Do you ever hear a song and realize how much you’ve missed it without even knowing it?
Watching The Royal Tenenbaums again last night, I was thoroughly digging the usage of ‘Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard’ and realizing how some days just need a little Paul Simon to feel right. This song is on the soundtrack alongside a stellar lineup that just underscores the unstoppable combination of Wes Anderson and Mark Mothersbaugh. From the opening ‘Hey Jude’ instrumental, to the Dylan, Stones, Ramones, obligatory depressing scene with Elliott Smith, Velvet Underground, Van Morrison, and even some fantastic Nick Drake — it’s just top notch, eh?
This also reminds me of the fun cover that those hot whistling Swedes, Peter Bjorn & John, recorded on KCRW a bit back. By the way, didja know that the female vocals in that infectiously poppy ‘Young Folks’ tune is Victoria Bergsman (formerly) of The Concretes? I thought she sounded familiar.
Both of those versions are going onto my running playlist and I’m heading out in today’s glorious sunshine. I got finally new running shoes (you mean they don’t last 3 years?) and I am ridiculously excited.
It was raining yesterday so their christening run was on the treadmill and I went farther than I thought I could go without someone chasing me. I am invincible, like Wonder Woman, except it is a heck of a lot harder for her to run in those thigh-high boots.
If you have the patience to watch and enjoy as a rich noir-influenced story unfolds with diverse characters, three loosely interrelated plots, and an absolutely top-notch soundtrack, then Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train is one you should definitely dig up at the rental place.
I never saw this when it came out in 1989 because although I have always liked this kind of music, I was preoccupied with NKOTB at the time and probably wouldn’t have been allowed to see it anyways because there are boobies. I was more about the Hangin’ Tough Live Concert video than moody atmospheric musical travelogues through rock history’s footprints. But now that I have grown, man alive did I enjoy this one.
Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers, Coffee & Cigarettes, Year of the Horse) clearly loves music, and there is nary a city in America where music is more firmly enmeshed in the pulse of the community than Memphis, Tennessee. It’s a story that takes its sweet time unravelling, with long pauses to breathe. The cinematography is vignette driven, almost like a series of postcards with lingering shots of the city of Memphis — the dirty, gritty, ambling back alleys and monuments to Elvis and references to Graceland.
And Elvis is indeed everywhere (even if our young Japanese protagonist keeps insisting that Carl Perkins was better); inescapable and as much of a living character in the film as anyone else. The black velvet portrait over the bed of the skeevy motel even pictures the gentle doe-eyed Elvis who smiles down on the rapid-fire consummation (okay, it’s the 11th time) of young teenage love.
The film starts with that teenage Japanese couple pulling into the train station for a firsthand pilgrimage of American rock and roll history. He sports a pompadour and the ever-present cigarette behind the ear, while she rocks the combat boots, a leather jacket, and a bright enthusiasm for anything related to American rock and roll. They don’t really know where they’re going, on several levels, but that’s okay with them.
After their story is mostly told (but left unfinished), the night rewinds and we meet a young Italian widow also in town to bring home the body of her husband to Rome. Played by the lovely Nicoletta Braschi (La Vita è Bella), hers is a wide-eyed and gentle respite between the other two tales. It was during her story that I found myself unable to resist belting out a bit of Marc Cohn: “Saw the ghost of Elvis down on Union Avenue. . .” even though most days I could do without that song. Rare the film that melds American rock history with the sonorous sounds of the Italian language, and I loved that segment.
Finally the triple-action view of the evening is wrapped up with a glance into the activities of three wayward punks (one of which is, oh, Joe Strummer, another a very young Steve Buscemi) and their drunken crimes. Although concrete connections between the three parallel storylines become apparent throughout the course of the night, the tales never directly intersect. Characters who know each other find themselves down the hall from one another, hearing the same sound, but never knowing of the intersection. Ultimately, it’s just a glimpse, and the film feels unfinished — but agreeably so.
