Music Supervisor. My girlfriend and I were talking about this unicorn job the other night. How does one go about getting it? Who gives it out and what are the qualifications? As someone who, for better or worse, pretty much thinks about this stuff all day anyway, picking songs for movies and TV has been my “dream job” since I was a thirteen year old obsessed with the Mallrats soundtrack; even with the complete understanding that I was not the only music lover to whom this Peter Pan-esque pursuit would appeal, that the job was probably cartoonishly competitive, involved being in “showbiz” and playing that game in ways I am profoundly ill-equipped for, and was thus as unlikely a viable career path as “astronaut" or “baseball player”. And yet.
I still keep mental bookmarks on songs I think would be perfect for this or that idea. Imaginary pairings with images or scenes that don’t exist. And as a movie watcher, a well executed needle drop will still routinely bowl me over, one of the easiest ways for a movie to burrow its way deep into my brain. We watched Chungking Express at the house a few weeks ago, a movie I’ve seen a number of times, and I was still delighted anew at its iconic use of “Calfornia Dreamin’”, Faye Wong dancing to the comically loud radio behind the counter of the snack shop.
A successful meeting of music and film can happen a few different ways. If it’s a song the viewer knows, they bring their own associations and memories with them, and it is the burden of the film to override, subvert, or at least skew that existing data in a new way. In the case of a song as ubiquitous as “California Dreamin’”, that’s a tall mountain to climb, although perhaps its popularity was less universal in Wong Kar-Wai’s native Hong Kong. Regardless, I (along with an army of Letterboxd users) would argue that for anyone who has seen and loved Chungking Express, it’s hard not to think of Faye Wong when you hear “California Dreamin’” in some other context.
“Nightshift” by the Commodores (from 35 Shots of Rum)
You bring the song to the movie or else the movie brings the song to you. In my case with the above clip, from Claire Denis’ excellent 35 Shots of Rum, it was the latter.
The song: The Commodores’ 1984 single “Nightshift”, the band’s first (only?) real hit after the departure of Lionel Richie. A sleek, nocturnal groove that is unmistakably of its time thanks to a memorably deployed “fretless bass” (Yamaha synth preset?) which anchors the song’s otherwise airy post-disco scaffolding. Springsteen covered it a couple of years ago but with all due respect to the Boss, his version feels a bit heavy-handed; the updated production, big horns, and background vocals strip away some of the dated charm of the original.
If I’d ever heard “Nightshift” before watching 35 Shots of Rum, it didn’t make a big impression on me. But the way Denis uses it, like seasoning in a pot, adding flavor to the onscreen ingredients is remarkable. For me, one of those magic movie moments where you feel like you are directly on its frequency, everything clicking. I love this song, now.
I don’t want to write too much about the specifics of what’s happening in the story here - the above clip doesn’t contain spoilers in any real sense - and I’d highly recommend just watching the whole movie because its a heater and I found it very moving. But in broad strokes: A small group of people are gathered in a Caribbean restaurant after close, taking turns dancing amidst the empty tables. A song starts to play. Over the course of a dialogue-free dance sequence, a father grapples with letting go of his daughter’s adolescence, the daughter in question experiences the confusion and doubts of young love, and an ex-lover of the father resigns herself to chasing something that is definitively past tense.
You do not need to know any of this or have watched the movie up to this point to understand the core emotional context of what’s happening on screen or to be affected by it. Listen to the music, and watch the characters. Everything we need to know about these people and the feelings between them is telegraphed through the interplay between song and image, a kind of cinematic alchemy that I would call damn near miraculous.
“Modern Love” by David Bowie (from Mauvais Sang)
Here’s another example of a perfect usage of an overly familiar song on film. The above video has 65,000 views and I reckon I’m good for at least 200 of them. It’s one of those things I’ve watched so many times over the last decade that YouTube has entombed it in my related videos feed and is just constantly serving it up to me (not that I’m complaining).
I don’t remember where I first saw this clip. Linked on Twitter, probably? I hadn't seen the movie its from (Mauvais Sang or Bad Blood) at the time, but I was a fan of what I had seen from director Leo Carax (namely Lovers on the Bridge and Holy Motors). I also love Denis Lavant, the star of all three of the above-named films, with his topographically dense features and kinetically odd posture, an all time “weird little guy” with an insane amount of talent and charisma.
In this breathtaking (really think that word is earned here) sequence, Lavant, as he would go on to do in similarly memorable musical sequences in Beau Travail and Holy Motors, takes over the screen, devours it whole. Not much set up is required: again, a song comes on the radio, and creates a reaction in the character(s). The iconic palm muted guitar strums of “Modern Love” kick in, and Lavant begins down a dark street, the camera tracking him in perfect parallel. His movement is slow and uneven at first, his appearance hunched and sickly. As the song builds he begins moving faster, his body opening up like a flower, until he is suddenly leaping, running sideways, spinning and beating his chest like a man possessed.
Lavant in this scene is doing something separate from the rest of the film, its own piece of performance art or modern dance (I am assuming, though I don’t know for sure, that much of the choreography here was his own, and probably at least somewhat spontaneous). It’s “Modern Love” (which would have been three years old when Mauvais Sang came out in 1986) which acts as the scene’s third rail, providing an emotional electricity to what would otherwise be just a really impressive tracking shot. Bowie takes us to the chorus (“But I try! I try!”), and this man who just appeared hunched and sickly is flying, feral, ecstatic. It is pure expression. Modern Love!
