Top Five for the End of Time

Songs about the end of the world

My “eschatology” playlists capture songs that address any of the last things, confronting death, judgement, heaven, or hell. The list of great songs about facing death is very long. Heaven and hell have their fair share of references in popular music too. True apocalypse songs, however, are hard to come by. Here, I’ll dive into the best of those. The criteria for “best” is simply that I still queue these songs regularly and look forward to hearing them every time. There are other notable songs about the apocalypse that may have once captured my attention but no longer show up in my regular listening (Metallica’s “The Four Horsemen” I am looking in your direction). I’ve not included the subset of apocalypse songs specifically about facing a nuclear holocaust (something of late-eighties genre, Europe’s “Final Countdown,” Mike and the Mechanics “Silent Running,” and Genesis “Land of Confusion” come to mind here–not that they have a place in my regular listening these days). Included here are songs about the end of the world not caused by human action—real apocalyptic stuff—and they are songs that I still want to listen to today. This is not a ranking, just a listing with a few notes about why they remain in my rotation.

1. It’s the End of The World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

   REM from the 1987 Album Document

   “That’s great it starts with an earthquake

   Birds and snakes and aeroplanes . . .”

It’s the first song that comes to mind when you ask me for a song about the end of the world. After a rat-a-tat drum beat, the iconic opening lines above then blur into a rat-a-tat vocal performance of roughly 10,000 near-nonsense words sung by Michael Stipe without taking a single breath until everybody shouts, “Leonard Bernstein!” While I am something of a “lyrics guy” (meaning I pay attention to the words, usually know them, and they can alter my opinion of a song), I only know about 1/12th of the words to this song, so I cannot tell you what they are trying to say about the end times. There’s a comic moment in the middle where a call-and-answer seems to ask if we understand what is going on, “Right? Right.” But we don’t and they know it. The “I feel fine” line sounds potentially nihilistic, and the song reads as a dark comedy. That “feel fine” line is overlaid with a lilting, “time I had some time alone,” suggesting the narrator believes he’ll be the only one left? Um, Okay. The break toward the end that then re-introduces the raw guitar and a repetition of the chorus in a grand round is an epic moment, a joy every time. A bit tongue in cheek, it is a joyful romp into thinking about the end of time.

2. Calamity Song

   The Decemberists from the 2011 album The King is Dead

   “Had a dream. You and me and the war at the end times

   And I believe California succumbed to the fault line . . .”

With these lines, the Decemberists kick off their eschatological masterpiece that was no doubt inspired in part by REM’s classic. Brimming with energy from the initial syncopated hi-hat groove to the soaring “Ahh Ooo” vocal line of the chorus, “Calamity Song” provides a catchy, sweeping, and dramatic invitation into a meditation on the end of it all. Somehow not dark or depressing, “Calamity Song” is like something out of Revelation, including a grand war of good vs. evil where “scores of innocents died” and “all that remains are the arms of the Angels.” No Theological treatise however, it has comic moments and brings in references to pop culture, economics and fashion (“supply side bonhomme bone drab, you know what I mean?” [no, Colin, we don’t]), and the Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove (“build a civilization below ground . . .”). If that sounds wild. It is. Beyond the zany end-times lyrics, the Decemberists have written one of those songs that seems to never get old. It will likely remain in my regular rotation right up until my end times.

3. Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

   Staple Singers on the 1965 Album This Little Light

   (Original by Bob Dylan)

   “Oh where have you been, my wandering son?

   Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?”

REM and The Decemberists approach the end times with light touch. The Staples Singers “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” is no joke. The opening lines set the stage for the unfolding of a prophecy from the vision of a child in response to five questions: “Where have you been?”, “What did you see?”, What did you hear?”, “Who did you meet?”, and finally “what’ll you do now?” The answers are a dark, sometimes terrifying, litany of what is to come. Each revelatory verse is followed by the promise of judgment, “And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s hard, It’s a hard, It’s a hard, rain’s gonna fall.” The harmonies climb and build tension on each repetition of “It’s a hard” before resolving together on “rain’s gonna fall.” This brings the weight of impending judgment despite its sing-song harmony-laden call-and-answer structure that emphasizes the conversation with a child. It is chilling. Bob Dylan is credited as a great lyricist (he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2016), and these lyrics probably merit detailed reflection which I am not going to dive into here. Here is the “what did you see” section:

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Yikes. This is heavy stuff. The writing is a dark, mysterious, and poignant anticipation of the end times. Clocking in at over seven minutes long, and unfolding a dark vision, “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” doesn’t feel tiresome and—somehow—isn’t depressing. It’s rolling, repetitive cadence, beautiful harmonies, and sense of profundity is worthy of many repeat listens.

4. (Nothing But) Flowers

   Guster on the 2004 album On Ice–Live in Portland Maine

   (Original by Talking Heads)

   “Here we stand, like an Adam and Eve

   Waterfalls, garden of Eden . . .”

“(Nothing But) Flowers,” originally by the Talking Heads and performed brilliantly by Guster live in Portland Maine takes us beyond the end of the world to a post-apocalyptic vision of a new earth. A new Adam and a new Eve survey the scenes of a “shopping mall . . . all covered with flowers” and “parking lots” that have become “a beautiful oasis”, or a “pizza hut” that is “all covered with daisies”. But far from enjoying this rebirth, all of these discoveries are announced as a litany of complaints. “I miss the Honky Tonks, Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens.” Alienated from the world as he knows it, this Adam “can’t get used to this lifestyle.” While the song can read as an extended too-clever joke, it can also be read as a serious consideration of our attachment to the fallen world, a love of things and being unprepared for the end times. (For a more complete—and better—analysis, see Alan Jacob’s 1991 First Things essay on this song). This live Guster recording is spectacular. It captures the energy of the live setting (just the right amount of crowd noise), and the execution of the song itself is top notch. Guster infuses humanity into the vocal performance (in contrast to David Byrne’s anxiety-robot vibe) and at the same time they nail the instrumental moments (particularly the drum breaks). It’s an all-time favorite of mine regardless of the time of year.

5. The Man Comes Around

   Johnny Cash on the 2002 album American IV: The Man Comes Around

   “There’s a Man goin’ round, takin’ names

   And he decides who to free and who to blame . . .”

Johnny Cash takes the final judgment head on in this now classic folk tour de force (which translates literally, I believe, to “really awesome song”). Johnny Cash could sing the instructions for an IKEA bookshelf and it would sound like a Biblical prophecy.

Here, he is singing of Biblical prophecy, so the heft is kicked up to eleven (this prophecy goes up to eleven). If a folk musician is going to warn me that “The hairs on your arm will stand up, at the terror in each sip and in each sup” and ask me “Will you partake of that last cup? Or disappear into the potters ground, when the Man comes around?” I can’t think of anyone better than Johnny Cash to do it. In addition to his signature compelling conversational vocal performance, Cash adds rhythmic muted-string strumming for tension building effect, along with poetic flourishes in the lyrics (“The whirlwind is in the thorn tree / It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”). Diving head first into actual biblical warnings and preaching in a song is hard to pull off without sounding, well, preachy. Johnny Cash pulls it off here, creating a song that is worth listening to, worth thinking about, and worth putting into a regular listening rotation.

That brings us to the end of the “Top Five for the End Times” list. These are all included in the (growing) Eschatology 2025 playlist that can be found at the link below.