For the music nerd, the film does journey through several immortalized locations, including a fast-talking tour of Sun Studios and some of the last footage ever shot of the original legendary Stax Records (by the way, if you like that soul sound, check out the Stax 50th Anniversary box set just released this week).
The melancholy soundtrack throughout is of the finest quality and simply cannot be beat for the atmosphere it creates, reminding me of the David Lynch scoring in Blue Velvet. Most of the tunes used in the soundtrack were actually recorded at Sun Studios back in the heyday, and the film resurrects them in almost-eerie fashion.
PS — the richly honeyed voice on the radio with the 2am intro to ‘Blue Moon’ in each of the three vignettes is none other than Tom Waits. Come on.
Mystery Train – Elvis Presley Mystery Train – Junior Parker Blue Moon – Elvis Presley Domino – Roy Orbison Soul Finger – The Bar-Kays Pain In My Heart – Otis Redding The Memphis Train – Rufus Thomas (I was so excited when Joe Strummer’s character selects this last tune on the bar jukebox — I just “found” it recently on the What It Is! compilation, and it has been an essential and beloved addition to my favorite new mix CD. Great song – and watch for the cameo in the Memphis train station by ole’ Rufus himself).
I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Mason Jennings tour DVD Use Your Van recently, when it finally popped to the top of my Netflix queue. It’s a very interesting look at an independent travelling musician, the life on the road, with Mason in the studio and on the stage. I appreciated the tension he illuminated between major label and independent, time spent on the road vs writing music, financial means to record in the studio vs. freedom to do what you want creatively. Plus, the man is dang funny — the film made me laugh out loud on more than one occassion. Pay close attention to the fake setlist he is shown devising backstage towards the end, with song names like “Diamond-Studded Bracelet, The Ribbed Or The Right, and Twice Is Fun, Three Times Is An Illegitimate Child.”
The songs throughout the film pull from all his albums — plus there are some unreleased gems, like this one.
Recorded 2/13/2004 at the Use Your Voice CD release concert in MN, it’s an old-timey feeling piano waltz that makes me think of music boxes and cabaret, but tethered with Mason’s grounded, poetic lyrics. It made me smile widely. This particular mp3 is ripped from DVD, but check out a fan recording of the full show here; esp the Elliott Smith and Johnny Cash covers.
Somehow, someway, I made it all the way to my 27th year of life without ever seeing the fantastic documentary of the meteoric rise of all things Seattle, Hype! — and this from an admittedly huge fan of what was called “the Seattle sound.” I remember wanting to attend a screening when Hype! first came out in 1996, but the club must have been 18+ or something, because I ended up not going — and in the days before Netflix, never noticed it at a local video store. I finally watched it recently and very heartily enjoyed the experience.
Hype! is a wonderful music documentary by Doug Pray (Scratch), and highly recommended for anyone of my variety of musical come-uppance. I started high school in the fall of 1993, so I guess I missed the very beginnings of the explosion of bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, but I caught up just as fast as I could (I had to go through my junior high Bel Biv Devoe phase, unfortunately).
Since I was young and somewhat naive, I never realized a lot of the background of music in the ’80s in Seattle. A point is made to lay the foundation for the film that Seattle was definitively not a cultural hotspot in the early 1980s:
“Bands never used to come here . . . they’d go as far as San Francisco and then not come all the way up to Seattle ‘cuz it wasn’t worth it to play just one show.” — Nils Bernstein, Sub Pop
“Well, Seattle was really lame, specifically in the early ’80s; it was like a million second cities. It had a fake Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, Killing Joke, all the fake Ramones you could shake a stick at, and, you know, people from Bellevue singing with English accents.” — Steve Fisk, record producer
That’s what made the explosion in the early ’90s all the more surprising to Seattleites, fueled largely by the Sub Pop record label. Bruce Pavitt started Sub Pop in 1979 as a cassette fanzine network where he’d make and distribute a zine along with compilation tapes of local bands. Pavitt teamed with Jonathan Poneman in 1986 to co-found the Sub Pop label with the goal of taking the sounds of their city beyond the confines of the region, with the hopes of allowing their musicians the freedom to quit their day jobs and take to the road, making it viable for them to get their music out there.
