Category Archives: song of the day

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Song of the Day #4,647: ‘Green’ – Abraham Marder

Best Films of 2020
#2 – Sound of Metal

Director and co-writer Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal is another film that hit harder due to the pandemic. This story of a heavy metal drummer who has to find himself after losing his hearing wound up having deeper thematic resonance due to a crisis the filmmaker’s didn’t see coming.

Consider that the film’s main character, Ruben (played brilliantly by Riz Ahmed), is facing a sudden and foreign new reality, and struggles mightily to regain some semblance of his previous life. How many of us can relate, forced inside and into masks, away from loved ones, jobs and pastimes? How have we strained to find our old lives buried in this new existence?

We were lucky if we could find some grace in the solitude, some comfort in the silence.

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Song of the Day #4,646: ‘Rain Song’ – Emile Mosseri and Han Ye-ri

Best Films of 2020
#3 – Minari

When I watched writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, knowing nothing about its origins, my immediate thought was that it had to be based on real-life events. The details were too precise, and the emotions too full-hearted, for it to be anything but a collection of memories committed to film.

Sure enough, I soon learned that Chung based the film on his own Korean immigrant family’s experiences starting a farm in rural Arkansas. Every interaction feels so true to life because he lived it.

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Song of the Day #4,645: ‘Speak Now’ – Leslie Odom Jr.

Best Films of 2020
#4 – One Night in Miami…

In a year of strong ensemble casts, none impressed me more than the quartet at the center of Regina King’s One Night in Miami….

King directs a script by Kemp Powers, based on his own play, about an encounter between four legendary Black icons: Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.). The four men alternately clash and harmonize about their roles and responsibilities in a society that worships them but would never invite them in for dinner.

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Song of the Day #4,644: ‘It’s Raining Men’ – DeathByRomy

Best Films of 2020
#5 – Promising Young Woman

Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s polarizing Promising Young Woman is one of the most self-assured and stylish debuts I’ve ever seen. Whether you find it exhilarating or nauseating (or both), you can’t deny its potency.

Part rape revenge thriller, part romantic comedy, part exploration of PTSD, this movie manages its twists and turns so deftly and somehow emerges as a cohesive vision. Fennell, an English actress best known for roles on Call the Midwife and The Crown, has crafted a singular concoction, a candy-coated poison pill.

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Song of the Day #4,643: ‘Pretty (Ugly Before)’ – Elliott Smith

Before today, Elliott smith had made 25 appearances as a Song of the Day artist. Thirteen of those were by my choice, while the other 12 were Random Weekend selections.

Today’s random SOTD evens up the score, making it a baker’s dozen of both random and intentional selections.

One thing is certain: every one of those 26 songs is a gem. In his short career, Smith seemed incapable of recording a song that wasn’t special in some way or another.

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