5 Classic Rock Songs Inspired By Your Favorite Movies

The artists who wrote the songs of the classic rock canon took inspiration from anywhere and everywhere: Their own lives, the world around them, and sometimes even the general culture, pulling characters and stories from popular and acclaimed films. Some movies persisted in the collective mind and became beloved and known to millions because of their insightful and captivating takes on the human condition. Songwriters and musicians saw something so special in these cinematic works that they adapted and interpreted them into short pop songs, synthesizing, condensing, and exploring their themes through a different lens. Classic literature has inspired many classic songs, and so have movies, an equivalent narrative staple of modern times.

Here then are five familiar songs we've all heard thousands of times that you may not know took their stories, ideas, and narrators from decidedly popular films. We have artists like America, Bob Seger, David Bowie, and more, drawing from movies as arty as "2001: A Space Odyssey" to lighter fare like the comedy-crime caper flick "The Sting."

1939's "The Wizard of Oz," the enduringly popular fantasy film and childhood classic based on a book by L. Frank Baum, follows Dorothy Gale as she leaves her dreary rural Kansas life in favor of a magical land. Here, she seeks an audience from a mysterious magical figure along with her gang: A courage-seeking humanoid lion, a sentient but brainless scarecrow, and a tin woodsman seeking a heart.

That latter character, also known as the Tin Man, was a clear and obvious hook for America's 1974 single "Tin Man," according to the 1970s folk-rock band member and songwriter Dewey Bunnell. "'Tin Man' was manufactured from the chunks of thoughts and themes that I was putting together into a kind of mosaic," Bunnell told American Songwriter. He added: "I originally wanted to write a cohesive dialogue about 'The Wizard of Oz,' which I loved. It was my favorite movie as a kid and it's still one of my Top Ten." Bunnell combined the fantastical and dream-based elements of "The Wizard of Oz" with some other cultural tropes of the era. "The song is like surrealism, which was a genre of art that was always mesmerizing for me," he explained. "There's the whole psychedelic thing, coming out of the '60s, the Woodstock generation, opening your eyes, expanding your mind, and looking at things differently."

"The Sting," starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as smooth 1930s con artists, was both a commercial and a critical smash. One of the top-grossing movies of 1973, the film went on to win seven prizes at the 1974 Academy Awards, including best picture. Later in the 1970s, the movie spurred Bob Seger to write and record one of his biggest hits with the Silver Bullet Band.

Seger had already completed "This Old House" when he attended a screening of "The Sting." "There's a line in it that struck me, when he said to the waitress, 'It's 4 in the morning, and I don't know anybody,'" Seger recalled to the Detroit Free Press. "That just hit me real hard. The next day I wrote 'We've Got Tonight,' this song about two people who say 'I'm tired. It's late at night. I know you don't really dig me, and I don't really dig you, but this is all we've got, so let's do it.'" Utilizing the chords and more or less the same melody from "This Old House," Seger crafted "We've Got Tonight," a No. 13 hit in early 1979.

Acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's 1968 release "2001: A Space Odyssey" created the modern template for space movies both in content and look. Unsurprisingly, the film won an Oscar and was nominated for three more. It was an adaptation, based on the thoughtful and philosophical science-fiction novel of the same name by Arthur C. Clarke. And based on this movie specifically, David Bowie composed "Space Oddity," a lightly psychedelic acoustic ballad about a wayward and disconnected astronaut.

Bowie's first charting song, the No. 5 U.K. hit "Space Oddity," was issued as a single in the summer of 1969 in favor of audiences captivated by the Apollo 11 astronauts' landing on the moon. But Bowie wrote the song after seeing "2001: A Space Odyssey" while under the influence of unspecified brain-altering substances. "I went stoned out of my mind to see the movie and it really freaked me out, especially the trip passage," Bowie said in the biography "Starman" by Paul Trynka. "It was really a revelation to me. It got the song flowing," he told Performing Songwriter.

Before he became a successful actor with a career almost destroyed by "Heaven's Gate," Kris Kristofferson was a sought-after songwriter in the 1960s and early 1970s. One day, Monument Records head Fred Foster issued a challenge: Write a song around the title "Me and Bobby McKee," with the name taken from a co-worker's secretary. Kristofferson misheard "Foster" and thought the woman in the title was named "Bobby McGee," and so he got to work. "For some reason, I thought of 'La Strada,'" Kristofferson told Performing Songwriter.

Directed by Federico Fellini in 1954, "La Strada" won the Oscar for best foreign language film. The movie follows a developmentally disabled woman forced into service as a traveling entertainer among other harrowing events. Kristofferson thought of a scene where Zampano (Anthony Quinn) travels by motorcycle with the main character, Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), playing a trombone until he jettisons her roadside. "Later in the film, he sees this woman hanging out the wash and singing the melody that the girl used to play on the trombone," Kristofferson explained. "He asks, 'Where did you hear that song?' And she tells him it was this little girl who had showed up in town and nobody knew where she was from, and later she died."

As recorded by Janis Joplin, the mournful and bittersweet "Me and Bobby McGee" hit No. 1 shortly after the singer died, topping the Hot 100 for two weeks in the spring of 1971.

Creedence Clearwater Revival missed the No. 1 spot so many times it set a record: Five No. 2 hits without ever going to No. 1. Among those almost chart-toppers was the summer 1969 smash, "Bad Moon Rising." A musically rollicking bit of boogie-down country rock, it's the opposite lyrically — a collection of worries about omens and foretelling of doom. John Fogerty, frontman and main singer-songwriter for Creedence Clearwater Revival, got the idea for the song from a movie that's similarly about dark and wicked forces. Particularly, the idea that humans must, on some distant and unspecified day that looms in the future, pay severe consequences for nefarious deeds. That film: 1941's "All That Money Can Buy," also known as "The Devil and Daniel Webster." It's the classic, definitive film take on the modern Faustian bargain tale about a farmer (James Craig) who sells his soul to the devil, aka Mr. Scratch (Walter Huston), in exchange for abundance and recruits legendary lawyer Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold) to win it back for him.

"I got the imagery from an old movie called 'The Devil and Daniel Webster,'" Fogerty told Rolling Stone (via Riverising). "... My song wasn't about Mr. Scratch, and it wasn't about the deal. It was about the apocalypse that was going to be visited upon us."