I loved a quote in the film from British record producer Martin Rushent, which captures the essence of the music scene at the time that Seattle started letting the raw rock fly: “When you’ve been through periods where you’ve had keyboard players with 50,000 lbs of kit on stage and 82 keyboards and 95 samplers, you know, after a while you just go, ‘Hang on. This is like eating too much food at one sitting; there’s too much sound, there’s too many colors, it’s all got poncey and posey. Let’s go see some bands where they just bash it out.” That ‘bashing it out’ is precisely what started to emerge from Sub Pop and other independent releases from Seattle.
In 1988, an article in the UK publication Melody Maker focused on the new sounds coming out of Seattle, and essentially wove together a story that created the myth of the city as an “explosion of subculture.” Journalists everywhere began writing about “the new Liverpool,” and what was happening in the Pacific Northwest. The NY Times article “Seattle Rock: Out Of The Woods and Into The Wild“ (by David Browne) posited, “This fall, the record industry went in search of the Seattle sound and returned with four rock bands whose only common trait seems to be inordinately long hair.”
And so began the fever for all things Seattle. The town became a mecca for bands looking to get heard and signed. Newly-formed bands were getting record contracts with only a week of live shows under their belt, just by virtue of being there.
One of the best cultural snapshots in the entire film is a shot of a sedate ride down an escalator in a department store. Piped in over the speakers is a tinny Muzak-synth version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ and the mannequins are all shown in their $180 “grunge wear.” It made me remember just how stupid and out-of-hand it all got once it was leeched onto by the fashionistas. Jeff Ament is quoted as saying, “More than anything else, I just think it’s funny. We wear long johns cuz it’s f*ckin’ cold!” (I’ll cop to wearing flannels pretty much my entire freshman year of high school. And Docs. And thermal shirts . . . okay, okay!)
The Supersuckers talk a bit about the excitement of the do-it yourself ethic in Seattle at the time, which I found inspiring: “That was the whole lesson we learned when we moved up here – just do it. We saw other bands no different than us just putting out records, zines –you know– a radio show, their own label, plus live shows.” That sounds to me a bit like the music scene at this very moment, with music blogs replacing the word-of-mouth of zines, MySpace streaming everyone and their gramma’s band on-demand, eMusic sales skyrocketing, and live shows like Daytrotter disseminating independent music faster than ever before.
The film’s got a very interesting (and humorously lo-tech) segment with Seattle musician Leighton Beezer, who constructed a computer program charting the inbred Seattle “family tree” for bands – linking musicians throughout a spiderweb network. It’s almost like ‘Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ through shared band members: Screaming Trees –> Nirvana –> The Melvins –> Mudhoney –> Green River –> Mother Love Bone –> Pearl Jam. Hours of endless entertainment in exploring those connections.
In addition to roiling, raw, cathartic live performances by everyone from Pearl Jam and Soundgarden to The Gits and The Posies, the film also includes the first ever live performance of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ with Nirvana in a tiny club. It gave me the chills, with the grainy home video, the alternate lyrics, but that undefinable quality that always made it a great song.
When I was watching Hype, it struck me as sort of a companion piece to one of my favorite movies Singles, which was conceived by Cameron Crowe as a love letter to the city, but also served to glamourize the whole “scene” to a whole generation of wide-eyed teenagers (like me). Hype! is firmly based in reality of the era, while Singles is admittedly fictionalized, scripted, and styled, but they both document an era. I remember wanting to live there soooo bad (I almost went to college in Seattle), imagining in my subconscious that, you know, I’d be sitting outside my apartment building and Chris Cornell would walk by and nod at my new stereo system, or Jeff Ament would pop his head in the basement of my building and ask me to move my car. Ha.
