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Got You Covered: “Nobody Does It Better”

October 19, 2010 | Comment

singleAh, the James Bond theme song: a sub-genre unto itself. There are songs, and there are movie songs, and then there are movie theme songs… and only then is there the Bond film song: a sub-sub-sub-genre distinctive for being (like the Bond movies themselves) unabashedly over-the-top. The best Bond songs are broad-stroke, go-for-broke, balls-out records: Shirley Bassey’s clarion “Goldfinger,” Paul McCartney & Wings’s churning “Live and Let Die,” and the subject of this post, “Nobody Does It Better.” Composed by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager, it played under the opening titles of the 1977 Bond adventure The Spy Who Loved Me. Carly Simon’s warm, wide-open performance of the pop ballad caught the fancy of moviegoers1 and radio station directors alike, and the single reached #2 on the U.S. pop charts. Here’s the first minute or so, just for nostalgia’s sake:

Like just about all of the songs in my Got You Covered series, “Nobody Does It Better” has been covered more times than a 90-year-old exhibitionist. Before I highlight my favorite version, I would be remiss if I didn’t address the rendition by Radiohead. A taste: Read the rest of this entry »


The Last.fm Waltz

June 15, 2007 | 2 comments

The “Opera Idol” video set me to thinking about the transcendent power of music. When I’m asked what kind of music I like, I say something like, “Good music, composed and performed with skill and passion.” This answer might seem vague or flippant, so I always follow it with an explanation of how I relate to music… and it goes something like this:

Good music moves people. It cuts through listeners’ preconceptions of musical genres, styles, eras and so forth and compels them to stop and listen. We all love music and all have our own tastes, which is as it should be. I just get a unique thrill out of seeing when art (here, music) gives people a taste of something they didn’t expect, and they find out that they like it. I love it even more when it happens to me – which it does, regularly. As a result of this phenomenon, my music collection now ranges from Josquin to Ludacris, and increasingly many points in between. BUT – there’s always more good music out there.

last.fm-widgetIt was with that in mind that I recently made a profile on the music/social networking site Last.fm. I’d considered Pandora.com too, but I had problems making sense of the Pandora interface. I figured if Last.fm was good enough for my brother it was good enough for me, since he knows at least as much about music as I do and way, way more about tech/the web. At this moment he is the only occupant of the “Friends” section of my Last.fm profile, where his avatar sits next to a link that says with seeming disdain, “See all 1 friends.”

Any other Last.fm users reading this? Care to give my brother some company in the “Friends” box, and help wipe the smirk off that link’s face? Also, any opinions on whether or not I should I put a nifty Last.fm playlist widget (pictured at right) in this blog’s sidebar? Note it would not automatically play when you load this page (you click on the play button or a track title) – I hate pages that play music at me without asking, so I would never do that to you.