The Whales) we scoured reggae, jazz, country, folk, soul, rock and pop for songs both disturbing and inspiring.

Heres to this amazing endangered world of ours. Think weve missed any of your best Earth Day songs? Let us know in the comments section, below.

Listen to the best Earth Day songs on Apple Music and Spotify.

The song One World was recorded in a Berkshire barn. John Martyn remembered it as a time when the adjoining farmhouse was filled with Jamaican friends and their children who were in England to visit Island Records boss Chris Blackwell. The title track of his masterpiece album features one of Martyns greatest vocal performances, against his echo-saturated guitar. The song has a beautiful simplicity, as he sings, Its one world, like it or not/Its one world, believe it or not/Its one world. Nearly three decades later, when Martyn was reflecting on the song, he believed he had captured a zeitgeist moment. One World has now become a phrase used all over the television, Martyn said. Took em a long time to f__king realise. I dont think many people knew the expression before then. The tune is superb a perfect expression of how we are all individual and universal at the same time.

Bonos longing for spiritual renewal was reflected in his song Indian Summer Sky, which is about the desire to return to a more organic world (the seasons change, and so do I). Bono wrote the song in New York and said he was trying to convey a sense of spirit trapped in a concrete jungle. Sixteen years earlier, U2 had allowed a live version of their song Until The End Of The World to appear on the album Alternative NRG, which raised funds for Greenpeace. U2 were joined by other bands, such as Sonic Youth and UB40, on an album recorded live with a solar-powered mobile facility. Guitarist Brian May of Queen contributed the song New Damage.

Since the dawn of industrialisation, poets and songwriters have been extolling the spiritual and mental health benefits of getting out into nature. Dar Williams wrote the powerful song Go To The Woods in 2012, a composition that expressed her fears that the green spaces of the world are disappearing. Touring musician Williams devotes her spare time to environmental causes, not least her Give Bees A Camp project, which combines concerts and planting bee-friendly gardens for schoolchildren. Williams has also covered Joe Strummers rousing song Johnny Appleseed (If youre after getting the honey, hey/Then you dont go killing all the bees).

On his 1974 album Ragged Old Flag, country singer Johnny Cash addressed the political issue of the environment, through the device of a nostalgic song in which a father warns his son that they cannot eat the fish they are trying to catch. Though the acoustic mood of the song is upbeat Cash was joined on guitar by Carl Perkins the lyrics are bleak: There was a time the air was clean/And you could see forever cross the plains/The wind was sweet as honey/And no one had ever heard of acid rain.

Mike Love, who co-wrote with Al Jardine a different song also called Dont Go Near The Water, said he hated the ignorance that made people violate the laws of nature. Love and Jardine were encouraged by The Beach Boys then manager, Jack Rieley, to write an environmental song for the band, and the result was the anti-pollution plea that became the opening track for their 1971 album, Surfs Up. The prescient lyrics about man poisoning the sea were sung by Brian Wilson and the band. The downbeat mood of the song was heightened by the eerie Moog synthesiser playing of Daryl Dragon.

Photographs of the dust storms that wrecked southern America in the 30s are still shocking, and the devastation and migration they caused prompted Woody Guthrie to write his brilliant album Dust Bowl Ballads. I met millions of good folks trying to hang on and to stay alive with the dust cutting down every hope, said Guthrie, who made poetry out of despair.

In Pollution, the brilliant satirical singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer warned visitors to America about the environmental problems of his home country, and the way his nations air and water was being blighted. A short film of Pollution, featuring a cartoon of a bird playing the piano at a rubbish dump, combined with scenes of industrial contamination across the States, was made for the US Communicable Disease Centre. The bitingly funny lyrics included the verse Just go out for a breath of air/And youll be ready for Medicare/The city streets are really quite a thrill/If the hoods dont get you, the monoxide will.

Randy Newman was poleaxed by back pain and lying on the floor in 1969 when a television news item came on about the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, literally catching fire once again, because it was filled with oil waste. His disturbing song, sung at a maudlin pace with slow piano, is full of potent imagery: The Cuyahoga River goes smokin through my dreams/Burn on, big river/Burn on.

Rush lyricist Neil Peart once commissioned some drum makers to build him an entire kit from a 1,500-year old piece of Romanian wood. Peart recalled that he wrote his song The Trees in about five minutes, after seeing a cartoon picture of trees carrying on like fools. He said: I thought, What if trees acted like people? So I saw the song as a cartoon, really, and wrote it that way.

Queen singer Freddie Mercury said that he sometimes felt helpless about the state of the planet and that was the reason he and Brian May penned Is This the World We Created?. Mercury went on to explain that he and May were thinking about poverty going on all around the world and thats why the track came about it was a way of showing that I can do my bit. The song, which reflected the suffering of children, came at the time of natural disasters in Africa which had resulted in terrible famine. Queen performed the song, which was on their 1984 album, The Works, as the encore to their famous Live Aid showin 1985.

