Listening To: La La Land

December 9th, 2016

I got to see La La Land a few weeks back at the London Film Festival and ever since watching it I’ve been waiting frantically for the soundtrack to come out. There’s just so much I love about this movie!

The soundtrack is now available on Spotify and it’s as wonderful as I remembered. Almost every single track on this leaves me grinning like an idiot:

La La Land feels like your old school Hollywood musical with magical set pieces, tap dancing routines and super catchy music, but with a story and sensibilities for our generation. I can’t wait to rewatch it when it’s comes out in January!

As you might have noticed, this is my 5th post this week! I’ve been trying to figure out how to get back to writing more regularly and sharing more of the ‘stuff’ I’ve been consuming in my spare time. The general idea is to do at least one quick and easy post per day about something I’m interested in. So far it’s motivating me to write more, but I’d love to hear what people are most interested in hearing about!

In light of that, I’m reviving another ‘old’ post series of mine ‘Listening To‘: I started it with the intention to share what music I’m enjoying, but am expanding that to include podcasts, audio books and concerts!

imaginary_worlds

For today’s post I wanted to highlight a podcast I started listening to recently: Imaginary Worlds. It describes itself as:

“Imaginary Worlds is a bi-weekly podcast about science fiction and other fantasy genres — how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. These are the backstories to our stories.”

It’s my new favourite podcast and in the past 2 weeks I’ve listened to the majority of their archive (it goes back about 2 years)! Imaginary Worlds gives us a glimpse behind the curtain of some of my favourite geeky books and shows: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, there are a ton of different geeky topics that get covered, often with perspectives that I hadn’t considered before. Pretty much anyone that enjoys geeky stories should try out this podcast!

Current favourites episodes: Fantasy Maps about the work and detail that goes into creating them, 1977, a look into the state of the world and pop culture when Star Wars came out, and Beware of Cyber City about a three-dimensional model of a town that the military uses for cyber war games.

Geek + Geek = Awesomeness. I love John Scalzi‘s books, and was already looking forward to his next book, Redshirts (gee, I wonder what that would be about?). I also love Jonathan Coulton‘s songs. Put those two together and what do you get? The new theme song for Redshirts:

This was just on TV here in the UK and I’ve got this song stuck in my head:

I love the Muppet’s version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol; it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside 🙂

You all know how much I love Hugh Jackman singing, and somehow I stumbled on these videos! They’re from a Disney channel Christmas concert where Hugh presented and sang.

I can’t figure out if the following one is from that same concert or not (I don’t think it is), but it’s the best of the four videos (that high note at the end!):

And a final one with Hugh singing Hark The Herald Angels Sing:

It’s that time of the year again that I’m listening to Christmas music, but my playlist always has some non conventional choices. This year I thought I’d share them with you! I love Nightmare Before Christmas, so (of course) most of the songs are in my Christmas playlist.

My favourite though is What’s This? And it has the most Christmassy feel to it. I really like Danny Elfman’s voice; I’ve tried searching, but does anyone know if he has sung any other stuff? Enjoy:

I’m not exactly clued in on what people are listening to nowadays (as I’ve said before, I think like 80% of the music I listen to comes from movie or TV show soundtracks). So when the whole Kanye West debacle happened a couple of weeks ago, I’ve got to admit I hadn’t seen either of the two videos.

I finally watched Taylor Swift’s one though, and while it is cheesy as hell (and aimed for 13 year old high school girls), I can’t get this song out of my head:

Yeah, I know this might be one of the more geekier choices for my ‘Listening To’ series. I fell in love with this song though the first time I heard the opening credits from Civilization IV, and it never feels to somehow cheer me up whenever I’m in a bad mood.

I thought I’d introduce yet another recurring series of posts, this time highlighting the music I’m listening to. To start it off, here’s one of my favourite pieces from Ennio Morricone, the theme song from The Untouchables. I still get goosebumps every time I hear this:

Btw, does anybody have any tips what the best website is to find these type of embeds? YouTube doesn’t really feel right, seeing as it’s only audio.