By Brigid Flanagan

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:: November 1, 2025

I like to make monthly playlists. They’re always about 70 songs long, about 4 hours of music, and are a good way to ensure whatever new artists I want to listen to don’t get buried in huge playlists. It’s also a great way to set a particular mood for the month, which I make sure to do every October. 

All the Halloween classics go on there — Thriller, Scary Monsters, Scooby Doo original soundtracks, the works. One band I always make sure gets on the October roster is Concrete Blonde. Their most well known album has to be Bloodletting, released in 1990, featuring two big hits: “Joey” and “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song).”

In case that second song title didn’t give it away, they make songs about vampires.

The song, part of the band’s larger shift into gothic rock with this album, was inspired by frontwoman Johnette Napolitano’s spending a lot of time in New Orleans and reading Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. If you’ve read the books (or watched the excellent 2022 show), the influence is pretty obvious; Bloodletting captures the vibes of the series more than anything, and it’s great to listen to when vampires are on the mind. In my case, that’s every single day of the 10th month.

I’ve been digging into this stuff because recently, I found an old forum post by a woman who was in the Vampire Chronicles fandom back in the 90s and said that Concrete Blonde would perform at these fan events where they all got dressed up like vampires. Sounds extremely fun, but I couldn’t find any other source corroborating it; in the process of searching, though, I found out a whole lot more bands were writing songs inspired by Anne Rice’s books around the time. Australian pop duo Savage Garden (of “I Want You” fame) named themselves after a line from The Vampire Lestat: “Beauty was a Savage Garden.” Sting stated that his song “Moon over Bourbon Street” was inspired by Interview with the Vampire, “a beautiful book about this vampire which is a vampire by accident.” And the more you look into it, the more bands spring up — mostly in goth and metal scenes. The most blatant example is the band Theatres des Vampires and their 1999 album The Vampire Chronicles. It’s just named that, yeah.

Since it’s October and Halloween is just around the corner, now is a great time to listen to music about all the best monsters in fiction. Thanks to Anne Rice, there are a whole bunch of vampire bands to start with — so I hope you’ve got the ways and means to New Orleans, because you have to listen to Bloodletting now. I already put it in your music queue when you weren’t looking.

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