The Mind's Ear

There's a secret behind much of my music collection, as so much of it’s an offshoot of movie soundtracks. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of music and movies would quickly see the pattern like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Songs that played in pivotal movie scenes turned into IMDB searches and later album purchases, with the first two steps eliminated from forensic detection, so I could pretend to myself and others I found the songs on my own.

Several Nick Drake albums, all linked to “Fly” from Luke Wilson fleeing the hospital in The Royal Tenenbaums; dozens of Hank Williams tracks inspired by one of the prisoners listening to him at the library in The Shawshank Redemption, and several car rides blasting seven-minute Underworld songs while speeding, all from hearing “Rez” playing at the club where Tom Cruise loses his shit in Vanilla Sky.

Based on the above, this illustrates an eclectic taste in music, until you remember that it's really the directors’ doing. Certain directors—like Wes Anderson, Spike Lee, Nicolas Winding Refn, Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola, Cameron Crowe, Quentin Tarantino, and Edgar Wright, among others—inadvertently become like disc jockeys. The song is intertwined with the scene, and when playing it at home I sometimes futilely attempt to recreate that feeling generated in the film. (Unless it's a well-done revolting scene, like “Goodbye Horses” in The Silence of the Lambs or “Comanche” in Pulp Fiction.)

I listen to Carl Orff and try to charge like the knights in Excalibur, though all I can manage to do is shave faster. It's the Chromatics from Drive while stuck in traffic, The Miracles from Mean Streets while failing to dance like DeNiro, and The Chemical Brothers from Hanna, which doesn't really go with walking the dog. Each cool song is acquired in the lamest of ways. It’d only be worse if I somehow learned them all from TV commercials.

The shame often led to attempted subterfuge. When making mixes that might later be played while friends or my girlfriend were over, it seemed clever to space the songs from movies out to avoid being spotted as a music soundtrack phony. You don't go straight from The Stranglers' “Golden Brown” to Pete Wingfield's “18 with a Bullet,” or someone will say something like, “Do you get all your music from Guy Ritchie films?”

Add in some filler to throw them off the scent, preferably from musicians you actually found on your own and not often in movies, like Hinds, The New Pornographers, Mogwai, Ladyhawke, and Jane's Addiction. Suddenly it's not so obvious, and with enough tasteful filler, they might start to think you found “Golden Brown” on your own.

What makes the pretense worse are those rare moments when a friend asks, “Who is this?” Then you get to pretend to be the guy who knew what was cool before everyone else, who knew the song years before the movie. What alleviates my guilt and shallowness a little is that there are some movies which seem to exist just so the director can show off their taste in music. Does anyone remember the plot in Garden State? Probably not, but I bet you remember hearing The Shins' “New Slang.”

Everyone wants to feel original, and that our entire music collection came from the musicians sending us their albums to listen to, like we're Lester Bangs, instead of a consumer who first heard a song after millions of people already tired of it long ago. But it's okay to be behind the curve. What's important is that you're enjoying the song, pretending there's an imaginary audience watching you in a movie.