Posts for the month of September 2021

The Sabaton Index

I enjoy music that tells a story. True stories are even better. For what has probably been a couple of years, I have stumbled across references to Sabaton and their songs about historical events (particularly battles, wars, and related topics). But I only recently investigated and listened to their work.

Oh. Wow.

They post videos on YouTube where they also have a Sabaton History channel that covers the history behind the songs. They also publish their discography with lyrics and some background.

Who would sing a song about the Holocaust? Sabaton did. Listen carefully to the lyrics, soak in the thunder of the music. Reflect on the history.

For me, a song is more meaningful when I know the story behind it and the words from which it is crafted. So I want to learn the history, read the lyrics, and then listen to the song. But Sabaton has created so much material, from lyrics to lyric videos to music videos to history videos, that it is hard to really wrap your head around it. It really needs some organization to navigate it.

So I made an attempt at it.

Generally, each row of the table lists the title of the song, a link to the official lyrics, links to the Sabaton History videos for that song, various videos of the song itself, and a brief comment noting the topic of the song. They publish multiple video variants for their songs, such as "lyric videos" which show the words as they sing, or "music videos" which sometimes take a more reenactment approach. Or a "story video", as with No Bullets Fly, or even a stop motion animation "block video" as with The Future Of Warfare. I've attempted to be fairly complete in terms of listing all songs for which I found information, even if I didn't find enough to fill out all the columns. I have listened to but a small fraction of the material indexed here, but I've found this structure to be useful in exploring Sabaton's work.

Find the full table at SabatonIndex.