The Nolan Effect

Thanks to the worldwide success of “The Odyssey“, the blockbuster with which Christopher Nolan brought Homer's poem back to the big screen, fascination with the journey of Ulysses has flared up again. In truth, the king of Ithaca has never stopped sailing through music either. Over the past sixty years his myth has resurfaced in the most varied forms: from the psychedelic rock of Cream to the Italian singer-songwriter tradition of Dalla and Guccini, from the art-pop of Suzanne Vega to the esoteric atmospheres of Dead Can Dance, from the pop of Franz Ferdinand to the Mediterranean contaminations of Vinicio Capossela.
Sometimes Ulysses is the protagonist, other times he's merely a shadow evoked through other characters from Homer's poem, such as Penelope, Calypso, Tiresias or the Sirens. Either way, more than a character, he has often become a true archetype: the man who departs, loses himself in search of knowledge, and keeps chasing a homecoming that, perhaps, never truly coincides with the final destination. So let's retrace the myth of Ulysses through this selection, complete with its playlist.

Cream – “Tales Of Brave Ulysses” (1967)

In “Tales Of Brave Ulysses”, Cream turn Homer's Odyssey into a psychedelic journey. Released at the height of the Summer of Love, the song – with lyrics penned by Martin Sharp – blends imagery of the Sirens and seafaring with the visionary language of lysergic acid rock. After a surreal opening, with the bass laying out the melodic path that will soon take shape, Eric Clapton deploys the wah wah effect masterfully, in nervy solo flourishes that are quickly reined in amid the many abrupt stops that Ginger Baker imposes with his thunderous style. The myth becomes almost a sensory experience, amid acid colors, imaginary waves and timeless temptations.

Steely Dan – “Home At Last” (1977)

Tucked among the masterpieces of “Aja“, this is one of the most refined reinterpretations of the Odyssey in the history of American rock. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen turn the return to Ithaca into a metaphor for survival after a long journey. On the record, Steely Dan let all their disenchanted resignation to the L.A. lifestyle of the '70s show through — the city they'd relocated to after leaving the East Coast: an asphalt jungle where one must “slink like a viper through these suburban streets” (“Deacon Blues”). It's a feeling that resurfaces in “Home At Last” (“I know this superhighway/ This bright familiar sun/ I guess that I’m the lucky one”), the Odyssey revisited in shuffle form, with the piano front and center and a funky beat.

Lucio Dalla – “Itaca” (1971) / “Ulisse coperto di sale” (1975)

Lucio Dalla too fell under the spell of the myth of Ulysses. “Itaca” – included on his third LP, “Storie di casa mia” (1971) – flips the Homeric perspective: the story is told not through the eyes of Ulysses, but from the point of view of his sailors, ordinary men who, after years of war, wandering and suffering, wish only to return home. Dalla explained that he wanted to shift the focus away from the hero celebrated in schoolbooks and onto those forced to follow the ambitions of great commanders. In this light, Ithaca becomes a symbol of affection, of everyday life regained, and of the universal need to reach safe harbor.
Four years later, in the second chapter of the trilogy with Roberto Roversi (“Anidride solforosa”, 1975), Dalla returns to the figure of Ulysses from a more intimate angle. The evocation of the Odyssey's warrior myth becomes the springboard for a reflection on the theme of eternal return, in which, however, “everything has vanished, everything has changed”: “Una mano di calce bianca/ Sulle pareti della mia stanza/ Cielo giallo di garbino/ Occhio caldo di bambino/ Tiro il sole fin dentro la stanza/ Carro di fuoco che corre sul cuore/ Perché ogni giorno è sabbia e furore/ E sempre uguali non sono le ore”. A biting lyric by Roversi that – punctuated by solemn orchestral arrangements and sharp shifts in rhythm – leaves behind a sense of desolation and bitterness.

