Meca - Star Wars Theme (“7 Mix)
- it was 80s night at the rollerskating rink I work at tonight. I managed to slip this one in.
- I think I just pull off the world’s first triple entendre in my last facebook status.
Rudimental - Baby (feat. MNEK & Sinead Harnett)
- I like this track so much I made a This Is My Jam account just to post it. But the link isn’t working, so here it is! The groove on the verses are killer. The restrain on the bass production is so clear and placed so well in the mix, and that house beat on point, that you’re dancing and all, having the fun groovy times, but then MNEK minute Sinead Harnett’s solo comes along and absolutely burns it down, and you’re slinking and winding into a killer groove like the dancing at 0:41.
Great duet. Great video filmed in one room. Live version is also jammin’!
The Place Beyond The Pines
- while the title of this movie is a bit too similar to Miller’s Crossing, you should not worry about this. You also should not worry that is it a remake of Drive, only this time with Ryan Gosling riding motorbikes (although that would be awesome).
Instead, you should focus on the fact that this movie has two Hall & Oats references, beautiful cinematography, and redemption themes (hello!). It’s a generational-spanning storyline about fatherhood that rivals even Adrian Brody’s moment in Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited. Now you know what I’m talking about.
It features Ryan Gosling wearing Lil-Wayne style tattoos and Metallica shirts, so what more do you want?
I give it 8.5 green-rimmed sunnies and oversize Doc Martens out of 10.
1 Oliver Nelson - Stolen Moments
- just spent half an hour looking for this song. I thought it was by Ornette Coleman, and systematically typed every letter of the alphabet into the YouTube search bar after ‘Ornette Coleman’, trying to see of any of the songs named looked familiar.
Needless to say, they didn’t, so I had to pull out my hard-copy of Slumberland for reference. And I found it!
My name is Rob Sheffield. I write for Rolling Stone. I have a book coming out this summer about karaoke.
4 - there comes a time when you need to forget tempo, key, and genre, and just playlist that darn 80s skate out of its fluro-fishnet pants!
1 Katrina & The Waves - Walking On Sunshine
- I wonder if Kimberly Rew, the author of this song, was a Jonathan Richman fan? The song came out in 1983, and post-chorus around the 2:30min mark has always been my favourite part. It’s also very ‘Roadrunner’, which came out in 1972. The closest connection I can find between Rew and Richman is that Rew later played in Robyn Hitchcock’s bad, The Soft Boys, and last.fm rates Robyn Hitchcock as ‘Low Similarity’ to Jonathan Richman—so it’s not exactly a strong connection. But I think the music speaks for itself. Here’s the lyrics excerpt from ‘Walking On Sunshine’:
‘I feel alive
I feel a love
I feel a love that’s really real,
I feel alive
I feel love
I feel a love that’s really real’
And here’s ‘Roadrunner’, written in 1972:
‘I feel alone in the cold and lonely
I feel a-
I feel alone in the golden neon
I feel alive, I feel a love, I feel alive, I feel a rockin’ modern lover…’
Just trying to point out another famous Jonathan Richman fan.
3 The Rolling Stones - You Can’t Always Get What You Want
- I used to open rollerskating sessions to this at the skate rink I work at. I’ll make a Top 5 Opening Songs sometime!
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