Just like Heaven

Paradise
Is exactly like
Where you are right now
Only much much
Better
(Laurie Anderson, “Language Is A Virus”)

Sixty songs, one single word: heaven. Few images have run through the history of pop and rock with the same ability to shift meaning, turning by turns into paradise, the afterlife, promise, illusion, desire, love, loss, or simply a place of the imagination. It's around these many shades of meaning that our "heavenly" playlist takes shape, opening with “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan (from the famous soundtrack to the western "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" from 1973), where heaven is the ultimate threshold, the door you find yourself facing when life is about to end.
From there the journey heads off in wildly different directions. In “Just Like Heaven”, the Cure track that gives the collection its title, paradise is the dizzying kind found in falling in love: a moment of happiness so intense it feels almost unreal, as if already on the verge of dissolving. In the archetypal Led Zeppelin classic (“Stairway To Heaven“) Eden becomes a spiritual destination, a synonym for possible inner elevation, set against the illusion that happiness and salvation can be bought with material goods. The Bee Gees of the disco music era, on “Too Much Heaven”, turn it instead into the image of an absolute, overflowing love, while with “Heaven Or Las Vegas” by Cocteau Twins (who also give us the collection's cover image) the word loses almost all concreteness, becoming pure dream-pop suggestion, a dreamy, ethereal place suspended between ecstasy, sensuality and mystery.

Then there's the heaven of Talking Heads, anything but paradisiacal in the conventional sense: an alienating place where nothing ever happens and everything repeats forever (“Heaven is a place/ A place where nothing/ Nothing ever happens”), described by David Byrne with his usual defamiliarizing irony and later revisited by Simply Red in a new, poignant version. And there's the Eden that in the Eighties becomes irresistible (synth)pop and new wave material: the melancholic one of Echo & The Bunnymen and Psychedelic Furs, the synthetic one of Fiction Factory, the desperately romantic one of the Blow Monkeys, all the way to the earthly paradise of the delightful Belinda Carlisle and the sentimental, classic rock one of Bryan Adams.

But "Heaven" can also become tragedy and absence, as in Eric Clapton's “Tears In Heaven” (Eric Clapton); sarcasm and alienation, as in “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” by the Smiths; a cosmic and ecological metaphor in “Monkey Gone To Heaven” by Pixies; a disco-pop provocation in “The Number One Song In Heaven” by Sparks; the boundary between good and evil in “Heaven And Hell” by Black Sabbath; a subversive mutiny (“Mutiny In Heaven” by Nick Cave with the Birthday Party) or even the antechamber of hell in “South Of Heaven” by Slayer. Between Paul McCartney, Rolling Stones, Depeche Mode, Swans, Pavement, Lana Del Rey, Elliott Smith, Radio Dept., Siouxsie, Beyoncé and their fellow travelers, paradise ends up taking on as many forms as there are artists trying to imagine it.

Sixty different variations on the same word, then, plus one bonus track — sadly unavailable on Spotify — dug up from a precious eighties one-hit wonder called Two People (“Heaven”). Closing things out, a song beyond category: the ever-timeless “Language Is A Virus” by Laurie Anderson, which doesn't have "heaven" in its title but offers the best possible description of it in the line chosen as the playlist's ideal epigraph: “Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better “. An unbeatable definition that seems to us the best way to begin — and end — our journey through Heaven. Below is the playlist plus the two bonus tracks.

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09/08/2026