The Covers The Dreamers And Me

[Editor's note: It's Muppet Week! I asked  Team Experience to share their favorite Muppet memories. Like JA, I'm 1000% in love with this 1979 Oscar Nominee for Best Song. Feel free to sing along. - Nathaniel] 

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JA from MNPP here. Let's just get this outta the way right up front - "The Rainbow Connection" is my favorite song of all time. It's also part of one of my earliest memories, and definitely my very first movie memory - I couldn't have been more than three or four and I'd been dropped off at a babysitter's house for the first time ever while my parents took off to do god knows what. I was miserable, horrified, I distinctly remember the babysitter staring at me with terror in her eyes as I bawled like a maniac (so much time has passed and the only thing that's changed is now it's my boyfriend's face giving me that look).

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But it all changed as soon as the babysitter turned on the TV and whaddya know, there was The Muppet Movie just starting. Some little green frog was warbling his little tune on his little banjo on his little log in his little swamp, and magic - Muppet and movie alike - carried me away, and I've never looked back. When my parents showed up before the movie was over I refused to leave until it ended - a cinemaniac (with a secret felt fetish, shh) was born.

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Thirty years or so have passed since that life-defining moment, and  I will still break into immediate awestruck tears when I hear it. Lines like "I've heard it too many times to ignore it. It's something that I'm s'posed to be..." actually honestly helped me through the coming out process in my early 20s. The debt of gratitude for forming a basic piece of who I am - and a really basic decent part, I think I can say truthfully - that I owe to Jim Henson and songwriters Paul Williams and Kennth Ascher is beyond measure.

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So with The Muppets out in theaters this week, I figured we could take a look back at that song and the thirty years that it's been a living breathing beautiful thing in our lives. There are literally dozens of these to pick from but here are my five of my favorite covers!

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John Hawkes "Marcy's Song"

What is it about singing actors?
I can never get enough. 

Related: Best Supporting Actor

'I Want Love'... and Actors in Music Videos, Please

Justin Timberlake as Elton John in 2001Ten years ago right about now, Elton John's "Songs From the West Coast" dropped. I bring this anniversary up because...

a) I love to celebrate anniversaries
b) music videos are short films
c) an irregularly curated side-obsession of mine is tracking film actors who've appeared in music videos.

For the videos from the album, his last hit-parade album (though not his last album), he used actor/musicians rather than himself, including a pre comeback Robert Downey Jr back when everyone still worried for the actor's very life and he seemed like an open wound... which really worked for this video.

Just love that one, don't you? It was directed by Sam Taylor-Wood before the days of her award winning narrative short Love You More and before she graduated to features with the John Lennon early-years bio Nowhere Boy (starring her future babydaddy Aaron Johnson).

In the follow up videos "This Train Don't Stop Here Anymore" and "Original Sin" Elton John used two pre film-stardom singers: Justin Timberlake as Elton himself and Mandy Moore as a devoted fan. In the latter Elton does appear and drags Elizabeth Taylor along with him in pink-turbaned cameo as "Doris" because, you know, Elton does love to flaunt the company he keeps. Was "Doris" an inside joke of some sort between them? 

Maybe JT got a taste for his acting future right here because he keeps playing important men from the music industry (Sean Parker in The Social Network and now Neil Bogart in Spinning Gold)

What's your favorite Elton John song? And if you were celebrity-aware back in 2001, did you ever dream of such enormous movie stardom waiting just around the recovery corner for Robert Downey Jr.?

Stars... They're Just Like Us!

They also have to deal with obnoxious people walking backwards or stopping suddenly when everyone else is moving forwards!

This post is brought to you by Nathaniel's hatred of tourists in Times Square where he unfortunately found himself once this weekend. Tourists can magically transform a breezy 8 minute walk to a subway to a 35 minute nightmarish ordeal of erratic human movement. Turning 8 minutes to 35 is a feat as miraculous as feeding thousands with five loaves of bread ...only way less altruistic.

P.S. This amusing gif comes to us via my friend Matt's blog where he runs to Madonna's defense (as he do) about the gleeful takedowns of W.E. in Venice. Matt also shared an incredible video of previously unseen "Vogue" video footage. Lots of blooper-like stuff after the two minute mark. It's always so fun (though rarer than it used to be) to see Madonna laugh at herself / her surroundings.

David Lynch "Sings"

You can't help but respect any director who ends up getting his own adjective but David Lynch's next move could give whole new meaning to "Lynchian"... especially since he doesn't appear to be making movies anymore.

The iconoclast cheese and transcendental meditation loving auteur apparently also loves electro pop. He's recorded an album featuring the vocals of Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on at least one song. Is she the official songstress of choice for crazy-ass auteurs now that Spike Jonze and Lynch have both latched on? Lynch's album "Crazy Clown Time" is due in early November.

I consider it really bad form that David Lynch cannot be bothered to even direct his own video! (That was left up to contest entries and here's the winner.) I mean the least Lynch could have down if he isn't making another INLAND EMPIRE or Mulholland Drive is to make a strang music video wherein Laura Dern dances around him pulling faces that will haunt us all forever. That's the least he could do. Has he abandoned image-making altogether?

The first song "Good Day Today" does sound like David Lynch's voice ...if it emanated from places that could not accurately be described as lungs and larynx, that is. For maximum kitsch value I really wish he'd have thought to do a vocoder duet with Cher.  Here's an old interview with Pitchfork about the record.

Have a listen...

David Lynch's "Good Day Today"