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{{examples}}
== By genre ==
=== Afrobeat ===
* Fela Kuti: Most songs are longer than 10 minutes, some live versions take more than one side of an LP.
===
* [[Burial]]'s remixes of the [[Massive Attack]] songs "Four Walls" and "Paradise Circus" are both over 10 minutes long.
* [[Kraftwerk]]'s ''Autobahn'' is over 24 minutes long, and was one of the first hits of the band that pioneered techno in the 70's.
** The two part piece "Kometenmelodie" from the same album.
** "Trans Europe Express/Metall auf Metall/Abzug" is a total of 14 minutes.
* [[Orbital]]: When their songs get really long, they'll sometimes split them into two tracks, labeled part 1 and part 2, such as "Nothing Left" from ''The Middle of Nowhere'' and "Out There Somewhere?" from ''In Sides''.
** Sometimes their studio albums employ [[Fading Into the Next Song]], and the band will then treat the entire song suite as a single epic song at live shows. For example, "Lush / Impact / Remind", and "Way Out / Spare Parts Express / Know Where to Run".
** Their EP ''The Box'' had 4 different alternate mixes of the title song. Later, for the second disc of the American release of ''In Sides'', all four of these tracks were strung together as a single 28-minute track.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GqRsmffeVI "Escape Velocity"] by The Chemical Brothers is 12 minutes long. Since every track on the new album will be accompanied by short films, and segue into each-other, it can be assumed to be an epic album with every track that long.
* [[Daft Punk]]'s songs (when not live or remixed) rarely ever break six minutes in length, a rarity amongst electronic music. Those that do are "Around the World", "Rollin' & Scratchin'", "Rock 'n Roll", and "Burnin'" from ''Homework'', "Emotion" from ''Human After All'', and [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|the aptly named]] "Too Long" from ''Discovery'' which clocks in at exactly 10:00 in length.
* [[Erasure]], mostly known for three-to-four-minute, fast-paced synthpop, released a self-titled album in 1995 that was "influenced by Pink Floyd and prog rock". The average song length is seven minutes, and the longest is the 10:06 head-trip ballad "Rock Me Gently". ([[Zig Zagged Trope|Which was later given a stronger beat, remixed into a four-minute pop song and released as a single.]])
* [[Jean Michel Jarre]] has so many pieces of music which are longer than five minutes that many fans count only his three famous suites from the 80s as "epic": "Ethnicolor" and "Rendez-vous 2", both of which are almost twelve minutes long, and "Industrial Revolution" which exceeds 16 minutes.
** The longest piece of music he ever released, however, is "Waiting For Cousteau". It takes up most of the album of the same name at a length of almost 47 minutes. It should be mentioned, though, that this piece is an assembly of soundbites created for an exhibition which contained photographs and selected objects from Jarre's concerts, and lacks rhythm or structure.
* Xorcist's "Scorched Blood: Rising From The Ashes" from the ''Scorched Blood'' EP is 16:05. The last minute is actually silence to hide the [[Hidden Track]].
* Trance project Ayla's ''Nirwana'' album has the two-tracker "Into the Light / Out of the Light", 14 minutes total. Another epic track from the album is "Ayla(Taucher Remix)", at 9:33. The "Waterfall" and "Elemental Force" remixes of "Angelfalls" are 8:29 and 7:57, respectively.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlv3ka6iupg Paraglide(Blue Sky Mix)] by Paragliders(one of Oliver Lieb's [[I Have Many Names|many aliases]]) is 12:15.
* Kashiwa Daisuke, an experimental/progressive electronic musician, likes this. Program Music I is an hour long, and has two tracks.
* While it's fairly common for ambient house songs to go on for a while, The Orb makes music that's even long by their genre's standards. Their lengthiest song was the 40-minute epic, "Blue Room." And it was released as a single. Gallup (the compilers of the UK singles chart at the time) stated songs that are 40 minutes or longer are considered albums rather than singles. [[Crowning Moment of Funny|The Orb's response to this?]] They created a [[Take That|39:57 mix]] of the song for radio airplay.
* [[Covenant]]'s "Subterfugue for Three Absynths", from the ''Skyshaper'' bonus disc, is 43 minutes, although it's mostly an industrial noise loop.
** "Cryotank Expansion" (25:46) from ''Dreams of a Cryotank''.
* [[Juno Reactor]] has a few multi-part songs, eg "Rotorblade/Mars" from ''Beyond The Infinite'', "Nitrogen" from ''Shango'' and "Conquistador" from ''Labyrinth'', whose first half is an [[Epic Instrumental Opener]].
** Many of their single-part songs are epically long as well. "Samurai," "Children of the Night," "Guardian Angel," and "Zwara (Sleepwalker)" are all 7–10 minutes long. "Mona Lisa Overdrive," composed for [[The Matrix]] Reloaded, is just over 10.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi3K7whmIng "Deeply Disturbed (Infected Remix)" by Infected Mushroom] (9:06), among others.
* Trance songs routinely clock around 7–8 minutes, but usually this includes an extended intro/outro to aid DJs in crossfading two songs together. One example that's particularly long even without the extended intro/outro is "Remember Magnetic North," a collaboration between BT, Sasha, and Jan Johnston, that clocks in at about twelve and a half minutes total.