Surprisingly, Pearl Jam’s role in the film was muted. Ed Vedder gives a reflective interview (sitting next to his ex-wife Beth Liebling, in an uncredited appearance) on fame and hype during a time when he was still very much struggling with it publicly, and is shown jamming on the drums with Hovercraft (a side band that he’s toured with). I loved the very ending of the film, which shows Pearl Jam conducting their rad Self-Pollution Radio program in their Seattle studios. A few of their friends are shown stopping by (Mark Arm, Kim Warnick from The Fastbacks, Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, Barrett Martin from Screaming Trees, Layne Staley from Alice in Chains, and Krist Novoselic from Nirvana), and the lyrics from the song shown here are a most fitting way to end the film:
“Small my table, sits just two Got so crowded, I can’t make room Ohh, where did they come from? Stormed my room! And you dare say it belongs to you . . . to you . . . This is not for you! . . . Never was for you!”
Here’s some more music documenting the sounds of that era, from tunes featured in the film. The full soundtrack to Hype! is also available on Sub Pop Records.
Hype! also features a clip of Soundgarden performing this killer song off Badmotorfinger, in a bendy, sweaty, screaming performance with those notes being nailed by Chris Cornell. I saw Soundgarden in 1996 at the Henry J. Kaiser in Oakland, and it remains one of the best shows I’ve seen.
And this is purely a bonus track from me; Green River is the now-defunct Seattle band of Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, with Mark Arm and Steve Turner of Mudhoney.
Ultimately, it’s interesting to see how disparate and unique all the bands were that were lumped together under the headline “Seattle sound” when no one sound really ever existed. Hype! does a fine and entertaining job dissecting these years in American musical history. Director Doug Pray has made a convert of me to his productions; his next project is a film called Surfwise (about the life of Malibu surfer Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz) and I have a feeling it will include some choice tunes. Bring it on, Doug!
“They’ve toured the country, opened for rock legends, and you can’t find their album anywhere.”
And thus begins the journey in the new movie about Brooklyn band The Damnwells, their rise to Epic fame and fall from major label grace, and current creative successes as independent artists. Golden Days just got its first screening lined up — it’s one of 10 films picked for the Feature Film Competition at the 2007 Phoenix Film Festival (April 12-19 at the Harkins Theatre in Scottsdale).
Now I just recently found out about The Damnwells and have been listening to their Air Stereo record from 2006 (Zoe/Rounder Records) on heavy rotation. It is a damn fine record, one that you definitely should pick up if you liked the warm pop-alternative harmony and chiming guitars of Gin Blossoms or (my beloved) Toad The Wet Sprocket. There’s also a distinct alt-country vibe, perhaping emanating from the sticks of drummer Steven Terry, who was in Whiskeytown.
Here’s the trailer for the film:
Here are a few more Damnwells songs for your enjoyment and sampling. Get all their stuff — seriously. Plus, doesn’t lead singer Alex Dezen look (and sound nothing) like Jeff Buckley?
Golden Days You’ll hear this in the trailer (for obvious reasons) — a warm tune off Air Stereo, full of “oooooh” backing vocals and wonderful lyrics of musical allusions: “I can’t hear much but the melody coming from you / Baby please don’t rush, keep the tempo slow and blue, let me hear the words you say / Let’s go and get tangled in chains of golden days.” This is a great song.
You Don’t Have To Like Me (To Love Me Tonight) This one rolls right out of your speakers like that cocky guy walking into a bar and kicking the jukebox. And this comes out. “Nobody at school can tease me like you. Should we never be ours, leave it all to skies and the scars. Please don’t love me alone tonight.” [Air Stereo]
I Will Keep The Bad Things From You A sentimental song rife with little inside communications between guy and girl, promises like “You can keep your last name if you want to,” and “You keep the band names coming, I’ll make the jokes real funny.” From their 2004 album Bastards of the Beat.
Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we believe to know? Why do we believe anything at all?
Innumerable questions looking for an answer, an answer which will raise the next question and the following answer will raise a following question and so on and so forth.
But in the end, isn’t it always the same question and always the same answer?