Suzanne Vega – “Calypso” (1987)

Suzanne Vega also took on the Homeric myth, shifting the focus, however, from the hero to the woman who must let him go. In the Odyssey, Calypso is the daughter of Atlas who lives on the island of Ogygia, where Odysseus washes up after a shipwreck. The sea nymph saves him and falls in love with him, keeping him there for years with the promise of immortality, while he continues to long for a return to Ithaca and Penelope. "Calypso" (from "Solitude Standing", 1987) imagines precisely the moment when, compelled by the gods, the nymph agrees to let him leave. The song is told in the first person and captures all the melancholy of a protagonist who looks back on Odysseus's arrival after being rescued from the waves, the passion they shared, and the years spent vainly trying to hold onto him. The chorus, with its insistent repetition of "I let him go", is the emotional core of the song: Calypso realizes that not even a goddess can force someone to return her feelings, especially when his heart belongs to another. That's what makes the ending so achingly tender: as Odysseus sails home, Calypso is left alone on the shore, ready to face her solitude (“In the dawn he sails away to be gone forever more/ And the waves will take him in again/ But he’ll know their ways now/ I will stand upon the shore/ With a clean heart and my song in the wind”). In under four minutes, Suzanne Vega turns an epic episode into an intimate meditation on love, renunciation, and the ability to let go of someone truly loved.

Roberto Vecchioni – “Ulisse e l'America” (1984)

For Roberto Vecchioni, on the other hand, Ulysses is above all a literary figure, an alter ego of modern man torn between the desire to leave and the desire to finally find a place to land. Comparing the Greek myth to the idea of a promised America, the professor-songwriter reflects on the journey as a metaphor for life and for the search for one's own identity. It's a similar approach to his celebrated "Velasquez" from "Elisir". The journey thus becomes a permanent existential condition, told with the taste for dialogue between myth and contemporary life that runs through much of the Milanese songwriter's work. America represents not so much a real place as an ideal horizon, the promised land onto which to project desires, hopes, and the possibility of rebirth. Like Ulysses, every individual is called to face the open sea of existence, amid obstacles, doubts, and constant new departures, without ever losing the drive toward what is still unknown. With his poetic, richly evocative language, Vecchioni celebrates the value of dreaming, of freedom, and of curiosity, inviting us to consider the journey more important than the destination, and to never stop chasing our own personal landing place.

Francesco Guccini – “Odysseus” (2000)

Francesco Guccini's take is probably the most learned exploration of Ulysses in Italian song. His "Odysseus" engages with the great reinterpretations of the Homeric hero, echoing Dante's Ulisse, Kavafis's "Ithaca", and Ugo Foscolo's "A Zacinto". The protagonist is not merely the hero of the homecoming, but a man destined to chase the restlessness of the journey for his entire life: “La via del mare segna false rotte/ ingannevole in mare ogni tracciato/ solo leggende perse nella notte/ perenne di chi un giorno mi ha cantato”. In the first part, Ulysses recalls with nostalgia the time before the Trojan War: "Non appartenevo al mare… l'anima mia che è contadina, un'isola d'aratro e di frumento" ("I did not belong to the sea… my soul, which is that of a farmer, an island of plough and wheat"). It's the image of a man bound to his own roots, to his "stony" Ithaca, a clear echo of Foscolo's line "Baciò la sua petrosa Itaca Ulisse" ("Ulysses kissed his stony Ithaca"). This figure also reflects Guccini himself, always tied to the rural world and the landscapes of the Emilian Apennines.
But the call of adventure is irresistible. So Ulysses tells us: “Le navi costruii di forma ardita/ concave navi dalle vele nere/ e nel mare cambiò quella mia vita”. If in antiquity the sea represented the danger of shipwreck, in Guccini's hands it becomes a metaphor for existential doubt and the need to question oneself. His Ulysses also retains the determination of the Homeric hero: "Andavo come spinto dal destino/ verso una guerra, verso l'avventura/ e tornare contro ogni vaticino/ contro gli dèi e contro la paura" ("I went on as if pushed by fate/ toward a war, toward adventure/ and to return against every prophecy/ against the gods and against fear"), indirectly referencing the Trojan War of the Iliad and the subsequent adventures of the Odyssey. In the song's final section, Guccini embraces Foscolo's idea that only poetry is capable of making the transient eternal, granting immortality to the Greek hero (“Chi un giorno mi ha cantato… Donandomi però un’eterna vita/ racchiusa in versi, in ritmi, in una rima/ dandomi ancora la gioia infinita/ di entrare in porti sconosciuti prima”).