** Earlier, Sasha did [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PhM4Ow0Ts a 12-minute remix of "Remember"], which has a rather [[Nightmare Fuel|creepy]] [[Epic Instrumental Opener|5-minute intro]] with time-stretched vocal samples. And before that, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqkyVWcTV_o his 13:10 remix of "Embracing the Sunshine"].
** Songs in the Goa trance subgenre are generally in the 9-12 minute range.
* [[Skinny Puppy]] songs usually aren't more than 5–6 minutes, but "The Centre Bullet" from the CD [[Updated Rerelease]] of ''Bites'' is 9:42. Better yet is the 15-minute live track "Spahn Dirge" on ''Rabies''. "The Centre Bullet" is actually an instrumental version of a track by Cevin Key's side project Tear Garden.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtaqGOxMZb0 Sweet Release] by the Trouser Enthusiasts, is 9:08, extremely long by Eurodance standards and longer than most trance tracks.
* [[Autechre]]'s "Perlence Subrange 6-36" is 58:31, and consists of a slowly-changing ambient synth background and a 4-second sequence alternating between three instruments, which also slowly changes. The ''Quaristice Quadrange'' remix album also contains several other 10+ minute tracks, including "Perlence Range 7" and "Tkakanren". Also, many of their albums, including ''Quaristice'', use the "one song over multiple tracks" method.
* The extended version of Mike Mareen's "Agent of Liberty", from ''Dance Control'', is about 9 minutes.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAriHirahKw Floor.I.D.A (AK 1200 Epic Lounge Mix)] (9:22) by Rabbit in the Moon.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P651SkonWc Lithia Water] by Scanner (12:30).
* Synthdance/spacesynth songs are typically short and sweet (ie <5 minutes), but one of the genre's more epic tracks is Krzysztof Radomski's "Above the Zenith", at 8:41.
* The [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xzZ4K0NjSI Lenny B. remix] of Jessica Simpson's "Where You Are" is nearly 11 minutes, which is lengthy even by dance/club standards. However, [[Ending Fatigue|the second half is mainly repetitions of the coda]].
* [[Joy Electric]] typically stuck with short and sweet synthpop tracks. However, ''The White Songbook'' saw Ronnie incorporate some prog-rock influences in his songwriting and featured several tracks ("Shepherds of the Northern Pasture", "Unicornicopia", "Sing Once for Me", "The Heritage Bough", "The Songbook Tells All") just over 6 minutes long. Then his ''Tick Tock Companion'' EP—an experiment in free-form jamming—consisted of four tracks, each between 12 and 19 minutes long.
* [[Nine Inch Nails]] have a few that pass 6 minutes in length, most notably "Closer" (6:12), and "Reptile" (6:54) off [[Magnum Opus|The Downward]] [[Concept Album|Spiral]], "We're In This Together" (7:16) off [[Double Album|The Fragile]] and "Zero Sum" (6:14) off [[Concept Album|Year Zero]]. Also, some shorter songs become longer live, such as the version of "The Day the Whole World Went Away" (6:30 live vs. 4:32 studio) on ...And All That Could Have Been.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qycAC_6Bbto Delerium & Sarah MacLachlan - Silence (DJ Tiesto remix)] is 11:34. Epic trance indeed.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O84WZkbFaLc "45:33"] by LCD Soundsystem, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]]. The video linked shows someone making an ''[[Audiosurf]]'' run through the whole thing.
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4NsNhRRUp8 "Operating Manual"] by Galleon.
===
* Anne Briggs' version of [[Tam Lin|"Young Tambling"]] is a bit over 10 minutes long. (And completely a cappella, to boot.)
* [[Bob Dylan]]'s song "Desolation Row" is about ten minutes, and is one of the few true folk songs on his album Highway 61 Revisited.
* At over nine minutes, Bert Jansch's [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE_ZyGHKsmc version of 'Jack Orion'] was unprecedented among British folk traditionalists in 1966. Four years later he [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb-eYuk0cXg rerecorded the song] with his band Pentangle...and doubled the length again until it took up an entire side of vinyl.
* Iron & Wine has a few, but "The Trapeze Swinger" is notable for being both over ten minutes long, and featuring no repeating chorus. Just verse after verse strung together to a lilting acoustic melody.
* [[Danielson]]'s "Deeper than the Gov't" is divided into three tracks on the CD, but they flow together as a single, 9-minute song. And "Joking at the Block" is raga-inspired piece that lasts for 12 minutes.
* [[A Hawk and a Hacksaw]]'s "No Rest for the Wicked" is over 8 minutes long.
=== Funk ===
* Parliament-Funkadelic: "One Nation Under a Groove", "Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?", "What Is Soul", "Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow", "Maggot Brain", "Promentalshitbackwashenemapsychosis Squad (The Doo-Doo Chasers)", "Bop Gun (Endangered Species)", "Flash Light", "Aqua Boogie (Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)", "Deep" ...and that's just a ''few''.
* Curtis Mayfield: "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go", "We the People Who are Darker than Blue", "Move on Up".
* Sly & the Family Stone: "Sex Machine", "Africa Talks to You 'The Asphalt Jungle'", "Thank You for Talkin' to Me, Africa" (itself an Epic Remake of their own [[Shrek|"Thank U Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Again".]]
* Ohio Players: "Skin Tight".
* Marvin Gaye: "Got to Give It Up."
* James Brown: "(I Feel Like A) Sex Machine", "Get Up, Get In To It, Get Involved", "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag", "The Payback". Particularly the versions captured on "Live At The Apollo, Volume 3".
