In many cases, a movie’s soundtrack is just another piece of its marketing campaign. But occasionally, a song from a film actually becomes more popular than the film itself. Here are eight you can probably sing from memory (whether you want to admit it or not), from movies you’ve probably never heard of. Consider this a spoiler alert – if you read the name of a film and don’t want the plot described, just skip to the next one.
(NOTE: For a song to qualify, it has to have originally been released as part of a soundtrack. And I decided to stick to movies from the 60’s onward. Otherwise, this list might be all Gershwin and Porter.)
Let’s count ’em down…
8. “Heaven” by Bryan Adams, from A Night in Heaven (1983)
And love is all that I need
And I found it there in your heart
It isn’t too hard to see
We’re in heaven.
Beautiful… unless it turns out that “Heaven” is the name of a male strip club. Kind of changes the song a little, right?
Interestingly, the Bryan Adams song “Heaven” isn’t used for any of the steamy moments. It’s first heard over the opening credits, as we watch Faye’s rocket scientist husband ride his silly-looking bike:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI_jnEbqX1o
It comes back again during the film’s final scene, in which Faye apologizes for bedding Ricky the Rocket and the couple reconciles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A_m5PldgGk
So I guess the meaning of the song is, “You may have gone to a strip club called ‘Heaven,’ but that’s not really heaven. Our simple domestic bliss is.”
7. “You Light Up My Life” by Joseph Brooks (popularized by Debby Boone), from You Light Up My Life (1977)
In the 1970’s, Joseph Brooks was a top composer of advertising jingles (like this one). But what he really wanted to do was make movies. You Light Up My Life, a dramedy about a young woman who dreams of being a songwriter, was his first effort. Brooks’ writing and directing left something to be desired (4.2 out of 10 on IMDB). But he put his jingle-writing skills to good use on the movie’s title track, earning a Grammy and an Academy Award.
The lead role, Laurie, is played by Didi Conn (a year away from immortalizing Frenchie in Grease). Early in the movie, she has a one night stand with a film director named Cris Nolan. (Very much not to be confused with this guy.) During the tasteful makeout scene, we first hear “You Light Up My Life” swelling on the soundtrack. But over breakfast Laurie reveals that she’s getting married in a few days, and takes off without giving her number.
Laurie goes to audition for a movie. The producers tell her they’re uphappy with their lead’s singing voice, and they’re looking for someone to dub her. (Mildly ironic, since Didi Conn herself was dubbed by a singer Brooks knew from his jingle days, Kacey “Have you driven a Foooord… lately?” Cisyk.) Laurie’s ready to go, until she meets the film’s director – none other than Cris Nolan (once again, not the Memento guy). Laurie seems understandably freaked out, but Nolan’s so happy to see her he insists she audition not on guitar, but backed by a full orchestra. Luckily, she apparently carries around 50-part arrangements of her songs, just in case:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj66UIEnOh4
By the way, the bearded conductor in that scene was none other than writer/director/composer/all-around-polymath Joe Brooks.
For a while it seems like Laurie is destined for a starring role in Nolan’s movie, and in his pants. She even dumps her fiancee. And that’s when Joe Brooks hits us with a twist worthy of Chris Nolan (the Memento guy, this time). Nolan (the other one) decides to cast a blond in the movie instead of Laurie, and blows her off with the comically brutal: “Friends? Bye bye.” And it dawns on us that despite the poster with the couple walking on the beach, You Light Up My Life isn’t a love story. A piano version of “You Light Up My Life” fades in during the movie’s climax, as Laurie tearfully muses:
I learned that I’ve got to depend on myself. I can’t depend on anybody else. And that’s okay. You know why? Because I’m a really good person to depend on.
In other words, “I light up my own damn life.”
Anyway, when it came time to release a single from the film, Joe Brooks did his own backstabbing. He thought that he needed a bigger (and easier to spell) name than poor Kacey Cisyk. So he got up-and-coming star Debby Boone to rerecord the song. That version spent 10 weeks at number one, making it the biggest hit of the entire decade.