Those existential ruminations form both the thematic foundation and the opening montage of one of the best art-house films I’ve seen in the last decade. If you’ve never seen the kinetic 1999 movie Run Lola Run (German title: Lola rennt), you absolutely must. This visceral and immediate story traces how one decision can alter the path that our immediate future takes, and how all of our lives are interconnected in ways we can’t see.
Essentially one dramatic moment played out with three different possible endings, the film folows Lola (Franka Potente) — a badass German punk with hair dyed flaming red (I wonder if the Alias creators saw this first) who gets an emergency call from her boyfriend Manni. He has lost a large sum of money not belonging to him. Together they have 20 minutes to get 100,000 Deutschmarks, or Manni is pretty much a goner.
So she sets off running.
As Lola makes split-second decisions on where to turn, who to talk to, and how to get the money that Manni needs, three different stories reveal themselves. The viewer is left with questions of the immutability of fate & death, and how all those small decisions (which don’t feel at all monumental at the time) can effect what happens next and, indeed, our whole future.
Images and spiraling storylines flash at the viewer a mile-a-minute (or, I guess a kilometer-a-minute: filmed in Germany). As Lola brushes past someone on the street or throws an offhand remark to another passerby, the movie shows us the next series of events in that person’s life with a series of rapidly flashing vignettes, some comic, some tragic. Oh, that we could see those things in real life – it’s an absolutely fascinating concept. How many times have you seen someone pass and wondered their story? Wouldn’t it be fantastic (and a bit terrifying) to see the next 10 years of their life played out for you in ten seconds of shotgunned images?
I love films that deal with alternate possibilities of reality (like this one, or how about Sliding Doors or Frequency?) and the ways that our lives interconnect without us realizing it. One split-second decision can change everything. Our life consists of the decisions we make, and director Tom Tykwer explores Lola’s choices and their ultimate effects on her reality. God love the German philosopher within the director. The movie is intelligent and urgent; you should have some friends over, pour some lagers, and have yourself an impassioned post-film discussion.
The electronic soundtrack is pulsating and relentless, making the whole movie seem to pass in a few minutes. The viewer is drawn in through the triple-punch of the action, the camera work (which seems as caffeinated and agitated as Lola herself), and the music. Together they live and breathe, and breathe hard. Check out two of these tracks. I’m no club kid, but there are irresistible within the atmpsophere and context of the film:
I love you, Colorado. But I’ve decided you are a wuss.
There is (a beautiful and powdery) 3 inches of snow on the ground this morning, tops. And it’s a snow day. I say everyone should get some snowshoes and 4-wheel-drive, and life should continue as normal. Thank you.
In the shutdown interim, here are a few odds & ends that are entertaining me this morning:
Ûž A reader pointed me in the direction of mp3s from the KEXP session with The Rosewood Thieves (my previous post here, definitely check them out). They performed 5 songs, including a Dylan cover. I am strongly digging their bluesy rocker sound.
Ûž My new friend Adam wrote about his new supercool fancy tracker thing for runners that goes in your shoe, wirelessly connects with your iPod, and tracks your running stats, even TALKING TO YOU while you run. I need that (it should say pugilistic things like, “Frickin wuss! DO NOT WALK UP THIS HILL!” Maybe yell obscenities at me to keep me moving). It appears to be reasonably priced at $29, but then you also need the special Nike shoes with a pocket to hold the sensor (can I do it myself with an x-acto knife?) and an iPod Nano (mine’s a 60). Drat. (wait, or not).
Ûž A couple of interesting “from the studio” news bits:
-Mike Watt plays bass on Kelly Clarkson’s new album (for real)
-!!! Sign to Warp Records (same label as my new love Jamie Lidell), new LP Myth Takes coming in 2007. If you haven’t heard their unique disco-funk sound (and I think you say their UnGooglable name Chk Chk Chk), here’s an mp3 of their song Take Ecstasy With Me from 2004′s Louden Up Now. You wanna dance around, don’t you?!
