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Song of the Day #4,921: ‘The Number One Song in Heaven’ – Sparks

Like Todd Haynes, Edgar Wright is an idiosyncratic writer-director who released his first documentary this year. Unlike Haynes, Wright brought his trademark wit and visual ingenuity to the new project. The mind behind such films as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Baby Driver and this year’s Last Night in Soho proved a perfect match for this material.

The movie in question is The Sparks Brothers, an in-depth look at the career of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, whose band Sparks has been a cult favorite for more than 50 years.

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Song of the Day #4,920: ‘Sunday Morning’ – The Velvet Underground

Writer-director Todd Haynes’ delivered another of this year’s celebrated music documentaries with The Velvet Underground, the first feature length film to explore the career of the seminal indie rock band.

This is Haynes’ first documentary, though he has tackled musical icons in the past with Velvet Goldmine (about the glam rock scene in the 70s, and based heavily on David Bowie) and I’m Not There, which chronicled the life of Bob Dylan through multiple stages using six different actors in the central role.

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Song of the Day #4,919: ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine (Live, partial)’ – Gladys Knight & The Pips

Get Back was the year’s most captivating music documentary, but plenty of other candidates hit big and small screens in 2021.

Among those I haven’t seen (yet) are Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, Listening to Kenny G, Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love and Rage, and any of the four(!) different Britney Spears documentaries released this year.

But I did catch three others that I’ll highlight this week.

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Song of the Day #4,918: ‘Get Back (Live, partial)’ – The Beatles

Disney stripped me of my ability to post clips from Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back, but today I’ll list a few of the moments I was prepared to feature.

– Paul coming up with ‘Get Back’

This is the most talked-about moment in the series, because it so casually captures the birth of a classic song. Paul, George and Ringo are killing time waiting for John to arrive. Paul starts noodling away on his guitar until he stumbles onto the riff that would become the backbone of ‘Get Back.’

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Song of the Day #4,917: ‘Something (Rehearsal)’ – The Beatles

Initially, I planned to spend this week featuring clips from Get Back, Peter Jackson’s fascinating eight-hour documentary on The Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, available to stream on Disney Plus.

But Disney has apparently scrubbed the web of excerpts from the series, unfortunate for people like me who want to use them to celebrate the work.

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