The general belief is that Wayne Coyne, the lead singer, wrote this song about Steven Drozd’s (the band’s drummer) heroin addiction but there’s more than that..
At first Wayne actually believed it was a spider bite and wrote a song about it to his friend. You can hear about the full story behind this beautiful piece On The Soft Bulletin: Complete Film from Scott Booker. In the movie the band manager describes the song as: “a strange song. Steven is getting bitten by a spider, and just lyrically tells the story in such plain spoken manner: Here’s my friend Steven who’s in the band and he got bitten by a spider and the doctors were gonna cut of his hand.” But the thing is the story sounded quite different from Steven himself: “I thought I got bitten by a spider so I go to the emergency room and I told them ‘I thought I been bitten by a spider’. They’re like: ‘well it could be’, so they’re giving me some antibiotics.” he keeps on: “I started talking to the doctor and I’m telling him all what happened. He say ‘you’re might be a drug user’, he knew what’s going on and I said ‘Oh, yes I am’. And he said ‘did you inject your hand?’

2. The Cure – Lullaby

The song (how appropriate) is influenced by the poem “the spider and the fly”. Although Robert Smith, The cure’s frontman, attributes this song generally to childhood nightmares .There are many other speculations about the horrific lyrics: drugs addiction, depression, independence and even sexual abuse.

3. Devendra Banhart – Little Yellow Spider

The little yellow spider is mentioned only on the first verse. You can also find Albatross, squid, mockingbird, (sexy) pig, (baby) crow and a turtle. You can say that probably Devendra had smoked way too much. You might also find in this purposely childish song, a kind of a message – We don’t give the animals the credit which they deserve. Maybe we are more intelligent than them (at least most of us) but we are missing a lot of things if we consider only money and power as indicators for happiness.

4. The National – Terrible Love

“It’s a terrible love that I’m walking with spiders”

Before the album “High Violet” Matt Berninger, The National’s frontman , became a father. This experience combined with his fears and insecurity have a profound influence on the lyrics.
Spiders refer to these fears – the fear of starting a new family, embracing a new born baby and officially start the adulthood.

5. The Who – Boris the Spider

John Entwistle, the Who’s bass player, wrote this peculiar song. On the live album ‘Left for Live’ John have a short remark regarding this song (with his heavy English accent): “This is a bit of a sad song because my tarantula died two days ago. Her name was Doris. She was seventeen and she packed out, which means died.” Let’s send him our dearest condolences. One last fun fact: the spider was actually a present from his friend, Joe Walsh from The Eagles.

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As usual I choose to pick those not so obvious choices. When you think of songs about cats the almost immediate ideas that pops up is “The Love Cats”. We’ll get to that later. Robert Smith is probably really fond of cats, otherwise I can’t explain his attraction to them on his lyrics (if you know any other songs by The Cure about cats – please let me know!). Apparently this one was on the soundtrack of the devastating movie Marie Antoinette but don’t get this unnecessary fact mislead you – this is a great song. As part of their early discography, this one is a classic 80’s (in the good way) you gotta love the lingering synths, the lazy percussions and I think I’ve never heard Robert Smith’s voice so morbid as in here (and as you know, Smith is not really famous for his cheerfulness).

2.CallmeKAt – The Love Cats

I found this beautiful cover on “Perfect as Cats: Tribute to the Cure” (check out its creepy art cover!). I’m not a great fan of cover songs, especially ones that I categorize as classics. However, if there’s a justification for covering a modern classic is to charge the song with a different context (mission accomplished). I didn’t find much information about the singer, but I will be glad to hear more!

3.Dinosaur Jr. – Cats In a Bowl

As you can hear from the first seconds of the song (or the album) – the sound is notably low-fi like it was recorded in one take on their parent’s garage (just like Guided by Voices actually recorded the lion’s share of their discography). This is not far from the truth- “Dinosaur” ,their debut album, was recorded in a home studio with the tight budget of 500$. Honestly, sometimes you don’t need a million dollar producer and a shiny record label – you just need to write a really good songs (look for Kleenex Girl Wonder, Guided By Voices or The Early Elliot Smith – this is so called low-fi).

4.Hot Chip – Alley Cat

The reason that Hot Chip have found themselves in a perfect spot between the mainstream dance floor masses and the indie kids admiration is mostly thanks to the perfect balance between great melodies and irresistible beats. More than this- only few so called dance artists can mold so many emotions in a single song.

5.Metric – Lost Kitten

Metric is one of my favorite’s guilty pleasures. You can call it synth pop, dance-rock or new wave –it doesn’t matter. I just call it pop songs, and there’s no shame in that.

6.Dan Deacon – The Crystal Cat

Dan Deacon puzzling music is a wild combination of too many different bands- from the New Wave of Devo and The Talking heads to the eccentric and cacophonic sounds of contemporary bands such as Animal Collective and Deerhoof. Having said that, Dan Deacon still has developed his own unique sound and the enchanted “The Crystal Cat” is no exception.

7.Squeeze- Cool For Cats

I know this song from a long time ago – from a cheesy 70’s hits collection. Wait, maybe was it “Is that love”? Anyway, this is a must for every British pub out there.

8.Violet Violet – C-C-C-Cat

I’ve never heard about Violet Violet before. In last.fm they describe them as “mouths and hearts of PJ Harvey, Sleater-Kinney and Huggy Bear”. Another great music discovery -thanks Spotify!

9.Red House Painters- Three Legged Cat

Mark Kozelek is the one man show behind Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon. What so special about another singer songwriter with an acoustic guitar? First, the lyrics is overwhelming at its sincerity and humor – “spend my whole life neurotic and fat”. Nobody writes like this anymore (maybe except Morrissey). Second, the music (obviously). You can try to categorize the music as part of the Slowcore genre. However, Kozelek has its own unique sub-genre which perfectly fits with rainy days, heartbreaks and solitude.

10. Shy Nobelman-Cats

I couldn’t find this one even on Spotify so I embedded the Bandcamp version. I highly recommend to give a listen to the full album “How to Be Shy”, an Israeli indie semi-classic that combines 60’s psychedelic music (Sergeant Pepper’s seems to be a great influence in here) , 90’s Britpop with power pop melodies.

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