=== Hip-Hop ===
* The Sugarhill Gang, setting the norm for rap with the 14 minute, 35 seconds ''Rapper's Delight''.
* DJ Shadow: "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt", "Changeling", "Stem/Long Stem", "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain", "In/Flux", "What Does Your Soul Look Like" and "Blood on the Motorway".
* R. Kelly's bizarre, overblown, [[So Bad It's Good|hilarious]] "[[Trapped in the Closet]]" saga.
** It currently has about 22 parts and a total running time of '''ONE HOUR AND 24 MINUTES'''.
* ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCUiG9aZSh8 Demain, c'est loin]'', by French group IAM has epic ''rapping'', clocking at about 9 minutes of continuous rhyming one after another. (Then again they ''are'' five people.)
** Rapper Akhenaton, of IAM fame, closed his album "Soldats de Fortune" with "La Fin De Leur Monde", a ten-minute (and very eloquent) rant against world politics carried by Akhenaton and fellow member of IAM, Shurik'n.
* "Liberation" by [[OutKast]] is an 8-minute, piano-driven, semi-spiritual piece featuring Cee-Lo, Erykah Badu, and spoken word artist Big Rube.
=== Jazz ===
* [[Duke Ellington]]'s work, while not as long as that of some later jazz men, is notable for pushing the limit back when music was released on.<ref>the most common 10-inch discs could hold about 3 and a half minutes of music per side; 12-inch discs could hold 4 or 5 minutes per side</ref> His 1931 "Creole Rhapsody" took up both sides of a 10-inch record, and his 1935 "Reminiscing in Tempo" took up four 10-inch sides. It's telling that, once the long-playing record format was invented, Duke's very first LP consisted of four songs, ranging from 8 to 15 minutes in length.
* Anything by Charles Mingus, who wrote some of the most melodically complex jazz songs of all time (look up "Hora Decubitus" or "The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife" if you don't believe me).
** Then there's Epitaph, a piece clocking in at 127 minutes that was never performed in full before his death. It carries all the complexity of Mingus' normal work, but just at an insane length.
* A special achievement awarded to a certain Mr. [[Miles Davis]], who between 1968 and 1975, starting with ''Miles in the Sky'', dedicated himself to going too far with this. This culminated in the albums ''A Tribute to Jack Johnson'' (two tracks, both 25–28 minutes long), ''Big Fun'' (a double album with four songs between 21–28 minutes) and ''Get Up With It'' (another double album with two songs that broke 32 minutes).
** Don't overlook "Kind of Blue", where all but one track were recorded "live" in the studio, while improvising, with no overdubs. While several bandmembers were struggling with raging heroin addictions.
*** To clarify, ''all'' the tracks on ''Kind of Blue'' were recorded live. Only one has two complete takes ("Flamenco Sketches"); one had a replacement ending recorded but it was never used ("Freddie Freeloader"). But the album definitely qualifies, with four out of five tracks clocking in over 9 minutes. Hat tip to "All Blues," 11 minutes and 33 seconds. Expanded reissues of the album feature a bonus track after a full take of the song in which bassist Paul Chambers is heard panting and saying, "Damn, that's a hard mother!" Well said.
* Herbie Hancock in his jazz-funk fusion era.
* The [[wikipedia:Free jazz|Free Jazz]] subgenre largely does away with fixed tempos, chord changes, harmonic structures in favor of simultaneous improvised soloing. It tends to be (but is not always) fast, loud, chaotic, and frenetic. The pieces also tend to be 20+ minutes long. It's an epic experience that one endures as much as enjoys. The epicness is especially apparent in any of the large-ensemble Free Jazz pieces along the lines of John Coltrane's ''Ascension'', Peter Brötzmann's ''Machinegun'', and Ornette Coleman's seminal ''Free Jazz: a Collective Improvisation''. Many of these kinds of pieces feature multiple drummers and walls of horns each blasting their own disparate riffs and solos.
* [[Sun Ra]] took a trip to Saturn.
* [[Bohren & der Club of Gore|Bohren]] has a number of these, the longest being "1" from Midnight Radio and "Zeigefinger" from Geisterfaust.
* [[Pat Metheny]]'s "The Way Up (68:10)" is exactly that. Technically, it's divided on the album into four sections, but it's really just one really, really long track. [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|And one hour, eight minutes, and ten seconds long]].
* [[Jaga Jazzist]]'s longest track is the 28-minute-long "Out of Reach (or Switched Off)"—although 22 minutes of it is taken up by a vocal skit in Norwegian. Their longest proper song is "Toccata", at 9 minutes.
=== Metal ===
* The entire genre of both doom metal and drone metal, with bonus points to Isis for having songs that alternate between awesome ambient sounds and pounding metal riffs, and...our winner, drone doom band [[Sunn O)))|Sunn O]]))), known best for having 40 minute songs that should never be listened to alone in the dark.
** By extension, the entire meta-genre of drone music almost always takes the cake in terms of length, such as pioneering drone band Earth, whose album ''Earth 2'' has two 30-minute tracks and one 15-minute track.
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* The live version of [[BABYMETAL]]'s "Road to Resistance" tops out at almost nine minutes long.
