History Main / EpicRocking

* Several Klaus Schulze albums, such as ''Timewind'' and ''Moondawn'', both of which consist of two 30-minute-a-piece tracks.

* Anything by ambient electronica group Dilate. One album had to have its songs compressed to fit on a single CD.

* Donna Summer's "[=MacArthur=] Park Suite" is 17:40. The stand-alone version of "[=MacArthur=] Park" is itself 8:24.

* BeyondTheImpossible: ''Olitsky'' by Ian Mellish consists of four tape loops of slightly different lengths (around 44 minutes), that theoretically would take ''1.6 million years'' to complete its cycle.

* Canadian indie rock band Wintersleep has several long songs: "Motion" on the ''Wintersleep'' album, which begins with a single acoustic guitar chord being strummed once per bar, and ends with distorted guitars colliding with a 35mm film synchronizer being tortured. The ''Untitled'' album has "Nerves Normal, Breath Normal" which segues out of another song and goes on for 7:23, including a lengthy jam and a drum solo, and "Danse Macabre" which starts as a fairly straightforward hard rock song, then turns into a quiet jam, and ends with the drummer wildly crashing his cymbals at high speed. ''Welcome To The Night Sky'' ends with "Miasmal Smoke & The Yellow Bellied Freaks", an 8-minute long song that shifts through instrumental moods before becoming a high-tempo rock song, then becomes a 2-minute prolonged outro.

This trope also has the subtrope "Epic Jamming", which is {{Exactly What It Says On The Tin}}. Only studio versions are included, since live examples would bloat the list to hell.

* The Grateful Dead: Their entire catalog.

* Jimi Hendrix: "Hear My Train A'Coming", "Voodoo Chile", "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)", "Machine Gun", "Country Blues", "Bold As Love".
* {{Led Zeppelin}}: "You Shook Me", "Dazed and Confused" (the version on the ''The Song Remains The Same'' Soundtrack is nearly half an hour long), "How Many More Times", "Stairway to Heaven", "When the Levee Breaks", "In My Time of Dying", "Kashmir", "In the Light" "Achilles; Last Stand".

* {{The Who}}: "A Quick One, While He's Away", "Underture", "We're Not Gonna Take It", "Won't Get Fooled Again", "Love Reign O'er Me" , "Who are You".

* Dire Straits have "Telegraph Road" (14 minutes) and "Tunnel Of Love" (8 minutes).
** What about "Money for Nothing" or "Love Over Gold"
* The Doors: "The End", "Riders on the Storm", "Light My Fire" , "LA Woman", "Celebration of the Lizard King", "When the Music's Over".
* Velvet Underground: "Heroin", "All Tomorrow's Parties", "The Gift", "Sister Ray", "The Murder Mystery".

** {{Queen}}: full stop.

* Jefferson Airplane: "Spare Chaynge", "Hey Frederick".
* Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Free Bird"

* AC/DC - While "For Those About To Rock" is on the shorter side at 5:44, it makes up for the brevity with several tempo changes, blistering interleaved guitars, and cannons. FIIIIIRE!

** On the AC/DC Live album, "High Voltage" and "Let There be Rock" also pitch in with respectable times of 10:33 and 12:17 respectively.
* Modest Mouse: "Spitting Venom", "Stars are Projectors", and "Trucker's Atlas" all clock in over 8 minutes long. Heck, their average song is close to 5 minutes long

* Meat Loaf's overblown, symphonic style of rock includes lots of examples: "Bat Out of Hell", "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)", "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", and so on. Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf's principal songwriter, coined the term "Wagnerian Rock" to describe this style, and is at least partly responsible for its epic excess. Witness Steinman's productions for artists like Air Supply (''Making Love Out Of Nothing At All''), Celine Dion (''It's All Coming Back To Me Now'', which Meat Loaf would eventually [[CoveredUp cover]]), and Bonnie Tyler (''Total Eclipse Of The Heart''), and Todd Rundgren's willing participation, as producer and lead guitarist on ''Bat Out Of Hell'', are both mysteries that will probably never be solved.

* Early Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. Most notably the 23 minute MindScrew of "Supper's Ready". But also deserving mention are the fan favorite 10 minute songs "Firth of Fifth", "The Musical Box", "Fountain of Salmacis" and more.
** Phil Collins-era Genesis has some, too, like "Domino".

* {{Pink Floyd}}: "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", "Echoes", "Interstellar Overdrive", "A Saucerful of Secrets", "Atom Heart Mother", "Comfortably Numb" (particularly the P* U* L* S* E version).

** Their latest album, Death Magnetic, is a return to form. Not one song on Death Magnetic is under 5 minutes, and only 1 is under 6 minutes ("My Apocalypse" - 5:01).
** ''Load'' also has a pair of long ones - "Bleeding Me" runs 8 minutes and "Outlaw Torn" just short of 10 minutes.

* Manowar's 27-minute (!) epic "Achilles: Agony and Ecstasy (In Eight Parts)", also a case of ShownTheirWork oddly enough.

* Jane's Addiction: "Ted, Just Admit It...", "Three Days", "Then She Did...".
* Faith No More: "The Real Thing", "Jizzlobber", "King for a Day".

* {{Judas Priest}}: "Run of the Mill", "Winter", "Victim of Changes", "Sinner", "Beyond the Realms of Death", "Blood Red Skies", the live version of "Diamonds and Rust", also, a few of their newer songs manage to stretch on and on and not get old, namely "The Future of Mankind" and "War" but {{Your Mileage May Vary}} with the other new stuff.

