Side A
Artist	Song
Prologue:
John Cale	Macbeth
Act I:
Marianne Faithfull	Witches Song
The Left Banke	There's Gonna Be A Storm
Richard Hell and The Voidoids	Betrayal Takes Two
Oneida	Sinister Purpose
Act II:
Flying Saucer Attack	Rainstorm Blues
Black Sabbath	Black Sabbath
The Make-Up	The Bells
Smog	Bloodflow
Howlin' Wolf	Moanin' At Midnight
Side B
Artist	Song	Buy
Act III
The Clash	Somebody Got Murdered
Albert Ayler	Ghosts: First Variation
Pylon	Crazy
The Fall	There's A Ghost In My House
Act IV:
Opal	Magick Power
Royal Trux	Hallucination
Edgar Broughton Band	Evil
Act V:
This Kind Of Punishment	The Sleepwalker
Tindersticks	Blood
Savage Republic	Tragic Figures
The Velvet Underground	I'm Set Free

Comment:

I start student-teaching in about a month, and one of the things I have to teach is Macbeth. About a month ago I stayed up all night preparing a Macbeth unit plan for one of my classes. Sometime during the bus ride in to school to hand it in I got the, no-doubt delirium inspired, idea to make a Macbeth mix (I must have been listening to the Cale track). This is the fruit of that ridiculous idea. Basically this covers the key points of each act of the play more or less (I had to leave out some central elements naturally, for example I couldn't find a song that accurately conveyed Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane). Some songs, such as "Crazy" or "Evil" simply refer to overall motifs in a specific act (and usually, by extension, the play as a whole). Most of them refer to specific scenes or lines: "Moaning at Midnight" refers to the Porter Scene ("Somebody knocking on my door"), which means I also have to live with the anachronism of the song mentioning telephones. "Black Sabbath" refers obliquely to the Dagger soliloquy ("What is this I see before me") and, since it begins with the sound of rain and bells tolling, is just too perfect a fit. "Sleepwalker" and "Blood" naturally refer to Lady Macbeth's final madness, etc. etc. etc. "I'm Set Free" may seem like a strange song to end it with, but I always thought the line "I saw my head laughing rolling on the ground" tied in far too well with Macbeth's beheading (here I'm conflating the Polanski version with the play itself), and I also feel like it may be an accurate summation of what death comes to represent for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth by the end of the play. Interspersed between the songs are key quotations from the Orson Welles film version. I toyed with the idea of including the Macbeth tracks from Ellington's "Such Sweet Thunder" but gave up because they didn't suit the mood at all. I DO have better things to do with my time (like actually preparing to teach Macbeth), but I'm also a terrible procrastinator.

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