I have a pretty extensive music collection, but nowhere near extensive enough to provide fodder for 31 songs named after the numbers one through 31.
So one of the great things about this challenge is how it has forced me to discover new music by artists I’d never even heard of.
For almost as long as I’ve been postings Songs of the Day (10 years come July!) I’ve wanted to do a series of songs named after numbers. One month’s worth, from ‘One’ to ‘Thirty One.’ For some reason I never got around to it until now.
Each day of March, I’ll feature a song that shares a title with the date. Wherever possible, I’ll use songs whose titles are just the number with no words. But that’s harder to pull off for some numbers, and sometimes I just like a song enough to give it a pass.
I can’t do a week on Academy Award winning songs without giving a nod to Disney animation. Songs from animated Disney films have won a whopping 13% of all Best Original Song Oscars.
The trend started way back the 40s with Pinocchio‘s ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ (1940) and ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ from 1947’s racially problematic Song of the South. Disney had a 40-year drought after that, until 1989’s The Little Mermaid brought the studio back with a vengeance. Including that one for ‘Under the Sea,’ Disney animated films would go on to win seven of the next 10 Best Original Song Oscars.
Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself,’ from the 2002 film 8 Mile, was the first rap song ever nominated for an Oscar. It won. Three years later, Three 6 Mafia’s ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp’ became the second rap nominee (and winner). 2014’s Selma won its sole Oscar for ‘Glory,’ a rap song written and performed by John Legend and Common.
Three for three. No musical genre is more sure-fire. Clearly, if you want to win a Best Original Song Oscar, you just have to get a rap song nominated. Of course, that’s the hard part.
My next two featured Academy Award-winning songs are integral not just to the films’ atmosphere but to their plots.
Writer-director John Carney’s 2007 film Once follows two aspiring musicians in Dublin who bond over their creative passion but are destined to not end up together. It is a tender, bittersweet film that strings together a handful of wonderful musical set pieces.