In 1971, singer-songwriter John Prine wrote his marvellous song Paradise about the environmental damages of strip mining and the destruction it wreaked on small communities. Paradise, which was also known as Mr Peabodys Coal Train, was about was about Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, the town his parents had grown up in and how it was ruined by a coal company. Among the poetic, moving verses is: Then the coal company came with the worlds largest shovel/And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken/Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

On his 1974 environmental song, Before The Deluge, Jackson Browne told the story of his generations ideals and illusion, and their fall from grace. The song was eerily prophetic, with its stark warning: Some of them were angry/At the way the earth was abused/By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power/And they struggled to protect her from them/Only to be confused/By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour. The song was from the album Late For The Sky, which featured Jai Winding, the son of Verve Recordsjazz trombonist Kai Winding, on keyboards. Versions have been recorded by musicians as diverse as Joan Baez and Christy Moore.

Cat Stevens wrote his song Where Do The Children Play? for the 1970 album Tea For The Tillerman. The song reflects many of his concerns about poverty, war, ecological disaster, pollution and the future of the human race. Stevens became a Muslim later in the decade and is now known as Yusuf Islam. He remains committed to what he called the harmony and balance of the universe, and in May 2019 gave his support to Europes first green mosque, in Cambridge, which was clad in solar panels and surrounded by apple trees.

Earth Song, which appeared on the album HIStory: Past, Present And Future, Book I, was the best of Michael Jacksons socially conscious songs. This sweeping track about the environment and welfare was a No.1 hit in the UK and went on to receive a Grammy nomination. It was notable for its powerful video, too.

Bob Marley died in 1981, but his music continues to inspire people who love protest songs and care about the environment. In 2019, for example, Chicagos The Rock And Roll Playhouse held an Earth Day celebration concert featuring tunes by the great master of reggae. Marleys gorgeous song Sun Is Shining was first recorded in the 60s and re-recorded for the album Kayain 1978. Island Records boss Chris Blackwell later recalled, The original version of Sun Is Shining was produced by Lee Perry. I loved his production, which was very sparse. But the version we re-recorded for Kaya has a great atmosphere, too. We tried to reflect the essence of the song, which is saying the sun is shining but dont forget that people are suffering too.

I wrote Big Yellow Taxi on my first trip to Hawaii, Mitchell explained in 1996. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart this blight on paradise. Thats when I sat down and wrote the song. Mitchells mesmerising song has been covered by Bob Dylan, Counting Crows and Janet Jackson.

Bob Dylan was only 21 when he wrote the beautiful lyrics, such as Ive stumbled on the side of 12 misty mountains, in A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, the iconic protest songin which he warned of impending apocalypse. In 2009, before a United Nations climate change conference began in Denmark, the UN Environment Programme released a rare live recording of Dylan performing his song-poem set to dramatic photographs of shrunken ice caps, barren landscapes and devastated lives.

The mysterious, multi-layered After The Gold Rush is full of different themes and meanings, but there is one thing at the heart of the song: After The Gold Rush is an environmental song, said Neil Young. Dolly Parton has recorded several versions it. The line Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s is memorably chilling, and has been updated by Young, who now sings in the 21st Century in concert. Young also wrote Be The Rain, a song that calls on the big oil companies to stop ruining the planet. In 1985, Willie Nelson, Young and John Mellencamp set up Farm Aid to increase awareness about the importance of family farms. Young has remained a committed environmental activist and in 2018 he criticised President Trump for his denial of climate-change science.

The beautiful voice of Marvin Gaye rings out in despair as he sings Where did all the blue skies go? on his Motownclassic Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), which was written for his 1971 album, Whats Going On. At the time, Motown boss Berry Gordyhad not heard the word ecology, and Gayes masterful song may have been one of the first ever to deal with the mercury poisoning of fish. This is a sorrowful masterpiece and, given what we now know has happened to the environment in the past half-century, seems a moment of musical genius and foresight.

What A Wonderful World is one of the most uplifting, life-affirming songs of all time and all because of the heartfelt warmth in the singing of the jazz legend Louis Armstrong, a man who was already in failing health when he recorded the two-minute gem, written by Bob Thiele and George Weiss. Lush instrumentation introduces a magnificent song that opens with such memorable lines: I see trees of green, red roses, too/I see them bloom for me and you/And I think to myself: What a wonderful world.

Its good to end on a note of positivity so treat yourself on Earth Day and savour again the beauty of Satchmos hit.

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Best Earth Day Songs: 20 Tracks That Make The World A Better Place - uDiscover Music