Finding the music that you love
There’s a certain magic in finding meaning in well-known songs through moments in cinema and television
It is a visual that will stay with me for a long time: An abandoned music store, overgrown with plants and weeds, in the middle of a once beautiful and now ruined city; and at the centre of the scene, a pristine acoustic guitar leaning against a box, glowing with an almost ethereal light. A reminder of all that was once lovely and is now lost in this world reeling from a cruel apocalypse, but also, a symbol of hope and possibility. The Last of Us is that unusual zombie show that forces us to look deeper not just at the potential for cruelty in all of us—a lot of post-apocalyptic shows do that—but at the potential for beauty and love at the same time.
In this scene, 19-year-old Ellie (played by Bella Ramsey) finds a guitar that has survived the end of the world as we know it in a music store in Seattle, or what was once Seattle, and starts idly strumming it. Eventually, she settles on a song she learnt from her foster father—a-ha’s 1984 hit Take on Me. In her version, the original’s synth-pop briskness has been stripped away, leaving behind the lovely bones of the song: a soothing melody, a plea for love, a playful serenade.
I was familiar with the original Take on Me, of course, given that about 90% of my Spotify library is 1980s music. I had even heard the band’s own acoustic version of the song. But this mellow, almost unbearably sweet rendition of it, weighted with meaning and context, has become an obsession in the weeks since this episode aired. I’m sure it’s a fairly common experience, though always a special one, for a song that one has known—and even tepidly liked—to suddenly become extraordinary.
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I think a kind of alchemy happens when music is imbued with meaning and force once it becomes part of a powerful story. I remember feeling this way about Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now (performed by Judy Collins), played during the end credits of an especially poignant episode of Mad Men. Suddenly, the always beautiful song seemed to hold the answer to life itself, and I’ve never shaken off that feeling.
Then there’s Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth, used to great ironic effect in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. The discordant notes of the music that plays in the background as June, the protagonist, hums the song while watching over a fellow handmaid whose practically lifeless body is being preserved as a vessel for her unborn child felt especially eerie as I played it back just now. There is a woman in Georgia, US, in exactly the same position, in real life, today.
There are more cheerful associations as well. How I Met Your Mother led me to some wonderful independent music, including songs by bands like Goldspot and Fort Atlantic that I wouldn’t have paid much attention to if the algorithm had thrown them at me randomly. There’s the jaunty Make Your Own Kind of Music by Cass Elliot, which became deliciously spooky and weird after being used in several episodes of Lost; Some thing Stupid in Better Call Saul, the popular love song transforming into an elegy for a dying relationship; Should I stay or should I Go and Running up that Hill in Stranger Things, where both songs become part of the narrative rather than briefly illuminating a moment.
We are at the mercy of algorithms in so many aspects of our lives that it’s easy to forget what it’s like to serendipitously find something we love. It is also entirely possible that I watch way too many TV shows, but what can I say? Thank you for the music, I guess.
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