monoceros blogsA favorite music blog of mine (The Late Greats) often puts up homonym posts, listing songs with the same title or that have the same word in the title or singer's name. It's inspiring to hear these songs that sound exactly the same in title but differ so greatly in music and lyrics. Very much the way two (or three or four) people might have the same name, but have personalities as different as say, iron and wine, incidentally a band that appears on the playlist of homonymic songs I created this afternoon.
It began when I was looking for Sia's "Breathe Me." I typed "Breathe" in the search bar and found five songs with the word "breathe" in their titles. After that I went a little crazy and began typing random words that popped into my head just to see what songs my library would chuck at me. It was nice enough to find a handful of songs for each word and then put them into a playlist, but I soon noticed that the words I chose started to sound like a strange poem when I lined them up.
breathe gravity drive sway bird lonely everything broken gone crash arms save grace superman words lost goodbye afternoon secret away
Words (and numbers) I'll try later: garden, living, daughter, eyes, tonight, call, tomorrow (I'm sure a number of "Annie" songs are going to turn up in this search), 95, 100
I've been swamped with papers, and am having a trying time at work. No time to write, no time to read, no time to think much about anything really. But when my father sent me this link about a bird performance, it made me sit up and smile. I haven't seen a show this good since...since...well, I don't know. It starts out a little slow and screechy, but then really gets good.
Go here to watch and listen.
I watched him become that famous guy with the radio, standing below a girl's window, and then morph into a homicidal but cool professional hitman attending his high school reunion, and change yet again into a self-absorbed, music-obsessed fellow in Chicago. John Cusack did good in smart and funny films like "Say Anything," "Grosse Pointe Blank," and "High Fidelity" but went to waste in throwaway rom-coms like "America's Sweethearts" and "Serendipity." Now, he's a fair bit older, pudgier, but once again marvelously watchable in "Grace is Gone," which won the Audience Award for Drama at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.
The trailer alone undid me. And then there's the surprisingly poignant score by Clint Eastwood, who I thought had already done everything from acting to producing to directing. While this may be his first full-length score, it turns out he's had writing credits on several soundtracks since 1986.
Bespectacled and frumpy, Cusack is a husband and a father dealing with the loss of his wife who's been killed in action far from home - specifically, Iraq. The film is about his struggle to tell his daughters that their beloved mother is dead. Cusack is entirely convincing in his frailty, strength, pain, and devotion. See why in the trailer below.