Friday Music
A pretty eclectic mix for you this week….
In honor of last night’s viewing of the advanced screening, I give you “The Ballad of Serenity”, which, being the theme to the Fox TV series Firefly was actually not a part of the film…I’m hoping that it’s eventually put in over the end credits when the film is complete.
On the way home from the movie last night, I heard this new song on 97.3 The Planet: Luce – “Buy A Dog” I’m not sure why, but it hooked me immediately. Something about the guys voice, I think.
One of my favorite guitar hooks of all time is featured in Crosby Stills & Nash’s “Dark Star”, which, despite lyrics which are fairly clearly about a woman, has always made me think of far-flung space operas with starships zooming off into the night. Yes, that makes no sense. I’m a geek. Sue me.
The link here is a bit slow, but when I stumble across somebody who’s got a copy of one of my favorite techno songs online, I can’t pass it up. Darude – “Sandstorm”. It’s pretty much a love-it-or-hate-it kinda thing in my experience….if you don’t have a tolerance for what a friend of mine once called “thump-thump music”, you’ll probably not be too much of a fan. Me, I eat this stuff up.
In honor of our securing tickets for the concert in July, I’ll put up one of my favorite Duran Duran songs from their latter period, when they weren’t getting much radio attention, but were still producing some brilliant material. Duran Duran – “Out of My Mind” was featured on the soundtrack to the Val Kilmer film version of The Saint (which Laura will quickly tell you, given the opportunity, is a bastardization of the character, bearing almost no similarities whatsoever to the character that Leslie Charteris wrote about).
A bit further in the way-back machine, we come to the 1980s, and the best-known single by Nik Kershaw – “Wouldn’t It Be Good”. I still have the entire Human Racing album. Love this stuff. Kershaw’s most famous single would get even more exposure when it was used in the John Hughes film Pretty in Pink, but for some strange, unknown reason, Hughes opted to have an unknown band, the Danny Hutton Hitters, record an essentially identical cover of the song rather than use Kershaw’s original.
Nothing says “80s dance club” more than the piercing falsetto of Jimmy Somerville, whether singing with The Communards, or here with Bronski Beat – “Why?”. I spent so much time listening to this kind of stuff in my room that I’m pretty sure that my mother must have thought I was Gay at least once.
In case you are among the uninitiated, I’ll fill you in: Dario Argento is one of the most brilliant directors in the horror genre. For many of his films, he teamed with the Italian progressive-rock group Goblin, who created unique scores to accompany the disturbing imagery onscreen. Here is the 1977 theme song to Argento’s best-known work, a surreal and nightmarish film about an American ballet student enrolled in a prestigious German dance academy, which turns out to be run by a diabolist coven under the command of a centuries-old “Black Witch”: Goblin – “Suspiria”
Another favorite film track of mine: The film version of The Shadow, with Alec Baldwin, was right up my alley–pulpy goodness abounded. Even better, the closing credits to the movie featured a song written by Jim Steinman, composer of “Bat Out of Hell” (and much of the rest of Meatloaf’s oeuvre), “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, several tracks from “Streets of Fire,” etc., whose bombastic, melodramatic anthems are amazingly recognizable even though he doesn’t perform his own work. Taylor Dane – “Original Sin (Theme From The Shadow)”.
…and, lastly, we have Kate Bush – “Hounds of Love”….because, well… Dude. It’s Kate Bush.