===
* [[Michael Jackson]] had a few, starting with ''Off the Wall'' opener "Don't Stop Til You Enough". ''Thriller'' had ''Billie Jean'' and ''Wanna Be Startin' Somethin''' (6:20 and 6:04, respectively). ''Bad'' was more straightforward (only "Man in the Mirror" is over 5 minutes)... then ''Dangerous'' had 10/14 songs at least 5 minutes long (two clocking over 7!). The [[Distinct Double Album|second disk]] of ''History'' had 3 songs over 6 minutes ("Earth Song", "History" and "Little Susie") - which are even longer on remix album ''Blood on the Dance Floor'' (which in turn has the epics "Morphine" and "Superfly Sister"). His final album, ''Invincible'', opens with another epic, "Unbreakable", and has 5 more songs over 5 minutes.
** Then, of course, there's the Jacksons' ''Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)'', clocking in at just under 8 minutes.
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** "Ol' Skool Company" (7:30), from ''MPLSound''.
===
* "Starship" by [[MC5]].
* "Nothing Left Inside", "Scream" and "Three Nights" by [[Black Flag]]
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** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRuLdKP7l6w "Aurora (Meet Me In the Stars)"] is a bit short compared to others at 5:45, similar to "For Those About to Rock" above, but it likewise has the makings of this trope.
=== Rock ===
==== Hard Rock ====
* [[The Who]]: "A Quick One, While He's Away", "Underture", "We're Not Gonna Take It", "Won't Get Fooled Again", "Who are You", "Eminence Front", "I've Known No War".
** "The Song is Over" deserves special mention. It's the one song that Pete Townshend has sworn he'll never play at concert, because it would simply be impossible for four people to play all the parts it requires.
** The Live At Leeds versions of My Generation and Magic Bus clock in at 15:47 and 7:48, despite being 3 minute songs originally.
* [[Guns N' Roses]]: As far back as ''Appetite for Destruction'', there was "Rocket Queen". ''Use Your Illusion I'' and ''II'' had several more, including "November Rain", "Estranged", "Locomotive", and "Coma".
** "Paradise City" from ''Appetite'' is a possible example, considering it gets faster and faster as it goes.
* [[X Japan]]: "Dahlia," "Silent Jealousy," "Forever Love," "I.V.", "The Last Song," "Tears", "Rose of Pain".
** And then there's "Art of Life". 30 minutes studio version, 33 minutes performed live. This song can also be seen as a [[Love It or Hate It]] since, while it is the band's [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]], performing it again at 43 when injured has possibly ended Yoshiki's career as a drummer.
* [[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 [[Covered Up|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.
** Is that the [[Chessmaster]], or the [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Cheesemaster?]]
** The songs found on Steinman's website from his defunct ''[[Batman (film)|Batman]]'' musical project, like "Catwoman's Song" and "Vespers/Angels Arise/Graveyard Shift", definitely partake of this, as do the songs on his own solo album ''Bad for Good'' (recorded when Meat Loaf lost his voice in the early 1980s).
** Likewise the songs he wrote for his "girl group" Pandora's Box and their concept album ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Sin_(Pandora%27s_Box_album) Original Sin]''.
* Mother Love Bone: "Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns"
* [[Neil Young]]: "Cortez the Killer", "Down By The River", "Pocahontas". He and Crazy Horse stretched a live version of "Cinnamon Girl" out to over 12 minutes. He's been known to do the same with the live versions of "Sedan Delivery", "Like a Hurricane", and "Barstool Blues".
** The studio version of "Ordinary People" clocks in at 18:13. That's eighteen minutes ''without'' extended guitar solos.
* [[Pearl Jam]] - "Release", 9:30.
* [[Blue Öyster Cult|Blue Oyster Cult]]: "7 Screaming Diz-Busters", "Shooting Shark", "Black Blade", and "Astronomy" all top six and a half minutes. This isn't counting most of their live output, notably the face-melting live versions of "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" and "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" from the album ''Extraterrestrial Live.''
* [[Alice Cooper]]: Halo of Flies. According to [[Alice Cooper]] himself, the song was written to prove that the band can perform long progressive suites
* [[Foo Fighters]] has the 7-minute long "Come Back". (many of their songs have shifts and [[Stop and Go|false endings]], but are usually concise enough to not fit the trope)
* The Runaways' "Dead End Justice" and "Johnny Guitar" relative to the rest of their output: both are a little over seven minutes long. "Johnny Guitar" owes most of it's length to extensive jamming, but "Dead End Justice" has multiple sections and is almost a self-contained mini-[[Rock Opera]].
* [[Bon Jovi]]'s "Dry County" clocks in at 9:52.
* [[Alter Bridge]] has "Blackbird" at 7:58.
* [[Chuck Berry]]'s "Concerto in B. Goode" at 18:43.
==== Jam Bands ====
* [[Phish]]
* Dave Matthews Band
* The Allman Brothers Band were probably the Southern alternative to The Grateful Dead (no surprise considering Duane Allman idolized Garcia), mixing blues, rock and touches of jazz. The greatest example is probably "Mountain Jam", that tracks at 33:41 and features a solo from EVERYONE in the band. "Ramblin' Man", "Whipping Post", "Jessica", "Les Brers in a Minor", and "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" are other noteworthy examples, often passing twenty minutes in concert.
==== Post-Rock ====
* [[Sigur Rós]]: The final track on ''( )'', especially.
** Almost the entire album of ''Tak...''. Notable examples include "Milano" at 10 minutes and "Glosoli" which, alas, is only 6 and a half, but it truly is an epic rocking.