Ûž There’s a new Contrast Podcast you should listen to, this one on the fun ornithological theme of Chickens and Other Birds. I was going to contribute either Cake’s wonderful song that I can hear playing in my head just typing it: “Comfort Eagle” (but someone else submitted it, yay!) or the fantastic boogie “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens.”
But coulda woulda shoulda I’m lazy.
Ûž There’s a new documentary out called American Hardcore; maybe I want to punch someone after just watching the preview. It’s open now in selected theatres, and it features folks like Henry Rollins, Jesse Malin, Ian MacKaye, Flea, Mike Watt, Moby, and Tommy Stinson. Like a microcosm of the Punk: Attitude documentary from last year, this one focuses on the specific aspects of the American punk-rock scene within a 6 year period from 1980-1986. Looks interesting.
Ûž Here’s the perfect Christmas gift for that world-renowned air guitarist on your list. Now they just need to make the corresponding sensor pants for us air drummers and I will be one happy camper.
Ûž I am liking this new song from distinctive Liverpool band Clinic, off their upcoming 4th album Visitations (January ’07, or on iTunes now). Listen to Harvest.
Ûž Finally, one more reason to love the (gratuitious and borderline creepy) internet: A MySpace group for those who love it when everyone’s favorite prolific alt-country rocker turns around: Who Wants To Look At Ryan Adams’ Ass?
I saw Stranger Than Fiction last night and absolutely loved it. It’s been a long time since I saw a film where I wouldn’t change a thing about it. I found the script and the meta-premise extremely clever, loved the literary turns and the intelligent plotline.
If you’ve seen the previews, you know that the film involves the (flawlessly cast) Will Ferrell as a colorless IRS agent Harold Crick, who lives a precisely organized life that one day changes when he begins to hear a woman’s voice narrating his life. He has become the main character in a new novel being written, in an odd intersection of life and fiction, and learns that in the book his “character” is to be killed off. Ah, gravitas.
It’s not just a silly comedy of a film, but instead engagingly raises some fascinating existential questions about the meaning of life, the greater good, the process of creating something wonderful, and living your life in the face of a possible impending doom. I appreciated the overexaggeration of the one-dimensionality of the characters, from Ferrell’s all-beige, sterile apartment of precise teeth-brushing and no fun, to the overstated colorful quirkiness of his female foil (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in her tattooed artistic world (which included her bakery with posters for Rogue Wave and The 22-20s stapled to the wall, which is apparently what anarchist bakers listen to).
Speaking of the music, there was a suitably punchy soundtrack which I thoroughly enjoyed. It is heavy on the Spoon, with Britt Daniels and Co. contributing several songs, as well as some new materials and scoring from Daniels in conjunction with Brian Reitzell (Lost In Translation, Marie Antoinette). Here’s what we loved about it:
The Book I Write (new version) – Spoon (plays over the closing credits) (This just begs me to listen to “Everyday I Write The Book.” Or maybe to just watch Wedding Singer again.)
That’s Entertainment (demo version) – The Jam (bus scene with Will Ferrell reading the manuscript of his life and potential death, perfect musical accompaniment)
Death or Glory – The Clash (playing in the background after Crick’s first encounter with the artsy baker Ana, while he yells at the invisible narrator)
Going Missing – Maximo Park (spot-on lyrics for Ferrell’s character, sung in that appealing British lilt)
And more goodness awaits in the official soundtrack CD. And go see the movie, it was the best I’ve seen in a long time, and it induced me to a fervent profession of love during the closing credits for the first-time writer Zach Helm. Someone buy that man a drink.
I am sequestered for part of this weekend up in the lovely Northern California mountains near Sonora, so not much fanciness planned for this here bad boy. I do, however, need to announce the winner of the Marie-Antoinette soundtrack contest which ended yesterday.
It was a tough choice because all of your entries were passionate and wonderful and made me want to sit in a theater and watch films with all of you — just for the musical discussion value.
The suck-up who called me classy started things off on a nice foot, and I loved every person who mentioned Richard Linklater and Dazed & Confused (adored that film). I never knew that Linklater “created mixes for each of the characters in Dazed and Confused and sent them to the actors before production so they could get a feel for their character.”
