The melody haunts my reverie

Songs that are not front and center but stick in the heart

We’ve been cluttering up Fun Fridays with political stuff a few weeks, and I hope it hasn’t put you good people off. But look, I have a prompt today that’s not only aesthetic, but also (potentially) sentimental! It stirred some sweet feelings for me, anyway.

Briefly: What’s a song (or piece of music) that’s used incidentally in a movie or TV show that has stuck with you?

I was partly steered to this by a recent Twitter incident that reminded me of the good old days before the place became a shithole: @laurenancona aka auntie cistamine speculated on a song she’d heard in the background of an old episode of “The X-Files,” which triggered a full-on crowd-sourced investigation that, notwithstanding the tune had never been released commercially, successful hunted down the song and the songwriters.

That was lovely and it made me think, not of songs in shows that I couldn’t track down, but of songs that I could find, and sometimes knew very well, but the use of which was for some reason — the setting, the situation, the sentiment, whatever — especially poignant and memorable.

You’ve had that, haven’t you? I’ve often had it in real life, too. (This is kind of a musical version of the privileged-moment Fun Friday I did back in 2022.) I have a strong memory of sitting in the lobby of my freshman year college dorm — or maybe it was one of the first floor hallways? Because how else could I have seen and heard this? — late on a weekend night. One of the residents, a pasty and doughy kid who worked with me in the cafeteria, was lying quite drunk on one of the twin beds of a dorm room with a bunch of girls around him. The girls were having a good time in general and laughing gently at his greater drunkenness; they clearly thought him harmless and tolerable. At one point, as the girls talked, the doughy kid laid his hand on the back of one who was sitting on the edge of the bed he way lying on, and very gently rubbed it. And he faintly sang a sentimental song that I didn’t recognize and was in a foreign language, a Slavic language which I assumed was the language of his people, maybe something that his grandmother or even his mother had sung to him when he was a child, perhaps while rubbing his back. That quill has been in my heart all these years and will be there when they lay me out.

But such moments may be easier to recall and share when they’re in media. When I say “incidental” I mean they aren’t big musical numbers — though something might fill the bill if it looks like a big musical number, but doesn’t serve that purpose in the movie.

I can recall, for example, several such bits from Altman’s Nashville — though that’s inevitable, because I saw it a dozen times when it came out, I was so crazy about it — that are musical numbers, but are used as backdrops or accents rather than as showpieces. Like Shiela Bailey Lucas and Patti Bryant as “The Smokey Mountain Laurel” singing “Down to the River,” a cute and ridiculous little cornpone tune (“Sweet Jesus rose in the mornin’/He didn’t kiss no women at night”) that the girls, apparently doing an open mic at a Nashville dump, sell with guileless gumption, pumping their arms and brightly grinning, because hey, maybe it’ll get Trout to give them a regular booking (“Not bad, girls,” he tells them after. “Go sit down, I’ll talk to you in a minute.” “OK,” says Sheila, “send over a coupla beers?” Remembering it now, I wonder whether they’ve been at this too long to be this excited naturally, and are pulled or coked up and need the beers to calm down, and whether Trout’s just being nice because they’re so hopeless. You know what, I still love that movie.)

Then there’s the appearance of Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh in Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All, as one of Professor Daumer’s outcasts, among whom Bruno S.’s mystic orphan Kaspar Hauser is included. Fricke plays an otherworldly blind pianist who creates what, in the context of the early-19^th-Century setting, would be utterly bizarre songs; we are treated to one, which sounds vaguely like a German folk tune but which Fricke plays and sings naively, with large dynamic shifts between tickling and pounding the keys, as if being led through it by inspiration or mania; at the end, when Kaspar — having proven unable to acclimate to ordinary society — lies on his deathbed, Fricke sits quietly, eyes closed, rocking gently, quietly humming this tune. The movie is no less strange than Herzog’s others, but I find this part to be moving in a very old-fashioned way.

Once you get on this train, a bunch of momentary-music memories start tumbling out of the luggage rack. Now I’m thinking of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, when they’re getting Gus drunk so they can cut his infected leg off, and “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree” — specifically Gus half-consciously going “Anyone else but me… anyone else but me…” over and over. And count me out from among the contrarian fans of Coppola’s One From The Heart, but I do feel it when Frederick Forrest hopelessly sings “You Are My Sunshine” to Teri Garr on the plane. (Maybe a hallmark of these tender moments is the singer being pretty bad at singing, or at least unusual.)

How about you?