Here in no particular order, are three of my favorite songs that been fully featured in a television show. The episodes didn’t have just 30 second clips, but the director took the risk of playing a song in its entirety, and actually pulled it off.
I thought this was a great way to open such a pivotal and emotional episode. The lyrics of this song fit so well and helped move the audience quickly into the emotional state of distress that Clark is going through on the day of Lana and Lex’s wedding. I seriously loved this episode and it wouldn’t have been half as good without this fantastic opening track.
Scrubs continues to be one of the funniest shows on television. Even in their eighth season and with a network change they can hardly create an episode that doesn’t make me laugh. But the reason I own every season on dvd, is not so that I can watch Dr. Dorian dance in a patient room filled with 99 Red Balloons to the Nena song of the same title (although I can’t help but laugh out loud everytime I watch that scene). Rather it is because they are not afraid to tackle some of the more serious and less fun aspects of being in a relationship and working in a hospital. While it is still worth a few laughs, this great opening to the second season is a great example of that.
I was really disappointed that I was unable to find a video for this one. I thought it was pretty incredible the way they wrapped up their entire season with this six and half minute song playing in the background. It doesn’t distract from, but rather adds to the dramatic effect of this cliff-hanging closer.
A coda is a musical means to an end. It’s the final transition into a song’s finish. This concluding passage is often what the listener remembers after the glow of the music has faded, and it determines whether a song sprints or stumbles over the finish line. These are a few of my favorite songs with instrumental codas, in which the singer is either too exhausted or too overwhelmed to continue.
Interpol’s albums have grown exponentially worse with each new release, but this song is from their moody masterpiece of a debut, Turn On The Bright Lights. The song chugs along mechanically, led by throbbing bass drum hits and stabbing, dissonant guitars, returning to a confounding chorus about sleeping on “200 couches.” But then the song pauses, brightens. The chugging returns more excited than before, carrying a fragile organ coo on its shoulders, and the sounds zigzag and crash into silence.
This wonderful Pet Sounds track is buried awkwardly in the third quarter of the album, which is perhaps why it is so criminally ignored. All the components of the song’s final 37 seconds are singularly present throughout the entire song: the bizarre circus piano, the merry banjo, and thattambourine. But it’s not until the song’s wordless coda that the threads are played together, and it is the blending of these elements that create true magic. It’s Christmas morning, it’s your first kiss, it’s absolutely perfect.
The song seems to begin in the middle of a phrase, without introduction. Stephen Malkmus croaks, “Dad, they broke me,” over drunken arpeggios and repeats the line twice at the finish of the first chorus. But he sings it only once for the second chorus, so we know a change is coming. Suddenly all falls silent, save for the sluggish 6/8 heartbeats of the drums. A brooding finger picked guitar line enters and is soon joined by another, each of them rising, falling and intersecting. The noise builds to a fever pitch, narrows to one single note of feedback, and then erupts again, roaring into a second coda.
This song sounds like a case of “I thought maybe we were more than just friends” if I ever heard one. Classic overstepping of boundaries, and now the singer just doesn’t know how to classify things with this person, but he is adamant in that he does not want it to be called love. I love how the sound of Fiction Family is so far gone from both Switchfoot and Nickel Creek, as well as even the solo works of Jon Foreman.
When Saturday approaches and the clock won’t fly by, these songs should keep you occupied for a good, ten minutes. May I recommend burning old depressing pictures, and snapping old mix cd’s in half. If it doesn’t make the emotional pain go away, at least you have something physical to show for you frustrations.
But as for me, I’ll be enjoying Valentine’s Day with my girlfriend.
anyways…
I hope you ears don’t get their feelings hurt, and spend the rest of the valentines dance crying in a corner where nobody can see you, except for the 7th grade history teacher who awkwardly approaches you to calm you down and help, but instead calls attention to your sad pathetic self.