Francesco De Gregori – “Il canto delle sirene” (1987)

In his 1987 song, Francesco De Gregori focuses above all on the evocative power of myth and its seductions, drawing on the episode in the Odyssey in which Ulysses has himself bound to the ship's mast to resist the song of the sirens. The sirens become the symbol of every illusion that promises happiness and absolute knowledge, while the language remains deliberately enigmatic and allusive, as in his finest work: “Non sarà il canto delle sirene/ Che ci innamorerà/ L’abbiamo sentito bene/ L’abbiamo sentito già/ E nemmeno la mano affilata/ Di un uomo o di una divinità/ Non sarà il canto delle sirene/ In una notte senza lume/ A riportarci sulle nostre tracce/ Dove l’oceano risale il fiume/ Dove si calmano le onde/ Dove si spegne il rumore”. The myth resurfaces only as an undertone, never becoming a mere narrative exercise.

Dead Can Dance – “Ullyses” (1988)

In the repertoire of Dead Can Dance, classical myth takes on the shape of an initiation rite. Amid ancestral percussion, liturgical choirs, and suspended atmospheres, "Ullyses" uses the hero's journey as a metaphor for spiritual transformation. The closing track of "The Serpent's Egg" (1988), one of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry's masterpieces, the song stands as one of the most mystical interpretations of Homeric imagery, perfectly at home within the Anglo-Australian duo's timeless aesthetic. It's an intense ballad, an elegant interplay of strings and keyboards, like a Renaissance dance led by a magnificent Perry, alternating Gerrard-style vocalizing (though with his own acidic timbre) with a deep, sweet, enveloping vocal line.

Enrico Ruggeri – “Ulisse” (1996)

The protagonist imagined by Enrico Ruggeri in 1996 on the concept album "Fango e stelle" seems much closer to Dante's Ulisse than to Homer's. He is a man incapable of standing still, driven by an almost obsessive curiosity and an inexhaustible need to explore the unknown. The tale of the elusive wandering hero thus becomes yet another pretext for laying bare one's own contradictions. “Sono già via/ Scrivo da questo mare, sono già via/ Non si farà legare l’anima mia/ Fatta di roccia più dura/ Perché l’anima è un concetto senza età/ Senza famiglia né bandiera”, sings Ruggeri. Musically too, the song alternates lyrical passages with sudden rock surges, as if translating the hero's restlessness into sound.

Vinicio Capossela – “Nostos”/ “Calipso”/ “Vinocolo”/ “Le sirene”/ “Dimmi Tiresia” (2011)

Having left ashore what little remained of his (already scant) sense of restraint, in 2011 Vinicio Capossela embarked on a sprawling "Marina Commedia" titled "Sailors, prophets and whales". It's an epic work, indeed a "cyclopedic" one, split into two CD-volumes – "one oceanic (inspired above all by Melville's Moby Dick, ed.), the other Homeric and Mediterranean" – poised between music and literature. More a theatrical musical than an album, it runs an hour and a half and overflows with 19 songs steeped in myth, poetry, and sea spray. The dark pull of the sea, a metaphor for the inscrutability of fate, drags Capossela into a kind of permanent oceanic trance. It's a literary, and inevitably metaphysical, odyssey. The second, "Homeric" disc revisits the "Goliath", the Bard, Ulysses's Sirens, and "Nostos", the feeling from which modern Nostalgia was born, which struck sailors on their travels. For Capossela, Ithaca is not a geographical place but a state of the soul: after the journey, no one truly returns the same as when they left. Still within his maritime universe, Capossela mocks a drunken Polyphemus, rendered through a brilliant neologism ("Vinocolo"), and dedicates a song to the nymph who keeps Ulysses on the island of Ogygia. Calypso becomes the personification of seduction, of suspended time, and of the temptation to give up the journey — a poetic reinterpretation that approaches the myth through images rich in Mediterranean allusions. On the album, Capossela also brings to the fore one of the most enigmatic figures of the Odyssey: the seer Tiresias. The dialogue with the seer in the splendid "Dimmi Tiresia" becomes a meditation on memory, destiny, and the weight of knowledge — themes that run through his entire body of work.

