Music about fruit and vegetables often comes bundled with odd, colourful quirks, mirroring the pure, wild essence of natural foods.
We’ve collected some stand-out pop and rock songs about fruit and veg to add some spice into your daily mix, whether you’re cooking for a dinner date or living life in the limelight.
Songs About Fruits And Vegetables
1. Led Zeppelin – Tangerine
Tangerine is a short and sweet Led Zeppelin track, harbouring a breathtaking landscape of summer scenery painted within its colourful lyrics.
This track’s sound evolves from mystical acoustic harmonies into an electrified psychedelic masterpiece gowned in stunningly warm guitar solos and the bittersweet fragrance of crushing heartbreak.
Tangerine has been described as a track whose meaning changes with the tides of life, echoing a different significance with each eventual return to the song. Zeppelin’s lyrics are crafted beautifully, threading in their title metaphor to reflect the ecstasy of a lost lover;
“Measuring a summer’s day, I only find it slips away to grey, the hours they bring me pain. Tangerine, tangerine, living reflection from a dream, I was her love, she was my queen, and now a thousand years in between.”
2. McFly – Broccoli
Featured as the final track on McFly’s debut album, Broccoli is an irresistibly quirky pop track backlit by a vegetable theme.
Broccoli isn’t the focus of this track, instead McFly use it to set a scene for a story of teen boy being stood up by his crush after preparing all day for their dinner date.
McFly match the quirky nature of their title by dusting bright, eccentric flavours upon their up-tempo track, whilst stylistically reflecting the despair and disappointment of being stood up through their nostalgic use of harmony.
3. Harry Style – Watermelon Sugar
Harry Style’s US #1 single, Watermelon Sugar, hosts a bounty of fruit inspiration embellished within its dream-clad lyrics. This fresh track ties a subtle euphemism to juicy fruits and sugary natural syrups, every beat adorned with an intoxicating, summery feeling;
“Strawberries on a summer evening, baby, you’re the end of June … Breathe me in, breathe me out, I don’t know if I could ever go without, watermelon sugar high … I just wanna taste it, I just wanna taste it, watermelon sugar high.”
4. Kate Nash – Pumpkin Soup
Kate Nash’s indie-pop single, Pumpkin Soup, makes no direct references to the dish, instead using the title to lure you into a story about love’s confusion.
Blending an array of sweet and sour quirks, this track is about wanting a boy but not wanting love, whilst struggling to decipher the blurred line between friendship and commitment;
“You’re chatting to me, like we connect, but I don’t even know if we’re still friends, it’s so confusing, understanding you is making me not want to, and things that I know I should do, but I trip fast and then I lose, and I hate looking like a fool. I just want your kiss boy.”
5. Blur – Peach
This obscure album track from Blur’s hit album Modern Life Is Rubbish, harvests the usual sweet, dreamy ambience found within songs about fruit, instead using it as a landscape for a much sadder story with little to do with peaches at all.
Blur’s opening lyric, “Chemical waste, best part of the peach, you’re always the way you are,” sets the scene for a tale of loneliness and deep-rooted despondency, illuminated by a strange psychedelic influence;
“A gun in your pocket, and hair in a locket around your neck, from the girl you once loved. Where is she now? You’ve gone crazy. You’ve got a gaping hole in your head, I’d let the birds nest there instead.”
6. The Beatles – Glass Onion
The Beatles’ White Album track, Glass Onion, is one of John Lennon’s infamous ‘joke’ songs designed to reveal the imaginary mythos of the band to their audience of armchair detectives.
Weaving in a number of references to prior hits such as Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am The Walrus, The Beatles use this track to dispel rumours while crafting others in the same breath;
“I told you about the walrus and me, you know we’re as close as can be, well here’s another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul.”
Glass Onion may appear to obtain its name from the nonsense style of psychedelia inherent to The Beatles’ later work, but the title is actually a metaphor describing the layers of mythology spawned by the media’s sensationalism of The Beatles.
The word ‘glass’ alludes to the fact that many rumours, such as the Paul Is Dead conspiracy, are transparently false, whilst the true meanings of divisive Beatles songs are actually as clear as day.
7. Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit
One of the most potent songs about fruit ever released, Billie Holiday’s magnificently dark jazz track Strange Fruit was released in 1939, as a morbid reflection of the lynching that desecrated the lives of black people in the US.
Billie draws shamelessly sickening parallels between a tree dotted with fresh fruits and a tree strung with fresh bodies, her metaphor forming one of the most disturbing yet profoundly poetic tracks to ever be released;
“Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, for the sun to rot, for the tree to drop, here is a strange and bitter crop.”
8. Frank Zappa – Call Any Vegetable
Frank Zappa’s 1969 track, Call Any Vegetable, is a zesty, melodious track brimming with absolute nonsense. His echoing title lyric is interspersed by short spoken word segments about prunes, laced with yodelling and dizzyingly eccentric prog rock rhythms.
If you’re new to Zappa’s innovative and incomparably eccentric music style, this is one hell of a track to start off with.
9. Rush – Limelight
Rush’s time-capsule hit, Limelight, devotes its addictive harmony to amplifying a story about celebrity.
This track is about working incessantly beneath the blinding limelight, learning to live with fame and embrace your life’s calling, despite experiencing soul-breaking alienation from the cosy, quiet world you once knew.
Rush’s compelling 80s sound is naturally honeyed with a sense of nostalgia, now enriched even more so by the age their track has amassed.