The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Today is the birthday of film composer Hans Zimmer! Zimmer tends to be a rather controversial figure in movie music fandom circles (mainly for the way his style of sound has been influential to the point of making a lot of recent film music rather homogeneous), and he’s written a lot of stuff that leaves me cold. But he has also written a lot of frankly wonderful music that deserves to be celebrated. Here are a few selections of his work that I enjoy!
I’ve never been a big Fleetwood Mac fan. I have nothing against them, and I tend to like their songs, but for one reason or another I’ve never really heard much of them beyond their biggest hits, like “Don’t Stop Thinkin’ About Tomorrow.” It’s weird how some big names just manage to never quite penetrate through to really being on the radar, isn’t it?
But lately during our evening reading and hanging-out time at home, The Wife has been playing a “Classic Hits” station on Pandora, and there’s been more Fleetwood Mac on that station, so I’ve been hearing more of them…and I’ve realized just how good some of their songs really are, such as this one. I’ve heard this a lot over the years but it’s never really hit my sweet spot until now, when I’ve decided that it’s one of the most beautiful rock songs ever.
Here is “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac.
OK, I need to find some consistency here again…I’ll get back to that Song Challenge thing soon, but for now, here’s a favorite musical number of mine. This comes from the movie High Society, which is a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, this time with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly in the parts played originally by Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, and with Frank Sinatra playing the nosy reporter originated by Jimmy Stewart in the original. High Society justifies its musical numbers by relocating the story to Newport, Rhode Island and a jazz festival that takes place there as Kelly’s Tracy Samantha Lord is remarrying after earlier divorcing Crosby. It’s a fine movie, and the musical numbers are all terrific (the film also makes good use of Louis Armstrong and his band), but I’m somehow never quite able to find Bing Crosby convincing as a romantic lead, and when you make a musical with Crosby and Sinatra, it seems odd to me that those two gentlemen are brought together for only one number.
But at least it’s a great number.
“Well Did You Evah” lampoons the kind of gossip that takes place in the rich-folks circles of those eastern communities, and the song itself catalogs the growth of a friendship in about four minutes between two men who are vaguely antagonistic toward each other at the beginning. By the time they reach the song’s final flourishes both Crosby and Sinatra appear to be having a blast, with one of my favorite lyrics ever: “Have you heard? It’s in the stars–next July we collide with Mars!”
Here’s “Well Did You Evah.”
I missed last week, boo! But I’m back this week, yay!
Setting aside the Song Challenge thing for a while, here’s a nifty bit of movie music…for a teevee movie, anyway. Back in 1983 there was a miniseries on NBC (a two-part movie, basically) called V, in which alien “visitors” appeared in giant ships to contact humanity. Their stated reason for visiting was benign, or so they said, but they quickly turned out to be liars who took over the planet and assumed control as they started robbing the Earth of its liquid water (which, the show told us, is “the rarest, most precious commodity you can imagine, and Earth is blessed with an abundance of it”) and harvest humans for food. Now, ignore the ludicrous nature of the show’s SF premise (there’s a shitload of water out there in the universe), the show was a lot of fun and it had some sober things to say about the nature of resistance in the face of evil. But the first installment left things unresolved, so along the next year came V: The Final Battle, which wrapped up the story over three nights. After some really convoluted stuff in the plot department (the first series was much more tightly written), the humans finally achieved victory by developing a biological agent that would poison the Earth’s atmosphere to the aliens (the “Visitors”) but be harmless to humans. The humans dispersed this stuff via hot air balloons in a nifty sequence that was pretty entertaining for a war show, eschewing a giant final battle for a more passively peaceful way of depicting victory. (There was action stuff that played out alongside this, of course, because you had to have some kind of action finale.)
The scene in which the balloons launch at dawn is accompanied by this music, which is as charmingly 1980s as you can get, with synths and drum samples and sounds that mimic whale songs, before the soaring melody arrives. It’s hard not to be cheered and buoyed by music like this. This is the kind of thing I grew up with, folks!
Here’s “The Balloon Theme” from V: The Final Battle.
Yup, the usual. Very busy at work and also very busy at home, what with editing books and other things! I finished manuscript markups on The Savior Worlds, but now I’m finishing up the manuscript markups on Deliverance, Eh? (not the actual title), which is my supernatural thriller about a kayaking expedition in the Alaskan wilds that goes wildly, horribly wrong. Also in the last few weeks we’ve had our wedding anniversary, a trip to Rochester for the Lilac Festival, and my appearance as part of the Geekiverse team at Nickel City Con! (Post about that coming up on the Official Site.)
Why all this writing activity? Because I want to get back to my original goal of having a book a year ready for release, at least for the next few years. That means that I had to get a nice backlog of manuscripts together, so I can start polishing them off, one by one. Right now there are five of them:
1. The Savior Worlds, being Book IV of The Song of Forgotten Stars.
2. Deliverance, Eh? (not the actual title), being the above-mentioned supernatural thriller.
3. Through the Pale Door, the second John Lazarus novel
4. Orion’s Huntress, the first installment in a new series of space operas
5. Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title) Part I, first half of a fantasy duology
That’s a lot of writing waiting to be processed and released into the wild, I can tell you!
But anyway, back to the song challenge. This one’s a bit heavy: A Song That Makes Me Think About Life. Well then! Here are a few of those.
So yesterday I was asked (well, I was asked to do this before yesterday, but yesterday was the day) to work not at The Store but rather to fill in for a guy who was on vacation at another location of The Store. Fine…except that The Other Store is in Niagara Falls, NY, and Casa Jaquandor is about 35 miles south of NF, NY. So I had a 45-minute commute, and then an 8-hour shift, and then a return-home commute that took an hour and twenty minutes because of road construction on I-190 through downtown Buffalo. (Couldn’t I have taken I-290 around Buffalo? Sure…but it’s under construction! And so’s the Skyway out of downtown! Huzzah!) So by the time I got home, walked doggos, cooked dinner, showered, walked doggos again, all I wanted to do was drink rum and do some edits on The Savior Worlds.
So here’s today’s entry into our ongoing song prompt thing, A Song From The Year I Was Born. Ready for some way-back hits from 1971? Here we go!
So, time to get back to our on-again, off-again song challenge! If my reckoning is correct, we’re up to A Song I’d Sing With Someone In A Karaoke Duet. Well, I’m honestly not likely to ever sing karaoke in any foreseeable future, but if I did…well, this category vexed me a bit which is why I’m actually so late today with this post. Only one song really leaps to mind for me as one that might get me up to the microphone (and a bit of alcohol infused into my system would also be necessary), and it’s this one, from Grease. Am I sure? Yes I’m sure! Yes I’m sure down deep inside!