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!

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.

I still want to blog about the fun I had at this year’s Hide & Seek Festival. As usual there was lot’s of running around (lots and lots), puzzle solving and random silliness. I hope to blog about it in more length some time this week, but for now here’s a short video about it:

This is part of this week’s Pocket TV episode, a new music based show hosted by Holy Moly’s Matt Edmondson. Every week, you’ll be able to watch a new episode in full or broken down into 5 segments so it’s a bit like jumping to a scene on a DVD. Simple and easy.

I like the idea of the show, but I’m not that much into current music myself. It’s not that I don’t listen to music (I do, a lot), but seriously 90% of my music library consists of movie soundtracks, TV show soundtracks and West End musicals; I’m not exactly up to date with the “hottest” music out there. However, if you are into music, Pocket TV seems pretty fun.

Check out the Pocket TV channel on YouTube.

Tags: Games, Music

It’s already a couple of days after Christmas, but it’s still the Christmas holidays and I wanted to finish my 12 Posts of Christmas (wow, lot’s of Christmas’s in that sentence). Here are my favourite Christmas songs: 

5. Oh Holy Night

This is one of those songs I wished I could sing properly. I still don’t have the right technique to sing it without paining others. Here’s one version from Josh Groban:

[Watch the video on YouTube]

4. Where Are You Christmas?

I love this song, but I never realized how cheesy the clip (unintentionally?) is:

[Watch the video on YouTube]

3. Christmas Is All Around Us

“I feel in in my fingers… I feel it in my toes… Christmas is all around us… And so the feeling grows”. One of the main reasons I love Love Actually:

[Watch the video on YouTube]

2. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

This is one of those songs that so many artists redo, most people won’t even know from who the original is.So, for your continuing education: it first appeared in Meet Me In St. Louis starring Judy Garland. Here’s a clip from the movie with her singing it:

[Watch the video on YouTube]

1. White Christmas

I love the Bing Crosby version, but the one from the movie White Christmas with the whole cast singing always brings me that much more into the Christmas spirit:

[Watch the video on YouTube]

Tags: Music

Episode 78: “With these broken wings I’m falling”

This song from Nickelback was mentioned in one of the books I finished this week (Dark-Hunter fans, you know what I’m talking about), but I had never heard of it before (yeah, not that much of a music geek, me). So what does a girl do in that situation? Look it up on YouTube of course! 

I don’t really like the song itself. Perhaps it may have been better, if someone other than Freddy Chad Kroeger was singing it, but with his raspy voice? Nope, didn’t fit for me. What I did like though was the clip:

Episode 73: “I will never say anything that couldn’t stand as the last thing I say”

I don’t really listen to classical music. It’s not that I don’t like it; some of it I do. I just have never taken the time to figure out which ones I exactly like. This TED talk about classical music is enough to convince me I should find the time: