Finding songs about time travel is actually surprisingly difficult. For that reason, I’ve included some more metaphorical time travel songs as well as a couple of songs about shows and movies that feature time travel (no Doctor Who, though; that’s going to be a completely different list!). This list even has some more mainstream artists than I usually feature in this column, although of course there are geeky artists as well.
1. MC Lars – “If I Had a Time Machine, That Would Be Fresh”
MC Lars would use his friend’s time machine to go back in time and change things for the better. How nice of him!
2. Emmure – “The Philosophy of Time Travel”
This is featured on the Donnie Darko soundtrack. I’ve never actually seen the movie, though (I know, bad geek…), and I didn’t even realize it was about time travel!
3. Weird Al – “Everything You Know is Wrong”
A TMBG-esque song about the weird stuff that happens to Al, including an alien abduction in which they take him to any time that he wants to travel back to.
4. Paul McCartney and Wings – “Backwards Traveller”
“Did you know that I’m always going back in time?” Not exactly a silly love song.
5. George Harrison – “Any Road”
Paul’s fellow Beatle, George Harrison, also gets in on the time travel (though it’s mostly about real physical travel). This one’s unsurprisingly more philosophical: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
6. Jonathan Coulton – “The Future Soon”
The time travel in this may be more of a daydream than actual travel, but it’s one that’s near and dear to me. The chorus describes perfectly the teenage me: “It’s gonna be the future soon, and I won’t always be this way. When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away.” It still makes me choke up every time I hear it.
7. The Singing Nerd – “Time Machine”
A physicist doesn’t get noticed by others so he decides to build a time machine. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for him when he tries to return from the future to the present!
8. Dual Core – “Judgement Day”
Click to visit Dual Core's site with streaming audio of the song
A nerdcore song about Terminator. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any videos for this one, but at least you can check out a sample of it here. It’s worth buying, too, as is the rest of their album.
9. Amanda Abizaid – “A Place in Time” (The 4400)
The 4400 was a really great show while it lasted, and I always loved the theme music for it. Lyrically and musically it fits the show so well. Although the 4400 people taken from Earth and returned didn’t strictly travel in time, they were at least displaced in time which, I think, is more or less the same thing.
10. The Oceanic Six – “Dude”
Although I stopped watching Lost in the third season, I did always enjoy Hurley’s character. This one is a song about him and his cursed numbers.
Queen – ’39
Nice. I wasn’t familiar with that track before. Thanks!
Did you seriously do a list of time travel songs and not include Back in Time?
Apparently I did. Mea culpa on that one; I don’t know how it slipped by me…
ludo broken bride is a 5 part song about time traveling to bring his fiance back
to life he tries to go back to the day she had a car accident but miscalculates and lands in the prehistoric era with dinosaurs and whatnot this causes changes to the timeline that cause an apocalyptic future which he goes to and then agree’s to travel back in time and stop himself from building the time machine in the first place,