* [[Godspeed You! Black Emperor]]: The only song shorter than ten minutes on any of their official album releases is "09-15-00 (Continued)", at 6:16. ''F♯A♯∞'' and ''Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven'' have tracks that run, on average, twenty minutes, with each divided into several movements.
** On the vinyl version of ''Yanqui U.X.O.,'' "09-15-00" and "09-15-00 (Continued)" are merged as one 22-minute track, thus making the ''shortest'' song on any GY!BE album "The Dead Flag Blues," at 16-minutes in length.
* Mogwai: "Like Herod," "Mogwai Fear Satan," "Christmas Steps," "My Father, My King"....
* Tortoise. Special mention goes to the 20-minute track ''Djed'', which contains four or five separate movements.
** Also, "Cliff Dweller Society" and "Gamera" from ''A Lazarus Taxon''.
* [[Slint]]: Most of the songs on ''Spiderland''.
* [[Talk Talk]]: Most of both ''Spirit of Eden'' and ''Laughing Stock''.
* [[Stereolab]] is unusual for post-rock in that most of their songs are pretty reasonable lengths; nevertheless every album (with the exception of ''Chemical Chords'') has at least one track that's 6 minutes or longer. Their longest songs are "Refractions in the Plastic Pulse" (17 minutes) and "Jenny Ondioline" (18 minutes).
==== Progressive Rock ====
* The longest recorded piece of music is "The Chosen Priest and Apostle of Infinite Space" by a band called [http://www.bullofheaven.com/ Bull of Heaven], which is more than ''two months long''. They also have other works that are multiple weeks long.
** Bull of Heaven has broken their own record, with "Blurred with Tears and Suffering Beyond Hope," (track 209) that is 4,723 hours long, or 6 months.
** Their newest song, "Like a Wall in which an Insect Lives and Gnaws" is 50,000 hours long. That's almost six fucking years.
** These guys have WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much time on their hands.
** That's nothing. The top song on their website is listed at... *deep breath* ''8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955 years long.'' That's longer than the universe has existed, by the way.
** One of their most recent songs is "only" 87,708,958,333,333 hours long. Unlike some of their other long songs though, which are usually compressed or not a traditional audio file, this song is a file, the filesize of which is 1.3 ''zetabytes''. For comparison, one zetabyte is one ''BILLION'' terabytes.
*** Compressed into an 85 kb archive. In other words, the mother of all zip bombs. The files in the archive are all identical, so its just the same piece repeated a gazillion times over.
*** Like Mel's ''Olitsky'' mentioned below, those tracks consist of several tape loops of different lengths, so the length of the song is the LCM of the loops.
* [[Emerson, Lake & Palmer]]: "Karn Evil 9" and "Tarkus".
* [[Yes]]: "Yours Is No Disgrace", "Roundabout", "South Side of the Sky", "Heart of the Sunrise", "Close to the Edge", "The Revealing Science of God", "Starship Trooper", "The Gates of Delirium" and about a dozen others. Heck, when they did a [[Cover Version]] of Simon And Garfunkel's "America", they turned a relatively sparse 3 minute acoustic folk song into 10 minutes of epic rocking, despite actually ''skipping'' a whole verse. ''Tales from Topographic Oceans'', however, gained a reputation for embodying the worst, most excessive aspects of prog-rock.
* [[King Crimson]]: "One More Red Nightmare", "21st Century Schizoid Man", "In the Court of the Crimson King", "Lark's Tongues In Aspic Pt.1 & Pt.2", "Pictures Of A City", "Epitaph", "Starless and Bible Black", "Fracture"
** Indeed, the entire "In the Court of the Crimson King" (1969) classic album should be considered epic rocking.
** How about the B-side of the 1970 album "Lizard"? It's 23 minutes long and even has Jon Anderson of Yes.
** Also, from their later albums: "The ConstruKction of Light" (2000) - the titular song and "Lark's Tongues In Aspic Pt.4" - and "Level Five", "EleKtriK" and "Dangerous Curves" from "The Power to Believe" (2003) qualify just as well as the earlier compositions.
** "Lark's Tongues In Aspic" is actually an ongoing rock epic, spanning nearly thirty years and featuring segments on the albums ''Lark's Tongues In Aspic'', ''Three of a Perfect Pair'', and ''The ConstruKction of Light''.
* Early [[Peter Gabriel]]-era [[Genesis (band)|Genesis]]. Most notably the 23 minute [[Mind Screw]] 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" and "Home By The Sea"/[[Sequelitis|"Second Home By The Sea]]".
** The short-lived four-piece era (1976-78) has "Mad Man Moon", "One For The Vine", "Ripples" and "Inside And Out".
* Early [[Rush]]. Some of the more complex examples include "By-Tor and the Snow Dog", "The Necromancer", "The Fountain of Lamneth", "2112", the "Cygnus X-1" and "Hemispheres" duology, "La Villa Strangiato"... the list goes on. Indeed, certain tropers would nominate the entire Rush catalog.
* [[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).
** ''Animals'' has a lot of this, excluding the "Pigs on the Wing" [[Book Ends]]. "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is more like a regular song that just happens to be 11 minutes long than true Epic Rocking, but "Dogs" and "Sheep" certainly qualify.
** "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast", from ''Atom Heart Mother'' also counts.
** "Intertellar Overdrive" was just a part of their early live repertoire. Only the beginning and the ending were the same. The band would just jam until they got bored and then would bring it back with the bookend riff. This sort of playing is also evident in "Pow R Toc H" and "Nick's Boogie".