6. “Mah Nà Mah Nà” by Piero Umiliani, from Sweden: Heaven and Hell (1968)
This is the song that the Muppets made famous. But it was first heard in Svezia – inferno e paradiso, an Italian “documentary” about the Swedish sex scene in the swinging sixties. I put documentary in quotes, because the movie is even more staged than The Hills.
The “Mah Nà Mah Nà” song is used for a scene where a group of girls visit a sauna. It’s mildly unsafe for work, but not unsafe enough to be really interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-Rbd1bEzLw
You know what’s awesome? In just one year, this song went from the soundtrack of what’s basically a softcore porn movie to Sesame Street.
5. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan, from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
What’s really cool about “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is, when you see it in context, the lyrics were clearly written for the specific scene. Basically, Pat Garrett (James Coburn), an outlaw turned sheriff, is going after some of his former friends with the help of another sheriff (the always-welcome Slim Pickens). As Slim prepares to saddle up, he asks his wife, “Mama, where’d you put my badge?” In the gunfight, Slim is shot. And as he wanders off towards the sunset to die, followed by his weeping wife, Dylan’s song fades in:
Mama, take this badge off of me
I can’t use it anymore.
It’s gettin’ dark, too dark for me to see
I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.
The echo of the earlier “mama” line can’t be a coincidence. So basically, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is sung from the perspective of Slim Pickens, which is pretty mind-blowing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fMJfv5Ns7g
The film’s pretty good, by the way. At one point, Dylan lassos a turkey.
4. “That’s What Friends are For” by Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager (later popularized by Dionne Warwick and Friends), from Night Shift (1982)
Night Shift was an early film by Ron Howard, not to be confused with Graveyard Shift, which is about giant rats.
Chuck and Blaze start off as a total Odd Couple knockoff, gradually come to like each other, and end up best buds. So you’d expect “That’s What Friends Are For” to pop up during one of these bonding scenes, right? Nope. Astoundingly, the song is used entirely for Winkler and Long’s scenes together, and it becomes increasingly weird as their relationship becomes less and less like “friendship,” and more like “making love in an empty bathtub”:
I see two possibilities:
- The songwriters didn’t understand how the song was going to fit into the movie.
- Ron Howard has sex with all his friends.
As the end credits begin, we finally hear “That’s What Friends Are For” with lyrics, performed by Rod Stewart. (If you do watch this boring video to hear the song, you get to see one of the earliest screen credits for both Kevin Costner and Shannen Doherty, at about 2:55.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM_1wMgyMig
“That’s What Friends Are For” originally peaked at 23 in the UK, and didn’t even chart in the US. But in late 1985 Dionne Warwick decided to cover it to raise money for AIDS research. The charity version became the number one single of 1986, and Bacharach and Sager won the Grammy for Song of the Year, even though the song had actually been written four years previous.
Am I the only one who digs the irony that a song originally written for a movie about prostitution became famous as a song about AIDS?
3. “New York, New York” by Kander and Ebb (later popularized by Frank Sinatra), from New York, New York (1977)
Kander and Ebb (the team behind Chicago and Caberet) wrote the music. Early in production, they played the songs to Scorsese, De Niro, and Minnelli. The numbers all went over well… except the title song, which De Niro didn’t think was strong enough. Kander and Ebb were understandably annoyed, since they were freakin’ Kander and Ebb, and Robert De Niro has never been known for his musical ability.
But the songwriters grudgingly went back to the drawing board and wrote a new “New York, New York”… and karaoke singers around the world are damn glad they did.
