This week and next, I’m counting down the songs I most associate with movies — tracks that immediately put me into a specific scene of a favorite film.
Most of these are songs I’d never heard before encountering them on the big screen, but yesterday’s SOTD and today’s are exceptions.
Movies and music are inexorably intertwined, and the best films almost always feature music in a memorable way. That could be through an original score — think of Star Wars, Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark without John Williams — or recorded songs.
Over the next two weeks I’ll count down ten of my favorite uses of songs in the movies. I can’t believe I haven’t done this before through nearly 2,500 Songs of the Day, but that seems to be the case. I have written about some of these songs, and mentioned some of these movies, but never as part of a theme week. In the cases where I’ve featured a song already I will post a live or alternate version. Whenever possible, I will post the movie clips as well.
I always sigh when a Morrissey or Smiths song pops up on Random iTunes Weekends, bracing myself for the bashing to come from my regular readers.
I need to find a pocket of Smiths fans to whom I can market the blog on these occasions, so the lovers can drown out the haters.
‘Glamorous Glue’ is a track from Morrissey’s best solo album, 1992’s Your Arsenal. This one of several albums that will always remind me of the year I met my wife.
Here’s the second track from XTC’s excellent 1986 album Skylarking. It’s probably been more than a decade since I listened to any part of this album, and longer than that since I listened to it in full.
Actually, that’s not true. About seven or eight years ago I embarked on a mission to listen to every single one of my CDs in their entirety. The goal was to decide which ones I would keep and which I could sell back. It took me several months and my listening spanned several states (a northeastern road trip helped the cause, though I could only listen to some albums while my wife and kids were sleeping).
It’s not every day that I get a music recommendation from my parents.
Certainly, my exposure to some of the greats — Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, Carole King — is thanks to their influence when I was a kid. And my mother famously introduced our family to Billy Joel (or, as she referred to him, Billy Joe).
But since I turned 15, I can probably count on one hand the number of musical artists they’ve sent my way. I might not even need the one hand.
Meet Me In Montauk 