Good question... there may well be a list somewhere on the neilgaiman.com website, because there's an awful lot of stuff here, especially in the various bibliographies and such. But, because it's useful for the FAQs...
Off the top of my head, there are songs by me (some words and music, some just lyrics) on each of the three Flash Girls CDs, and on the Folk Underground CD. I wrote the English lyrics for both songs in the Princess Mononoke film (the Tatara Women song (not on the CD), and the End title song lyrics), and contributed some (uncredited) lines to Alice Cooper's "The Last Temptation". There's a song called "On The Wall" on the next One Ring Zero CD As Smart As We Are, which I wrote lyrics for, and I also wrote lyrics for the song over the end title credits of Mirrormask.
Here, for whatever it's worth, are the Mirrormask end title song lyrics (Dave McKean wrote the music, and asked for some key words, so it was written to his specs. It makes a bit more sense if you've seen the film, of course...)
If I apologised
it wouldn't make it all unhappen
wouldn't make the darkness go away
If I apologised
it wouldn't mean I was forgiven
wouldn't mean you wanted me to stay
But
it's a dream
when you seem
to be walking into the sun
we're on first
unrehearsed
and we still don't know what we've done
so we don't say anything.
If I apologised
I don't suppose you'd even notice
even though I'd whisper it inside
If I apologised
we could be the perfect couple
Well we could, but only in my mind
but
if you ask
for the mask
then we're stumbling on through the dark
But we wait
it's too late
And we only had to be asked
so we don't say anything.
It couldn't hurt to try it
It couldn't hurt too much to try
It's there beyond the quiet
it couldn't hurt too much to fly...
Which, I suspect, doesn't demonstrate much more than most lyrics aren't poetry.
Another song question just arrived...
Mr. Neil,
What version of "Spread a Litle Happiness" do you prefer? Specifically, which rendition were you listening to when you put it in Sandman #6? It can't be the Sting one, cause that apparently came out like five years after you made three poor women sing it on a countertop.
No, the Sting version came out in -- well, I remember it as 1982, but it might be '83 -- to accompany the film of Dennis Potter's "Brimstone and Treacle" (a Sting performance that Alan Moore sort of used in his creation of John Constantine, and which John Totleben used as his visual starting point for the character) -- Richard Loncraine, the director had discovered this fifty year old song he thought appropriate, "Spread a Little Happiness", and told me once how thrilled the extremely elderly composer was to get royalties from it, long after the world had forgotten it. So that's about seven years before the diner counter-top encounter, not five years after.
Neil,
Here's an interesting article I found through slashdot that I thought you might be interested in. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4669114/
I just hope it doesn't spread.
Chris
How deeply strange. A Fortean phenomenon, in the nicest sense of the word. Or of the weird.