** More recent ones are "Sorrow" and "High Hopes" (from their two last albums).
** The Experience Version of "Wish You Were Here" contains a 20 minute version of Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (basically both halves played back to back). Other songs of notable length from the album are "Raving and Drooling" (12 and a half minutes) and "You've Got to Be Crazy" (18 minutes 10 seconds).
* [[Porcupine Tree]]: "Anesthetize", "Arriving Somewhere But Not Here", "The Sky Moves Sideways", "Russia On Ice", "Radioactive Toy". Hell, any of the big songs by the Tree qualify for Epic Rocking.
** Voyage 34 is split into 4 parts, so technically doesn't count. The 40 minute unedited version of Moonloop, however...
** What about the title song of their latest album "The Incident"? 55-minutes long, broken down into 14 parts and it takes up the ENTIRE first disc. Wow.
* Kansas has a number of these, including "Song for America", "The Pinnacle", and "The Wall"
** And "Magnum Opus" on the Leftoverture album, which, despite being several songs in a medley, clocks in at 8:26.
* Magma has several songs that are at least 30 minutes long.
* [[The Mars Volta]]: "L'Via L'Viaquez"; in fact, the whole of ''Frances the Mute'' fits this trope.
** Before [[Executive Meddling]] (of sorts) set in, "Cassandra Gemini" was supposed to be one 32 minute track. In fact, it might still count because the digital version of the album has it formatted as one track.
** The Willing Well songs. IV (and ''more'' especially with the unbelievably long Neverender Night Three version), can seem like this, but is mitigated by the fact that it is actually ''two'' songs: the second (Bron-Y-Aur) is hidden in the first.
*** The Neverender version is an hour. There's even a twenty minute long drum solo where everyone but the drummer goes backstage! "Ladies and Gentlemen, Chris Pennie!" indeed...
** The End Complete V, in a similar situation, except that the live versions aren't as long as the above
* Anything, and I mean anything, where [[The Alan Parsons Project|Alan Parsons]] is involved.
* Any of [[The Decemberists]] music in prog (as opposed to folk-pop) mode, specifically ''The Tain'', "The Island" suite and "When The War Came" from ''The Crane Wife'', and pretty much all of [[Concept Album]] ''The Hazards of Love''.
* [[Supertramp]]: "Fool's Overture", "It's a Long Road", "Try Again", "Brother Where You Bound", "It's a Hard World".
** It can be safe to call "Rudy", "Asylum", "School", "Child Of Vision", "From Now On", "Lover Boy", "Waiting So Long" and "Another Man's Wowan" mini-epics. Note that most of them are written by Rick Davies.
* Uriah Heep: "Salisbury", "The Magician's Birthday", "July Morning", "Why".
** "Paradise/The Spell", if you count both of them as one song, is 12:46. Although they are separated on the record, and the lyrics are separate for each.
** Indeed, quite a bit of material on Uriah Heep Live could count as well, such as "Gypsy", the "Rock and Roll Medley" and "Circle of Hands".
* [[Styx]]: "Come Sail Away", "A Day", "Father O.S.A." (preluded by a brilliant little Bach cover), "Movement for the Common Man"
* Glass Hammer: Far too many to list. Special mention, however, has to go to "The Knight of the North," which clocks in at almost 25 minutes and required the addition of a string trio and a choir to the 9-person lineup for the most recent performance.
* Van der Graaf Generator's "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers"
* [[Can]]'s "Yoo Doo Right," at twenty and a half minutes is already a rather lengthy song. However, it turns out the song actually came from a ''six hour'' jam session that they had to shorten in order for it to fit on the record.
* The Soft Machine's 1970 ''Third'' and Tangerine Dream's 1972 ''Zeit'' both kicked off a short-lived early-70s fad for double albums consisting of four songs, one per side. Tangerine Dream honed the concept by using just one note per song, for a total of four notes in the space of eighty minutes.
* ''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. Three excerpts of this ("Beginning Mix", "Middle Mix", and "End Mix") were compiled into a double album.
* [[Marillion]] gets in on the action by means of "This Strange Engine", "Interior Lulu", "Ocean Cloud", "Neverland" and a good couple of others. They once played an entire set of only their longest songs, dubbed "The Shortest Set List In The World".
* Transatlantic is a supergroup made up of [[Dream Theater|Mike Portnoy]], [[The Flower Kings|Roine Stolt]], [[Spock's Beard|Neal Morse]], and Pete Trewavas ([[Marillion]]). Their magnum opus? 78-minute song The Whirlwind, divided into 12 tracks on the album but played cohesively live.
* Renaissance's average song length is probably something over seven minutes—this is including their shorter tracks. One classic, "Ashes Are Burning", clocks in at 11:21.
** The suite "Scheherazade" takes up an entire album side, and lasts 24:39.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwBDz3Hh4fA The Ikon] by [[Todd Rundgren|Utopia.]] The thing is over 30 minutes long!~!
** Utopia's "Singring and the Glass Guitar" clocks in at a modest 18:24.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kte1mGTT-ZQ "The Greener Grass"] by Fair To Midland. It's said [[Word of God|by the band]] that it is the longest song they have written (so far), at over ten minutes.
==== Psychedelic Rock, Blues-Rock, early Heavy Metal ====
* [[The Grateful Dead]]: Their entire catalog.
