4 Brilliant Songs That Find Unique Ways To Make Anti-War Points

Any songwriter can make some sort of general statement in a song condemning war. But we believe that the most effective anti-war songs are those that manage to tell personal stories that really bring home the damage done by armed conflict.

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The following four songs come from top-of-the-line writers. They tackle the topic of war in different ways. But all of them convey the personal toll taken.

“John Brown” by Bob Dylan

This song might have slipped under your radar unless you’re a diehard Bob Dylan fan. He released it under an alias on a folk anthology back in 1963. But “John Brown” didn’t appear on a Dylan record until he did it live for his 1995 Unplugged album. He and his band gave it a furious, bluegrass-leaning rendering in that performance. The song tells of the titular character heading off to war and his mother’s pride in his bravery. But when he returns from the war badly injured and no longer gung-ho about his service, his mother can barely look at him. Considering he wrote this in his early 20s, the amount of insight displayed by Dylan is quite staggering.

“Day After Tomorrow” by Tom Waits

Tom Waits released this song on his typically stellar 2004 album Real Gone, as always writing it in conjunction with his longtime creative and life partner Kathleen Brennan. The title of “The Day After Tomorrow” refers to the date when the narrator, a soldier trying to survive on a battlefield far from home, is scheduled to return. He’s writing a letter to his loved ones, one that veers between nostalgia for all the things he’s missing and his not-so-subtle disgust for his current state of affairs. The unsaid heartbreak lurking behind his story is that there’s a distinct possibility that he won’t make it back, which would render his letter a sad goodbye.

“The Gunner’s Dream” by Pink Floyd

Roger Waters wrote several anti-war songs during his stint as Pink Floyd’s artistic driving force. When he reached the 1983 album The Final Cut, his last with the band, he devoted the entire LP to the topic. As such, we could have picked any one of several fine cuts from the record for this list. But “The Gunner’s Dream” is the standout of the bunch. The song comes from the perspective of a pilot who is ejected from his aircraft during battle. As he wafts down to the ground “in the corner of some foreign field,” he imagines his funeral. And he tells of a dream, one in which such atrocities as his impending death will no longer be part of the picture.

“Dear Avery” by The Decemberists

Colin Meloy of The Decemberists was writing this song around the time that US soldiers were packing off to fight in Iraq. Over the sighing steel guitar, he sings the song from the perspective of a mother who can do nothing to protect her son in his current scenario. She compares that to when he was younger, and she could physically remove him from harm’s way. What’s devastating to her is that the soldier out in the field is not that far removed from the boy within her grasp, at least not in terms of time. Helplessly, she bids him support from afar and asks him to come home. Meloy offers a master class on making a powerful statement without hectoring listeners.

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