Compositions with a narrator

"Thriller" is a song recorded by American singer Michael Jackson, composed by Rod Temperton, and produced by Quincy Jones. It is the seventh and final single released by Epic Records from his 1982 studio album of the same name. A 14-minute video showing Jackson in a horror-themed performance premiered on November 14, 1983. It was first shown on MTV on December 2, 1983. The song was not released as a single until January 23, 1984.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (often colloquially known as Joseph) is a musical comedy with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The story is based on the "coat of many colours" story of Joseph from the Bible's Book of Genesis. This was the first Lloyd Webber and Rice musical to be performed publicly; their first collaboration, The Likes of Us, written in 1965, was not performed until 2005.

"Billy the Mountain" is a Frank Zappa song first made available on the album Just Another Band from L.A. in 1972. The original recording of this song, which took more than a half-hour to perform, was from a live tour performance on August 7, 1971 in Los Angeles, performed by Zappa with his band The Mothers and prominently featuring the musical duo Flo & Eddie. The album recording had to be edited in order to fit on one side of the record. An alternate version of the song was featured on the 1992 album Playground Psychotics, and a third version of the song was posthumously released in 2011 by the Zappa Family Trust on the album Carnegie Hall.

"The Adventures of Greggery Peccary" is a piece by Frank Zappa, originally released on the album Studio Tan in 1978 and later recompiled into the posthumously released Läther album. An instrumental version now appears on the Wazoo CD featuring the original Wazoo ensemble and debuted at the Hollywood Bowl on September 10, 1972. On that CD it is in 4 movements totalling 33.05 minutes. The song is an epic that extended 20 minutes and 33 seconds in length when first released and later 21 minutes (in a slightly different mix and edit) on Läther, mocking the rock opera style and reprising the extended story format used in "Billy the Mountain" and, to some extent, the lengthy adventures outlined in the "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow Suite".

"Albuquerque" is the last song of "Weird Al" Yankovic's Running with Scissors album. At 11 minutes and 22 seconds, it is the longest song Yankovic has ever released on any of his official studio albums.

Genesis Suite is a 1945 work for narrator, chorus and orchestra. A musical interpretation of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, the suite was a collaborative work by seven composers, some of whom wrote film music in Hollywood. The project was conceived by Nathaniel Shilkret, a noted conductor and composer of music for recording, radio and film. Shilkret wrote one of the seven pieces and invited the remaining composers to submit contributions as work-for-hire. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky wrote, respectively, the first and last parts. The Biblical text used in the spoken word narrative is the American King James Version. It was intended to be a crossover from art music to popular music.

Perséphone (Persephone) is a musical work (mélodrame) for speaker, solo singers, chorus, dancers and orchestra with music by Igor Stravinsky and a libretto by André Gide.

Peter and the Wolf (Russian: Петя и волк, Pétya i volk) Op. 67, a "symphonic tale for children", is a programmatic musical composition written by Sergei Prokofiev in 1936. The narrator tells a Russian folk tale, which the orchestra illustrates by using different instruments to play a "theme" that represents each character in the story.

The Whale is a "dramatic cantata" written by the English composer John Tavener in 1966.

Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds is a 1978 concept album by Jeff Wayne, retelling the story of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Its format is progressive rock and string orchestra, using narration and leitmotifs to carry the story via rhyming melodic lyrics that express the feelings of the various characters. The two-disc album remains a bestseller, having sold millions of records around the world, and is the 39th best selling album of all time in the UK with sales of 2,561,286 by 2009. It has since spawned multiple versions of the album, video games, DVDs, and live tours.