Once in awhile it hits me that I’ve been writing this blog for a damn long time.
When ‘Dear John,’ the opening track of Aimee Mann’s excellent concept album The Forgotten Arm, came up as today’s random iTunes selection, I figured I’d featured the record, if not this song, before.
And sure enough, I did… five and a half years ago.
Anybody who knows me could have guessed that Wes Anderson would show up on this list, probably more than once.
All of Anderson’s films make smart use of music, so I had plenty of options. I knew I wanted Rushmore represented, as I consider that his greatest achievement. But which song?
My second Richard Linklater film in this list, Boyhood uses music both to set the mood and to establish the setting.
Gliding through time, depicting Ellar Coltrane’s metamorphosis from a little boy to a young man, Linklater serves up the hits of the day to anchor us in each moment. Songs do such a good job of transporting us back to specific times in our lives.
I can point to a handful of filmmakers who use music in their movies better than the rest. They’ll all show up on this list, some more than once.
I definitely count the Coen Brothers among that group, though in their case it’s more about how they use sound of all kinds — music, score, ambient effects — to create their worlds. Whether it’s Beethoven on a banjo in Raising Arizona, the orgy of violence set to a soaring ‘Danny Boy’ in Miller’s Crossing or the ghostly echoing of the halls in Barton Fink, the Coens’ films are a feast for both the eyes and ears.
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.
