November 25, 2005
Your New Favorite Song.
Soundtrack for an Imaginary Wes Anderson Film, Track #9.
The Langley Schools Music Project's Innocence and Despair album is so 2001, but it's worth reintroducing to all you folks who missed it at the first time. All the information you need to know is right here: '70s pop songs sung by Canadian schoolchildren in a gym. It's a lot more than just the potential camp value, of course; as John Zorn put it, "This is beauty. This is truth. This is music that touches the heart in a way no other music ever has, or ever could."
The one song that everyone who has ever heard the album remembers -- and now that I'm surfing the net, it's the song that just about every reviewer singles out -- is a cover version of the Eagles' "Desperado," sung by a nine-year old Sheila Behman in a purely unaffected, heartbreaking vocal. I remember playing it to friends who literally stopped what they were doing as the song was playing. (In any case, they wanted to hear the entire album over again.)
I've never particularly liked the Eagles, though there are some songs ("I Can't Tell You Why," "Tequila Sunrise") that I do like simply because of their nostalgic pull. But otherwise the Eagles, who may have been well-meaning country rockers at the beginning but turned into slick adult-contemporary, were never real talents to begin with, and I could easily be happy the rest of my life without ever having to hear "Heartache Tonight" ever again. If you Americans think they're overplayed here, you didn't grow up in the Philippines, where every bar band has to have "Hotel California" in their repertoire, in case some drunken customer with a gun requests it. You then have a choice: "Hotel California" or death. It's not much of one. "Desperado" is the same way: unbearably sappy, with strings swelling in the background, and faux-cowboy lyrics.
In any case, this version of "Desperado" has a force of its own in the context of Innocence and Despair; peruse the comments and you read stories about grown men weeping uncontrollably, a radio programmer pronouncing it "one of the most sublime recordings ever made," someone on Amazon.com writing that the song "almost makes me reconsider my atheism," a reviewer calling it one of the saddest songs they have ever heard, a driver having to pull over because she or he was overcome by tears after hearing it on the radio. A little too much to burden this one song, but... well, you should hear it for yourself.
It seems, in any case, fitting for a Wes Anderson film: you approach it as slightly arch and distancing, perhaps, and then you're hit sideways by something genuinely moving. (There's apparently a scene in Jim Sheridan's In America that basically rips off the Langley Schools arrangement of the song.)
Hear it (4.93 mb, m4a).
[All mp3s on this site are posted only for a limited time and are for sampling purposes only -- buy the album! The rest of it is excellent: a mind-blowing "Space Oddity," a joyful "Saturday Night," a version of "The Long and Winding Road" that's better than the original (and there are at least a few more tracks like that).]
Posted by the wily filipino at November 25, 2005 10:17 AM