The most mentioned person was Cameron Crowe, whom I wholeheartedly support: Tony K. said of Elizabethtown, “Cam painted a canvas with largely unknown acts proving how much incredible music there is out there that we are unaware of” (amen!), and another commenter noted, “I think he makes movies just so he can make a soundtrack.” Loved your waxing poetic on his movies because I absolutely feel the same way.
Quentin Tarantino (“Tarantino soundtracks have the feeling of an old mix-tape that a boy would make for a girl he was trying to get with“) and Martin Scorsese (“It’s one thing to play a catchy song over a scene or compile a hip soundtrack, but to actually take a popular song and use it to CHOREOGRAPH a scene as effectively as Marty does… well, it’s just genius“) were close runners-up in terms of frequency of mentions, which are surely warranted.
But for some reason I am going with Aikin as my winner with his interesting comment for the Trent Reznor produced Natural Born Killers soundtrack. Here was an entry out of left field that I had completely forgotten about, but remember loving for all the reasons he mentions. The songs wove a creepy and unsettling feeling with the use of pretty songs like Patsy Cline’s “Back In My Baby’s Arms” or Dylan, juxtaposed with plenty of NIN and Jane’s Addiction and even Dr. Dre.
Plus, aikin used the sentence, “There’re a lot of weenies in this fire,” when he started his discussion of this soundtrack’s greatness, which is a phrase we definitely do not use enough. So congrats to grand poobah winner Aikin for an interesting selection. I’ve emailed you to get a mailing address.
Thanks everyone for playing, and this contest was waaay too hard to judge. I could have chosen any of you as the winner. Whew.
Just got word from the folks at Brushfire Records (Jack Johnson’s label) that they are finally releasing the soundtrack from the 16mm surfing film A Brokedown Melody(2004). Johnson’s other surf films have had very interesting, well-put-together soundtracks (see the write-up of Sprout here) so I am looking forward to hearing this one as well.
Notable ’round these parts is the inclusion of a nice little ukulele ditty with Ed Vedder which, as I recall, played over the closing credits. A friend of mine once said I’d do backflips for this but I was never able to find a version of it until recently. And I’ll admit, I fairly did.
“Goodbye” – Ed Vedder This version from 3-15-02 in Los Angeles, the first live performance
Here’s the full tracklisting of the album, which includes the usual suspects (Jack Johnson, Matt Costa) and some notably interesting inclusions (M. Ward, Kings of Convenience, The Beta Band):
01. The Cave – Culver City Dub Collective 02. Breakdown (film version) – Jack Johnson 03. Know How – Kings Of Convenience 04. We Need Love – Johnny Osbourne 05. Transfiguration No. 1 – M. Ward 06. Let It Be Sung – Jack Johnson/Matt Costa/Zach Gill 07. Goodbye – Eddie Vedder 08. Needles In My Eyes – The Beta Band 09. Heart (Things Never Shared) – Doug Martsch 10. The Road – Matt Costa 11. Vuelo Al Sur (Koop Remix) – Astor Piazzolla 12. Home – Jack Johnson
It’s available for pre-order now and comes out November 14, to coincide with the theatrical release of the film. Speculation is flying fast and furious that this would be the perfect song for Vedder to bust out at the Bridge School Benefit this weekend, which I am conveniently in-town to attend. I wouldn’t mind hearing this one live at all.
Name: Heather Browne Location: Colorado, originally by way of California Giving context to the torrent since 2005.
"I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part..."
—Nick Hornby, Songbook
"Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel." —Hunter S. Thompson
Mp3s are for sampling purposes, kinda like when they give you the cheese cube at Costco, knowing that you'll often go home with having bought the whole 7 lb. spiced Brie log. They are left up for a limited time. If you LIKE the music, go and support these artists, buy their schwag, go to their concerts, purchase their CDs/records and tell all your friends. Rock on.
Name: Heather Browne