Neffa – “I viaggi di Ulisse” (2003)

In a phase of profound artistic transformation, Neffa chooses Ulysses as a symbol of personal change. Far removed from epic overtones, the myth here becomes a metaphor for the search for direction and identity, showing how the figure of the hero still speaks to the sensibility of contemporary Italian songwriting: “Ulisse dove vai? Quando ti fermerai?/ Che stai cercando ancora in questo mare che oramai non ti ama più?/ Dove ti porterà la tua curiosità?/ La voglia di capire di cose che ai mortali non competono”, sings the rapper.

Franz Ferdinand – "Ulysses" (2009)

Alex Kapranos, frontman of Scottish band Franz Ferdinand, instead transplants the Greek hero into the metropolitan nights of the 21st century. "Ulysses", the opening single from "Tonight: Franz Ferdinand" (2009), uses the name of the Odyssey's protagonist as a symbol of disorientation, desire and transgression. The journey no longer unfolds at sea, but among clubs, temptations and escapes from everyday life. A hedonistic, urban reimagining of the Homeric myth. Trivia: the cover of the "Ulysses" single depicts Kapranos himself lying "dead" on a Brooklyn street.

Beck & Phoenix – "Odyssey" (2023)

The meeting of Beck and Phoenix produces a bright, immediate track. Released on 21 June 2023, it's a stand-alone single put out to promote the Summer Odyssey Tour, on which the two acts co-headlined. The song has been described as a "more refined heir" to "Once In A Lifetime" by Talking Heads, and overall it's marked by a highly energetic, buoyant atmosphere. The nod to the Odyssey is mainly symbolic. Amid synths with an Eighties flavour and pop melodies, "Odyssey" uses the journey as a metaphor for freedom and the endless search for new horizons, once again showing just how surprisingly relevant the myth of Ulysses remains.

Eleni Karaindrou – "Ulysses' Theme" (1995)

With her spare, melancholy scores, Eleni Karaindrou gave the cinema of Theo Angelopoulos an unmistakable soundtrack. The theme composed for "Ulysses' Gaze" (1995) is an instrumental meditation on journey, exile and memory, able to evoke the Homeric hero through music alone, between accordion, strings and silence. The film was dedicated to Italy's own Gian Maria Volonté, who died of a heart attack during filming and was replaced by Erland Josephson.

James Blake, Travis Scott and Ludwig Göransson – "When I'm Home" (2026)

The final stop on this long musical journey coincides with the Odyssey's return to the big screen courtesy of Christopher Nolan. The end-credits song from "The Odyssey", performed by James Blake and Travis Scott with music by Ludwig Göransson, picks up, right from its title, the theme of the homecoming, ideally closing a nearly three-thousand-year-old artistic journey that keeps reinventing Ulysses's voyage through ever-changing languages. Nolan himself is also credited among the song's writers. Göransson's score – having already composed the music for Nolan's previous film, "Oppenheimer" – accompanies the English director's epic tale, blending a modern orchestra with instruments and timbres drawn from the tradition of the ancient Mediterranean. Kitharas, lyres, flutes and percussion thus conjure up the Homeric universe, reinterpreted through a thoroughly contemporary cinematic sensibility.

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