In honor of Monday’s eclipse….
Something for Thursday
So, there’s a local radio station that every day at noon does what they call a “Beatle Block”. That’s four songs by the Beatles.
Only…not really.
The other day they played this, which is not a Beatles song. It’s a Wings song, by Paul McCartney.
Now, they’ve done this before; they’ve played “Imagine” as part of the Beatles Block, and I suspect they’ve also played “I’ve Got My Mind Set On You” as well. So, my question to you, Dear Readers, is this: If you’re told you’re about to hear a Beatles Block, should that include only songs specifically by the band The Beatles, or can it include any song that may have been written by a member of The Beatles, after The Beatles broke up?
I personally lean to the former. This isn’t a Beatles song. It’s a Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney song, recorded by Wings. (And in truth, I don’t much like this song; most of McCartney’s post-Beatles output leaves me cold. But here it is, anyway.)
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Something for Thursday
First of all, a bit of administrativia: the post immediately below this one was supposed to run yesterday and I screwed up the publishing. Oops.
Now: not music, but a scene from a teevee show today: the closing scene from “The Unnatural” from The X-Files, an episode David Duchovny wrote and directed, in which his Agent Fox Mulder visits an elderly former FBI agent named Arthur Dales about a curious incident in Agent Dales’s past. It turns out that this Arthur Dales was actually the brother of the former FBI agent Arthur Dales, though both were named Arthur. Anyway, this Dales was a cop in Roswell, NM in the late 1940s, and was assigned to protect a black baseball player named Josh Exley. Of course, Exley turned out to be an alien who loved baseball, and a very strange period story emerges, in which the show’s decades-long alien conspiracy intersects the world of baseball. Honestly, it’s one of the show’s very best episodes.
One thing that makes it great is that the present-day Arthur Dales was played by the great character actor M. Emmet Walsh, who just died this week after decades of appearing in seemingly everything. Walsh was an outstanding actor, and he will be missed.
I couldn’t find the actual scenes of Walsh and Duchovny talking in the episode, so I’ll just share this scene, which concludes the episode as Mulder and Scully take a break from all their alien-chasing and conspiracy-pursuing to bond–pretty romantically, too–over a bit of batting practice. The song heard throughout the scene actually weaves through the entire episode; it turns out that the alien ballplayer in 1947 also had a great singing voice.
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Something for Thursday
CCR:
Here’s what I don’t understand about this song: “It was down in Louisiana, just about a mile from Texarakana.” Huh? According to what I’ve found on Google, Texarkana is roughly 35 miles away from the Louisiana state line. (Although things get weird if you phrase the search wrong, because there is actually a State Line, Louisiana, which is all the way on the other side of the state, so it’s something like 300 miles from Texarkana.)
Still, this is a great song. It’s CCR, after all.
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Something for Thursday
A film music suite from the movie Miracle, about the “Miracle on Ice” hockey game at the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. That game was played 44 years ago today. Wow.
For more on that game, please check out Sheila O’Malley’s amazing oral history of the game, its background, and its aftermath.
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Something for Thursday
‘On one rainy night in Tokyo, three strangers experience solitude from three unique perspectives.’
That’s the description of this short film, Tokyo Solitude, which YouTube’s algorithm offered up for me the other day. I found this utterly captivating; the imagery is amazing, with one breathtaking composition after another. It’s especially fascinating because my overwhelming impression of Tokyo at night is that it is ablaze with light and packed with people, but this film suggests otherwise: darkness and solitude exist there, and neither is necessarily a bad thing.
Take ten minutes and enter another world (set your resolution as high as it will go, turn up the volume or listen through headphones for the immersive soundtrack, and put it in fullscreen):
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Something for Thursday: Happy Birthday, John Williams!
John Williams turns 92 today…and he’s still working.
In his honor, let’s listen to some of his work!
Williams won a Grammy just the other night for this: “Helena’s Theme” from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It’s a typically gorgeous theme that manages to evoke Marion’s Theme from all the way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark without echoing it or quoting it.
Here’s something that vexed film music fans for years: the unavailability of the End Credits music that actually was heard in the film of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The suite that appeared on the album was nice enough, but the film version is longer, quoting several of the movie’s themes as the last scene in the Indian village plays out. And when we finally go to credits and the Raiders March fires up, it actually fades out in the repeat (at the 3:32 mark) so that we can here a brief quote of Short Round’s Theme. Williams’s ability to put seemingly disparate themes together into an actually cohesive whole is always amazing.