The song is worked into the plot of the movie, with De Niro’s character writing the music and Minnelli’s character writing the lyrics, bit by bit over the years:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDLmcGEvXY0
We hear snippets of the song throughout the film, but Minnelli doesn’t actually sing it until the final reel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqFPdN4pX0I
The movie tanked in theaters, and the song didn’t even get nominated for an Academy Award. (You know what won the Oscar that year? “You Light Up My Life.”) But three years later, 65-year-old Frank Sinatra decided to record it for his triple album Trilogy. It became his last big hit, and now pretty much everybody in the world knows it and loves it. Sinatra’s recording is played at Yankee Stadium when the team wins. When they lose, they play Liza Minnelli’s original.
2. “I Just Called to Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder, from The Woman in Red (1984)
The Woman In Red is about a San Francisco ad exec (Gene Wilder) trying to cheat on his wife with Kelly LeBrock (aka the girl from Weird Science). Surprisingly (or not surprisingly, if you consider that Wilder also wrote and directed), LeBrock is totally attracted to him. The problem is logistics – the entire movie consists of Wilder trying to set up dates, and having them always fall through. If that doesn’t sound too funny, gold star for you.
About halfway through the film, LeBrock invites Wilder to spend the night in Los Angeles. Wilder tells his wife that he has to go to a conference in San Diego, and gets on a plane for L.A. But because of fog, the plane is forced to land in… San Diego.
Of course, San Diego is a mere 90 minutes from L.A., and if traversing that distance meant I got to have sex with Kelly LeBrock, I’d steal a car if necessary. But all Wilder does is trudge across the terminal to call his wife, and that’s when we hear “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Yup – one of the most painfully sincere songs ever written was actually first used sarcastically. And in case you didn’t get the irony, during the phone conversation we find out Wilder’s wife is apparently cheating on him… with their teenage daughter’s boyfriend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xO7r066yrI
So when I saw how the song was used, I got excited. As Jack Black said in High Fidelity, it is indeed “sentimental tacky crap.” But maybe it was supposed to be. Maybe Wilder said, “Stevie, there’s a scene where I call my wife to cover my cheating ass. Can you write me a cheesy love song I can use as a joke?” But since way more people heard the song than saw the movie, “I Just Called to Say I Love You” was taken at face value. If anyone runs into Gene Wilder, can you ask him about this for me? Also ask him how they made the river of chocolate in Willy Wonka.
1. “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton, from Rush (1991)
Yes, everyone knows Clapton wrote this about the tragic death of his son Conor. But it was first released as part of the movie Rush. Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh (double the Jason!) play undercover cops trying to bring down drug kingpin Will Gaines, who is played by Gregg Allman of The Allman Brothers for some reason. Clapton was hired to compose the movie’s score – mostly instrumental stuff. Months before, he’d written “Tears in Heaven,” as a form of therapy. From his autobiography:
Originally, these songs were never meant for publication or public consumption; they were just what I did to stop from going mad.
Clapton, p. 250
Incidentally, yes, I did actually go to a library and look at an actual book to write this.
I remember at some point playing “Tears in Heaven” to [producer Lili Zanuck] and her insistence that we put it in the movie. I was very reluctant. After all, I was still unsure about whether or not it should ever be made public, but her argument was that it might in some way help somebody, and that got my vote.
Clapton, p. 252
So here’s how the song gets used. Jason and Jennifer Jason put together their case against Gaines. But before it can go to trial, Jason is shot. Jennifer Jason quits the force, and as we dissolve to her running along the beach, we hear the saddest guitar riff in rock:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dJpvK0n-uo
“Tears In Heaven” won three Grammys, and Clapton’s Unplugged album which featured it sold seven million copies (and counting). Rush, on the other hand, grossed only seven million dollars.
Bonus: “Us and Them” by Pink Floyd, written for Zabriskie Point (1969)
“Us and Them” is one of the tracks from Dark Side of the Moon. It was originally written for this Michelangelo Antonioni film about an idealistic young couple that has lots of sex. However, the director rejected it as being “too sad.” Pianist Richard Wright hung onto it, and a few years later it found a place on one of the trippiest albums of all time.
Since it wasn’t actually IN Zabriskie Point, it doesn’t technically belong on the list. But still – honorable mention.