** And their live material, too. I mean, just look at the track listing for [[wikipedia:Dick's Picks Volume 4#Track listing|Dick's Pick's Volume 4]] (Widely regarded to be the band's [[Crowning Music of Awesome]]).
** "Dark Star" in particular gets expanded a lot in live performances. The version on the aftermentioned Dick's Picks Vol. 4 is over a half-hour long, and longer versions do exist (Such as the 41 Min. version performed at the Cleveland Convention Center).
* [[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", "No Quarter", "In My Time of Dying", "Kashmir", "In the Light", "Achilles' Last Stand", "Carouselambra".
* [[Black Sabbath]]: "The Warning", "War Pigs", "Hand of Doom", "Wheels of Confusion", "Heaven and Hell".
* [[Iron Butterfly]]: "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".
* [[Eric Clapton]] (Derek and the Dominos): "Layla", "Got to Get Better in a Little While", "Key To The Highway".
* [[Dire Straits]] have "Telegraph Road" (14 minutes), "Brothers in Arms" (Nearly 7 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", "When the Music's Over", "The Soft Parade".
* [[Velvet Underground|The Velvet Underground]]: "Heroin", "All Tomorrow's Parties", "The Gift", "Sister Ray", "The Murder Mystery".
* [[The Rolling Stones]]: "Midnight Rambler", "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'", "Going Home", 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'.
* [[Queen]]: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Innuendo" "The Prophet's Song", "March of the Black Queen", "Father to Son", that 22-minute ambiance at the end of "Made in Heaven"
** Queen: full stop. Though the songs usually are epics with many changes of rhythm with less than 5 minutes!
** "Tenement Funster / Flick of the Wrist / Lily of the Valley" from ''Sheer Heart Attack''. Though it's listed as three separate tracks on the album, many fans consider it to be one 8-minute song.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91_XJQN3U-4 "Station to Station"] by [[David Bowie]] clocks in at 10 minutes, 15 seconds. The first minute or so is just train sounds, leading into the droning guitar-based beginning section, then changing gears to an upbeat piano-based section. [[Crowning Music of Awesome|It's a damn good song.]]
** Bowie also has Width of a Circle which could be 15+ minutes live.
*** Never forget Cignet Committee proof that not all rockers liked the sixties.
* [[Jefferson Airplane]]: "Spare Chaynge", "Hey Frederick".
** Also, you can't leave out live versions of "Wooden Ships", "The Other Side of This Life", and "The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil"
* Quicksilver Messenger Service: "The Fool", "Mona" (a [[Bo Diddley]] cover), "Calvary", "The Hat".
* [[Lynyrd Skynyrd]]: "Free Bird"
* The Outlaws: "Green Grass and High Tides" (as recently made famous by ''[[Rock Band]]'').
* Rainbow: "Stargazer", "A Light in the Black"
** Special mention must be given to "Catch the Rainbow", which is a not-at-all-short six and a half minutes in the studio, and gets expanded into a fifteen minute epic live song, featuring Ritchie Blackmore and Cozy Powell trying to out-awesome each other while Ronnie James Dio screams his head off. Most of their live material is like this.
* Stevie Ray Vaughan: "Texas Flood", "Lenny", "Little Wing".
* Canned Heat, "Refried Boogie" and "Fried Hockey Boogie".
* UFO: "Rock Bottom", "Love to Love"
* Jethro Tull: ''Thick as a Brick'' and ''A Passion Play'' each had an entire album dedicated to the eponymous songs, and both ran for over forty minutes, filling a whole LP each.. Live versions of 'Thick as a Brick' run up to 90 minutes, leading to the band opening with an epic take on 'Thick as a Brick' and, an hour and a half later, Ian Anderson saying, "And now, for our second number..." While not full-album epic, 'Baker St. Muse' clocks in at 16 minutes, and they have a number of songs in the seven or eight minute range.
* Equally surprising is the absence of Peter Frampton. "Do You Feel Like We Do" clocks in at 14:15, and he makes the guitar talk to you.
* [[Fleetwood Mac]]: "Oh Well".
* Mountain. While classics like ''Mississippi Queen'' is up there, special mention has to be made to ''Nantucket Sleigh Ride''. The live version found on ''Twin Peaks'' is 31:42. So long it took up two sides on the LP.
* [[ACDC]] - 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 other end of the spectrum, there's "Jailbreak" from the ''Live at Donington'' DVD. All 14-odd minutes of it (compared to the 4:40 from the '''74 Jailbreak'' album).
** 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
** Don't forget other songs such as "Night on the Sun" and "Other People's Lives".
* George Thorogood and the Destroyers: "One Burbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (11:25 for the extended version. Bonus points for being a [[Covered Up|cover]].)
* [[Deep Purple]] and ''Child in Time''. It's over 10 minutes long [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfAWReBmxEs on the album] and a bit shorter [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJCTrolF3CY live].
** As with many '70's [[Hard Rock]] bands, they liked to expand their songs live. Just look at the [[wikipedia:Made in Japan (album)|lengths of the songs on this album]] and then compare it to the originals.
** Also ''April'' , at a whopping 12:03.
* Golden Earring, "Vanilla Queen".
** Eight Miles High, clocking in at around 19 minutes.
** The album version of "Twilight Zone" is nearly 8 minutes long
** They do this a good bit, though not to an extreme extent. On one of their compilation albums, a third of the songs are over 7 minutes.