Going back even farther, here’s one of Williams’s earliest contributions to film music: his score to the law-school drama The Paper Chase. Yes, it sounds a bit dated, but you can absolutely hear the fingerprints of the Williams-to-come in this cue, the End Credits suite from that movie:
It’s the lot of most film composers to have to turn in really good work for movies that…aren’t. Hook is, for me, one of the few misfires in Steven Spielberg’s output; it fell in that weird late 80s-early 90s era when Spielberg hadn’t really transitioned into the finer drama work that was to come, but you could tell that his heart wasn’t entirely in the magic-and-fantasy flicks he was still doing. But along comes Williams with this amazing score, and this almost perfect tone-poem-in-miniature:
When Williams’s score to 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones arrived, a lot of people were a bit befuddled by that score’s mix of darkness and lyrical love music. One person quipped on some message board or someplace, “It sounds like Nixon on a date.” That was pretty funny, but it seemed to highlight the fact that Williams’s score to Oliver Stone’s Nixon has never been particularly beloved. And that interests me, because I have always found it one of his most fascinating scores. He brings just the right blend of paranoid darkness and throwback Americana to Stone’s film (which I consider a masterpiece). Nixon has some of Williams’s most powerful and most overlooked music.
I do have to make an admission: I’m not always a big fan of Williams when he is scoring comedies or really light movies. For whatever reason, I always feel better when there’s a tinge of darkness in Williams’s music. (I can live quite happily without hearing Home Alone again, to be honest.) But in this wonderful march for Spielberg’s early big-budget misfire 1941, you can tell that John Williams has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. This is absolutely delightful.
I’ve never seen Seven Years in Tibet. I couldn’t even tell you right now what it’s about without Googling it, other than…a guy is in Tibet for seven years. But I love this theme:
Finally–and I’m only ending this here because let’s be honest, I could go on a lot longer about John Williams and how much he’s meant to me and to my creative life throughout my years, but I actually have to eat dinner tonight–here’s a suite of another of what seems to me an underrated score, which is all the more surprising to me because every time I listen to it, I’m dazzled anew by how new this sounds, even for a throwback score. It’s Catch Me If You Can.
Thank you for the music, Maestro Williams!
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Something for Thursday
Phil Collins turned 73 the other day.
Collins no longer performs due to age and health reasons, which is very sad…but there was a time when he was ubiquitous to a staggering degree. From the mid-80s to around 2000 or so, you couldn’t get away from the guy. In fact, I actually OD’d on Phil Collins during my college years, which is a shame but also a blessing in disguise, because in recent years I’ve been lucky enough to gradually rediscover him. In his prime he really was an electrifying musician.
Here are a few Phil favorites. This isn’t even close to all of his music that I love, and I’m limiting myself here to just his solo work. I’ve had a long-form essay in my head about the Genesis album Invisible Touch for a few years now….
By the way, I should admit that the one Phil Collins song that seems to get the most airplay these days, “In the Air Tonight”, has never been one of my favorites. That’s just how it goes. It always amazes me, though, that Collins could do gentle love songs, emotion-dripping power ballads, fast-paced dance bangers, and then he also did this genre of what I call “noir rock”, very dark and almost harsh songs that showed up in the soundtracks of Miami Vice and the noir-tinged episodes of Magnum PI.
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Something for Thursday: Robert Burns Edition
Robert Burns, the great poet troubadour of Scotland, was born this date, 1759. For a basic primer on Burns, this article is a good place to start. For some true appreciation, though, skip the basic intro and go right to Sheila O’Malley.
He was prolific. As it stands, there are over 400 Robert Burns known songs in existence. He was a celebrity in his own time. The fame he achieved in his own lifetime, however, is nothing compared to his posthumous fame.
Some of his verses are so engrained in our culture we can’t even imagine anyone wrote them at all. They seem to have just descended upon us, whole, from the heavens, the ether, Olympus. If you’re drunk on New Year’s Eve, gripping a bottle of champagne, and singing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of your lungs, annoying people on the subway, you are quoting Robbie Burns.
Burns is one of those poets whose work is best sounded aloud, or at least sounded in the mouth, even if one doesn’t make the sounds; one should at least feel them. There are verses of his that seem to make no sense, due to the Scots dialect, but when you sound them out, the meaning becomes absolutely, utterly clear.
For me, the union of Burns’s words and Dougie Maclean’s voice is one of those things of perfection that we get to enjoy once in a while in this world. Here is one of my favorite songs, thanks to Robert Burns and Dougie Maclean!