* IronMaiden: "Hallowed Be Thy Name", "Longest Day", "Brave New World", "Paschendale", "Fear Of The Dark", "Rime Of The Ancient Mariner", etc. Typically each album ended with one of these.
** And not to mention practically all of ''A Matter of Life and Death'', not just "Longest Day". Only two of the 10 songs clock in under six minutes.

** Also "All Around the World", which at 9:20 in length is the longest ever A-side on a UK number 1 single. It's likely to retain this record since the rules were changed.

* Bruce Springsteen routinely wrote sprawling, epic numbers, often intended to be live show-stoppers. These include "Jungleland", "Racing in the Street", "Incident on 57th Street", "Rosalita", "New York City Serenade", "Kitty's Back" and "Backstreets". Often, shorter songs like "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", "Mary's Place", and "The E-Street Shuffle" were stretched to incredible twenty-minute-plus lengths live.

* R. Kelly's bizarre, overblown, [[SoBadItsGood hilarious]] Trapped in the Closet saga.

* "Liberation" by Outkast is an 8-minute, piano-driven, semi-spiritual piece featuring Cee-Lo, Erykah Badu, and spoken word artist Big Rube. It would have been a perfect way to close out ''Aquemini'', as opposed to the mediocre "Chonkyfire".

* Elton John: "Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding", "Carla/Etude/Chloe", "Tonight", "It's Hay Chewed"

** ''Number nine, number nine, [[HellIsThatNoise number nine...]]

* Dire Straits sometimes ventured into epic rocking territory with such songs as "Telegraph Road" (About 14 minutes), "Brothers in Arms" (Nearly 7 minutes), "Tunnel of Love" (8 minutes) and more.

* ''Lateralus'' by Tool. The songs are plenty long (more than half are 6 minutes or longer), but the real whopper is the album itself, at 78 minutes and 58 seconds.

* ''Quadrophenia'' by The Who.

* ''AmericanIdiot'' by GreenDay.

* ''Freak Out!'', ''Absolutely Free'' and ''We're Only in It for the Money'' by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

* ''Thick as a Brick'' and ''A Passion Play'' by Jethro Tull, the former being an AffectionateParody of the trope and the latter more serious.
* ''A Night at the Opera'' by Queen. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the more mainstream rock songs there.
* Many Pink Floyd albums but particularly ''Dark Side of the Moon'', ''Wish You Were Here'', ''Animals'' and ''TheWall''
** Some of their earlier albums can count, too. "Atom Heart Mother" and "Meddle" both have songs that take up a whole side of the album.

* {{Yes}}: Relayer. 3 songs. at 40:28. "The Gates of Delirium" alone is over 20 minutes long.
*** This is nothing new to the band. 1972's Close to the Edge had three songs. The title track (18:43) took up an entire side, And You and I (10:08) and Siberian Khatru (8:55) filled the record out. Arguably the CMoA for prog rock.

* {{Lady Gaga}}'s "Alejandro" nearly reaches 9 minutes.

* Parodied in {{This Is Spinal Tap}} with "Jazz Odyssey".
* Parodied by {{Weird Al Yankovic}}, repeatedly: "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota", "Genius in France", "Nature Trail to Hell", "Albuquerque", "Trapped in the Drive-Thru", "You Don't Love Me Anymore".

* Surprisingly, NobuoUematsu pulled off a ridiculously ''epic'' one of these... back in the Nineties, and with a SNES game to boot. FinalFantasyVI has the longest single song in the ''entire FinalFantasy series'', the final boss theme, ''Dancing Mad''. Playing during the final SequentialBoss battle, which consists of four separate battles against two or more enemies per battle, ''Dancing Mad'' has a unique section for each battle, and each unique battle section loops at least once on the official version (note that if you take too long fighting one of the battles, the song will simply loop again, making the final song even ''longer''.) The official soundtrack version clocks in at 17 minutes. The Black Mages clocked that shit out at only 12- apparently they decided that trying to do the whole thing would just kill them, so they quit while they were ahead.
** The One-Ups, a semi-famous orchestra group that played video game music, used the entire 17 minute epic as its very last concert, ever; it's on the Net somewhere. It's ''epic''.

-->-- The back of [[DreamTheater Liquid Tension Experiment]]'s first CD.

* Half of the songs on "The Monitor" by Titus Andronicus are over seven minutes long, but " The Battle Of Hampton Roads" takes the cake at 14 minutes.

* ''Ys'' by Joanna Newsom. The shortest song is seven minutes.

** Their newest song, "Like a Wall in which an Insect Lives and Gnaws" is ''50,000 hours'' long. That's almost [[ThisIsSparta SIX.]] [[PrecisionFStrike FUCKING.]] [[ThisIsSparta YEARS.]]

** Their newest song, "Like a Wall in which an Insect Lives and Gnaws" is 50,000 HOURS long.

*George Thorogood and the Destroyers: "One Burbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (11:25 for the extended version. Bonus points for being a [[CoveredUp cover]].)

*CreedenceClearwaterRevival: "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", which clocks in at 11 minutes and five seconds.

** ''[=ESCM=]'' also has a couple multi-part pieces; Firewater=>Orbitus Terranium=>Flaming June=>Lullaby for Gaia, and Memories in a Sea of Forgetfulness=>Solar Plexus=>Nectar.

* "Arms Against Atrophy" by Titus Andronicus