* [[Creedence Clearwater Revival]]: "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", which clocks in at 11 minutes and five seconds.
* Traffic: "Glad", "Dear Mr. Fantasy", "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" (the latter just shy of 12 minutes and one of the longest songs This Troper has personally heard on the radio)
* Amon Duul II's album ''Yeti'' contains a whopping FOUR examples: "Soap Shop Rock" is 13 minutes, 47 seconds and sectioned, "Yeti (Improvisation)" is 18 minutes 12 seconds, "Yeti Talks To Yogi (Improvisation)" is 6:18, and "Sandoz in the Rain" is exactly 9 minutes.
* [[wikipedia:Wishbone Ash|Wishbone Ash]]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8D7RdoH_JE "Handy"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chpozse3zLU "Phoenix"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bSul2pZnxI "The Pilgrim"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYvckvAepYk "Where Were You Tomorrow"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtS8SHX7row "Time Was"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkvcM0JadEY "The King Will Come"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDUjeCmrFgI "Warrior"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFMKGzsIPC4 "Throw Down the Sword"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vwps4nO2jY "F.U.B.B."], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waw69AyR4Pw "(In All of My Dreams) You Rescue Me"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPWHDBFdBYI "Why Don't We"], [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EsPkuPE67A "Tales of the Wise"].
* Santana: "Black Magic Woman". It's actually shorter than most examples here, but it would have been a lot more shorter if it didn't have an epic instrumental closing.
=== Soundtracks ===
* [[Yoko Kanno]] loves this trope, especially when working with [[Cowboy Bebop|the Seatbelts]]:
** "The Real Folk Blues" as found on the Vitaminless disc, a 6 minute boiling vat of hyperactive drumming, erratic lead guitar, melodic basslines, plus strings and a brass section.
** "Space Lion". If there is one song that can be summed up as "epic melancholy", this is it.
** "7 Minutes", frantic techno-rock that finds enough time for slow-downs and a choral section.
** "Yakitori", also 7 minutes long, a jam rock track.
* The last battle theme of ''[[Atelier Iris 3]]'', "Schwarzweiβ (Kiri No Mukouni Tsunagaru Sekai)", features a lot of epic instrumental work. Points for Sakuraba-san (Game composer and also a prog artist) doing the Hammond and keyboard works.
* Surprisingly, [[Nobuo Uematsu]] pulled off a ridiculously ''epic'' one of these... back in the Nineties, and with a SNES game to boot. [[Final Fantasy VI]] has the longest single song in the ''entire [[Final Fantasy]] series'', the final boss theme, ''Dancing Mad''. Playing during the final [[Sequential Boss]] 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 (Uematsu's rock band) clocked that shit out at only 12, knowing that looping the movements would probably kill them, while the Distant Worlds arrangement is a bit less than 11, since it also cut the interlude before the fourth movement.
** The One-Ups, a semi-famous orchestra group that played video game music, used a 13-minute arrangement as its very last concert, ever. [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2123332194080245535# Behold.]
** That game had more incredibly long songs. The ending theme uses bits from nearly every leitmotif or theme in the game, and lasts an incredible 21 minutes. This is topped (in Final Fantasy games) only by the orchestral performance of "The Dream Oath" - a 23 minute long mini-opera. Which actually has lyrics, although technical limitations kept them off the game proper. No other song in the series even comes close - the next, the ending theme to VIII, is a "mere" 13 minutes.
* [[Pirates of the Caribbean]]'s [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN5ExwsXUiQ The Kraken.]
* ''[[Homestuck]]'' brings us "[http://homestuck.bandcamp.com/track/cascade Cascade]", the thirteen-minute-long [[Genre Busting]] soundtrack to the climatic [http://mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=006009 End of Act 5] for which it is named. While technically a patchwork of four different songs, they were specifically written/rewritten and meshed together to flow as one consistent piece for this purpose.
* The Delta Halo Suite on ''[[Halo 2]]'''s OST is the longest piece in the series, at over 11 minutes.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrjLkGGGGZo Oblivion's Theme] from ''[[Turok]] 2'' runs for over 15 minutes before its main loop completes; it actually is composed of several loops of different lengths, according to one Youtube user's calculations, the LCM of the loops is over ''208,398 years''. ''Turok 3'' also has a 19-minute song.
* The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary soundtrack has two songs a bit over 10 minutes long.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9FW0fY0cI "Samara"] from ''[[Mass Effect 2]]'' is just under nine minutes. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcrDWAuyqtc "M4 Part II"], the song that plays over the end credits of the first game, is just over eight.
=== Various other rock & pop ===
* [[Oasis]]: "Champagne Supernova".
** 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. Most of the songs in that album (''Be Here Now'') are long as hell too.
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* Canadian singer/songwriter [[Matthew Good]] tends to have one of these per album since he went solo. ''Avalanche'' has two, "Avalanche" and "Near Fantastica", ''White Light Rock and Roll Review'' has "Blue Skies Over Bad Lands",<ref>And "Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra", but only because of a hidden song</ref> ''Hospital Music'' has the opening track "Champions of Nothing", ''Vancouver'' has "The Vancouver National Anthem" and "Empty's Theme Park", and ''Lights of Endangered Species'' has "Non Populus".
* [[Sisters of Mercy]]'s "This Corrosion" and "Temple of Love", at the very least.
== Defies category ==
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