Songs and Food

The chef prepares a special menu
for your delight, oh my.
Tonight you fly, so high up in the vanilla sky.
Your life is fine: it’s sweet and sour, unbearable or great.
You gotta love every hour,
you must appreciate.
This is your time, this is your day.
You’ve got it all.
Don’t blow it away.
-Vanilla Sky, Paul McCartney



Paul McCartney’s song Vanilla Sky is probably the only good thing that came out of Tom Cruise and Cameron Crowe’s disastrous movie project. It also happens to be one of my favorite songs that went on extended play recently. I don’t have to explain, but it’s a song that enlightens and inspires.

There are songs and there are songs about food. I’m not food addled in the brain, it’s just that songs that use food allegories and metaphors are usually the ones I am drawn to. And while you may think that songs that use food typically relate to sex, food can bring richer meanings: life, love, longing, and inadvertently, laughter (consider the laughable horror that is MilkShake by Kelis: My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard and they’re like… better than yours, damn right, it’s better than yours. I can teach you, but I have to charge).



I still fall into a deep swoon when I hear Sting’s soulful Tea in the Sahara, imagining the sisters with their cups full of sand, waiting for the young man to reappear: tea in the Sahara with you. Food provides sustenance. It can nourish the stomach, the heart, the mind and this instance, the soul.

It won’t do
to dream of caramel
to think of cinnamon
and long for you.
It won’t do
to stir a deep desire
to fan a hidden fire
that can never burn true.
- Caramel, Suzanne Vega



Suzanne Vega’s Caramel is classic make-out song. The allusions to caramel and cinnamon make the longing more poignant, compelling. Thick, sweet, cloying, all-consuming unrequited romance. I can feel her predicament. I can almost taste her pain. It’s tragic and terribly, terribly romantic.

And when Fiona Apple came up with The First Taste, it perfectly captured the start of a grand, sensuous love affair.

Give me the first taste
let it begin
Heaven cannot wait forever.
I’m building memories on things we have not said.
Full is not heavy as empty, not nearly my love, not nearly.
- The First Taste, Fiona Apple



Allusions to food can be multi-sensorial. It can also serve to mirror life’s complexities. After all, what is paella but a hodgepodge, or probably a symphony, of flavors and textures? Food can also transport – remind one of instances most conducive to friendship and more. Consider the coffee moment, immortalized by Tanita Tikaram in song.



The woman smiles, the cafe feels like home to you
and as she glances through the magazine you feel somehow, she's seen you, too.
All my life I thought you said
all my life I heard you say
it'll be all right (All my life)
if you stay for all my life, for all my life.
- The Cappuccino Song by Tanita Tikaram

I’ll end with a song that almost serves as my theme song, but not quite.

Squint your eyes and look closer.
I'm not between you and your ambition.
I’m a poster girl with no poster.
I am 32 Flavors and then some.
- 32 Flavors, Alana Davis

Indeed, food is so much a part of our lives.

*I have a special cd mix of "food songs". Want one? Email me at mrs_so_rocks@yahoo.com or tell me how I can hook up with you in the comments section and I can send you a cd absolutely free. It’s an early Christmas present, and only because I’m nice.

**Photos taken from gettyimages.com