Every Day Should be an 'Earth Day' Quiz

Answer: OneRepublic

This beautiful, if not heartbreaking, number by US band OneRepublic was the theme song to the documentary "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power" (2017), Al Gore's continued crusade to make us aware of climate change and the hazards that the Earth faces.

Written by Ryan Tedder, the band's lead singer, and T-Bone Burnett, the pair have brilliantly humanized the planet, turning Mother Nature into a frail old woman, a woman that is very dear to our hearts. It highlights the fact that she needs to be cared for, that she has a limited shelf-life and that we need to do whatever we can to extend that life.

Answer: Marvin Gaye

Long before Al Gore stood on a pedestal to deliver his message of climate change, Marvin Gaye was lamenting about the damage that we are doing to our planet. Hard to believe that this poignant number, which has become an anthem for environmental change, was written more than 55 years ago and we still need champions to try and hammer the message home.

Written in 1971, Gaye speaks of oil spills and radiation, population explosions and poisoned air... and how much more of this abuse the planet can tolerate.

Answer: Metallica

This, the opening track to Metallica's 1988 album "... And Justice For All", foresees the end of humanity, in fact, all natural life on the planet, through nuclear war. With the lines:

"Millions of our years
In minutes disappears"

the band condemns all the patient efforts Mother Nature has conjured over her lifetime into a furious obscurity, all through humankind's own selfish actions.

The song exhibits echoes of another track by the band, "Fight Fire with Fire", which appears on the group's second studio album, "Ride the Lightning", which was released in 1984.

Answer: Albert Hammond

This is the lead single from Albert Hammond's debut solo album "It Never Rains in Southern California" (1972) and it opens with the idyllic scenario of a young couple pitching a tent and camping by a beautiful river for the night. However, the joy of that night out soon turns sour as the couple become ill and the cause is soon apparent... on the banks of the waterway, "silver fish lay on its side".

Their visit to a doctor confirms the decay as he informs them that "only foolish people go down by the river", before Hammond launches into a final verse condemnation that, unless we change our ways, the river will be filled with "clean white skulls" rather than being a haven for otters.

Answer: Joni Mitchell

I once opened a university essay with the line that "progress is the art of losing innocence" and, in my eyes, it has never been better reflected than in Joni Mitchell's classic lines:

"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got until it's gone".

Mitchell advised that she was inspired to write the song on a visit to Hawaii, throwing back the curtains to see a paradise of green mountains dressed in an avalanche of trees and shrubs, only to have her heart broken when she looked down to see a massive asphalt carpark beneath her window. The song wends its way through an ecological protest, even calling upon farmers to cease their use of DDT, before taking on a personal bent in the final verse.

Released as single by Mitchell in 1970, the song was a solid hit for the Canadian-born singer but it became a huge international hit in 2002 when recorded by the Counting Crows.

Answer: Talking Heads

Despite its mediocre performance on the charts, this Talking Heads song, taken from their last studio album, "Naked" (1988), is pure genius by the band. Marinated by lush African and Caribbean rhythms that provide the song with a rich and fertile soundscape, the lyrics take us on a journey to the future where Mother Nature takes back what was once hers, causing great displeasure to the locals:

"The highways and cars
Were sacrificed for agriculture"

However, if you read between the lines, the song can be seen as a response to Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" (1970), with the band taking a dig at environmentalists by saying "be careful what you wish for". In other words, yes you may yearn for a return to the jungle but are you really prepared to forego all of the trappings that you have created...

"This was a Pizza Hut
Now, it's all covered with daisies."

Answer: Canned Heat

Despite some thinking that last verse turns the song into a call to dodge the draft, many have linked the song to an escape from the pressures and the drudgery of city life. It speaks to the rural hippie movement and it became an anthem for the counter-culture "back to the land" campaigns that placed great emphasis on self sufficiency and community, while calling for social and land reforms.

Released in 1968, its call for escape is similar in theme to Tim McGraw's "Where the Green Grass Grows" (1998), "Going Up the Country" would become one of Canned Heat's best known songs and, certainly, one of their biggest hits.

Answer: Creedence Clearwater Revival

Unlike most of the songs in this quiz this 1969 single by CCR doesn't preach about saving the environment but puts forward idyllic pictures of what we stand to lose... namely a safe haven.

John Fogerty presents us with a picture of his childhood. He shares with us his memories ("Wonder if my rope's still hangin' to the tree"), moments of excitement and anticipation ("I can hear the bullfrog callin' me, oh") and simple pleasures ("Love to kick my feet way down the shallow water"). In the final verse he sings about himself venturing into the wider community, where the big world can rest heavy on one's shoulders and, should this burden ever threaten to drag him down, he could always escape to where he once found simple joys ("You're gonna find the world is smoldering, and if you get lost, come on home to Green River").

Answer: Van Morrison

Whilst they were a year apart in being released, at the same time that Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR) were recording "Green River" (1969), Van Morrison was in New York recording this track... and, whilst the approaches differ, the subject matter is eerily similar.

In the same way that John Fogerty drew inspiration for the CCR hit, "And It Stoned Me" (1970) was siphoned by Van Morrison from a childhood memory. Recalled by Morrison's biographer, Ritchie Yorke, in "Into the Music: The Van Morrison Biography" (1975), the song was triggered by being a child and being "stoned" by nature... nothing else was necessary. Years later, in Steve Turner's "Van Morrison: Too Late to Stop Now" (1993), Morrison expands that by indicating that it was a "quasi-mystical" experience. After getting a drink of water from an old man, who'd indicated that he'd gotten it from a nearby stream, Morrison expounded "We drank some and everything seemed to stop for me. Time stood still. For five minutes everything was really quiet and I was in this 'other dimension'." (page 102).

"Oh, the water
Oh, the water
Oh, the water
Let it run all over me."

Answer: Louis Armstrong

Despite some of the doom and gloom that has been recorded above it should be noted that Mother Nature is a truly remarkable beast, so it feels right that this quiz should close out with a song that is full of hope and optimism, and a song that boasts about all of the beauty that can be found in the world and the kindness that lives in the hearts of men and women.

Released in 1968, this is a song that nearly didn't happen. Whilst the writers, Bob Thiele (as "George Douglas") and George David Weiss believed in it and the singer, Louis Armstrong, believed in it, the record label's president, Larry Newton, hated it and did everything in his power to try and prevent the song being recorded and, once it was, sabotage its promotion. As a consequence, the song was only a modest hit during Armstrong's lifetime but created a sales storm when it was heard on the soundtrack to the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam" (1987).

The remarkable feature about the song is that, like optimism, it rose above gloom, despair and obstacles. It was a song that went against the prevailing trends in popular music at the time and it was written in an era when a horrendous war was being raged in Vietnam and streets around the globe were filled with anger and riots... yet it had the temerity to tell us to find some joy in what we have.