Jessi Klein's NotBlog

When that song “Put Your Records On” by Corinne Bailey Rae came out a couple of years ago I liked it but also didn’t like it.  I liked it because it was infectious and sweet but I didn’t like it because I feared for it.  It had that slightly annoying girl powerey-Cosmo-Fun-Fearless-Female vibe where I just knew it would end up as the song in a trailer for a movie starring Kate Hudson or someone else of her craptastic ilk.

Maybe a year after I hear that song I went to the movie Venus, which starred Peter O’Toole and maybe twenty people saw.  I really, really loved this movie.  I really genuinely did.  He got nominated for an Oscar, which he absolutely should have gotten, but then he lost, and I remember some people made fun of the shot of Peter O’Toole looking a bit sad at the Oscars when they didn’t say his name, for which all those people should be kicked squarepeg in the balls, even the girls.

Anyway, all the songs in the movie were Corinne Bailey Rae songs.  Some are from her album, some were only released on this soundtrack, and they are not so much Cosmo-ey as they are just simple and lovely and gorgeous.  (I think “gorgeous” was the final word in the script, and it’s a give-the-chills last moment.)

So  here is my favorite song by her.  It’s a slightly wintry song, what with the rain and the mention of the radiator.  When she says the line about “we sat inside by the radiator watching old black and white films” I get this weird feeling like she’s somehow singing about a memory I never told her.  Maybe it’s because I grew up in one of those NYC apartments with a radiator that made steamy whistley clinkey noises in the winter.  I loved those noises, I loved those pipes.  The radiator sound makes me think of home and my mom and hot soup and old New York winters when it would reliably fucking snow every year, a good boot topping snow like it meant business.  And this song kind of combines the mom/soup memory with a different being in love/sex memory, which on one level sounds just awful, but on another level, is maybe wonderful.  Isn’t this what we feel for our soul mates, really – a combination of mom/soup/sex/love?

Anway here is the song.

(I realize this site increasingly is just becoming the doorstep in which the cat that is me drags a little dead mouse to the person who is you.  And the cat is thinking, “I so sincerely hope you like this mouse,” and you are thinking, “Silly cat thinks we’ll like this stupid dead mouse!” and the whole situation is heartbreakingly awful.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 3:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.