I did finally watch Mauvais Sang in full this year. It’s good, and very French (young Juliette Binoche… oh là là, as they say over there) - the plot is nuts and the above sequence has basically nothing to do with the rest of the movie; a madcap tonal shift by a bold young filmmaker who would go on to make madcap tonal shifts something of a professional calling card.
“Dedicated to the One I Love” by The Mamas and the Papas (from Morvern Callar)
Another banger, this one from Lynne Ramsey’s Morvern Callar, which I finally got around to last month and has really stuck with me. It’s a character study of a young woman (a tremendous Samantha Morton) going through stages of grief in real time, bouncing between them in often unexpected ways.
This clip follows her across the floor of a slow-motion rave. She moves through the strobe-lit crowd, headphones in and disassociated, as if on a completely separate plane of reality from everything happening around her. Meanwhile the Mama’s and The Papa’s sugar sweet 1967 single “Dedicated to the One I Love” plays, maybe in her headphones or maybe the film is playing it just for her.
The thematic content of the lyrics does inform this clip more than in the previous two. The song’s “the darkest hour is just before dawn” message is pretty clearly in dialogue with this character and what she has been through. But I just love the editing in this clip, taken on its own, and the dissonance of the rave setting with the tone of the scene and song. Actually, my first thought watching it was that it felt awfully similar to a sequence in 2022’s Aftersun that also involved strobe-lighting and a notable needle drop. It made me wonder if that was more of a direct homage to Morvern Callar than I realized at the time.
“Dedicated to the One I Love” was first recorded in 1957 by The “5” Royales, an influential R&B group from North Carolina whose songs would also be covered by James Brown and Ray Charles. The Shirelles covered it two years later, smoothing off its corners and adding in their own girl group harmonies. The Mama’s and the Papa’s version did not come out until almost a decade later, in 1967 (two years after their breakthrough hit, ahem, “California Dreamin’”), on their third album Deliver. They strip out the song’s doo-wop and swing DNA, as you might expect, and replace it with gently psychedelic acoustic harmonies and a stirring full band chorus that stutters and soars like vintage Brill building.
Final note on Morvern Callar: the rest of the soundtrack absolutely slaps as well, the whole movie is extremely well curated. Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Can, Stereolab, Broadcast… definitely one for the heads. IMDb lists Andrew Cannon as the music supervisor on Morvern Callar, his only credit in that role, but hat’s off to him. Nailed it dude.
“I Am Coming Home” - Clifton Chenier (from Hot Pepper)
One more clip here, a really good one that just might make you tear up a bit, from Les Blank’s 1973 documentary Hot Pepper, about Clifton Chenier, the King of the Zydeco.
This one is less a needle drop and more of a filmed performance, but really its an excuse for me to write a bit about Les Blank, whose documentaries have become a real comfort food for me this year. His work has a consistently warm and humanist tone; expressive, conversational, alive. Blank seems drawn to small communities and the various oddballs and outsiders they contain, his subjects - from the cajun outskirts of rural Louisiana to the polka halls of the midwest - reflecting some core truth about what makes life worth living (food, music, friends, dancing). A filmmaker in pursuit of pure joy.
Clifton Chenier lived and died in Louisiana. He played zydeco music, a distinctly Creole blend of accordion based cajun dance music with R&B and African rhythms. Chenier was not a household name musician, but watching Hot Pepper you will quickly come to understand that he was a legend in his own right. He pioneered the genre in the early 1950’s, and was instrumental in bringing it out of rural Louisiana and onto radios and into clubs across the south. In Hot Pepper, we meet Chenier after his brief dance with fame, still touring and performing in small rooms but mostly living a humble (but joyful) small town life.
This clip finds Chenier on stage, starting into one of his more popular songs “I Am Coming Home,” a gorgeous gospel-soul/zydeco hybrid that sounds like “Bring it On Home to Me” with an accordion, which I mean as the highest of compliments. The camera wanders from Chenier and his band out into the audience, capturing faces and moments, one of my favorite parts of Blank’s work, the way he finds and lingers on faces. And then we are outside the club, into this small town. A young couple stands talking on train tracks. A mother walks down the street holding her daughter’s hand. And then we are outside of the town and into the wild, into the swamps and bayous, strings of birds flying high over a sunset-lit delta.
“I Am Coming Home” is a spiritual song that Chenier says later in the film was written about the death of his mother. Its familiar chords contain something elemental and essential, and when Blank’s camera finds and focuses on an unremarkable log half-submerged in swamp water for what seems like a minute or more of screen-time, it feels almost Emersonian, a zen re-centering, a reminder.
Oh hey, I put up another mix on Mixcloud. Since getting off Spotify a couple of years ago, I have to more actively curate my music library, which means doing a lot of digital crate digging and falling down rabbit holes on the ol’ P2P networks. I end up downloading a ton of more niche or outsider-y stuff and then sorting through it over weeks or months, and often these playlist ideas or groupings just sort of emerge organically from that process and I’ve been having fun dropping all the tracks into Logic and fine-tuning/sequencing these mixes like its the old days. This one is mostly Japanese electronic/synth/ambient from the 80’s/90’s, aiming at a specific strand of a retro-futurism: