Elijah Wood’s favourite album of all time: “I think it’s his masterpiece”
In today’s ‘most confusing information of the week’ we discover that when you research the fact that Lord of the Rings legend Elijah Wood is a huge music fan, you learn that there is also a very successful, multi-platinum selling Canadian musician who is named Elijah Woods, which conjures up an image of lots and lots of the diminutive American actor just standing there.
But the rabbit hole doesn’t stop there, because there is also apparently a second Canadian musician called Elijah Woods, who was part of a decent pop duo.
At this point, it got bizarre and not a little upsetting to imagine all those Elijah Woodses, so for now let’s concentrate on the American actor and former Hobbit who, it turns out, has an encyclopaedic and very impressive knowledge of music that crosses genres and ages and is probably better than mine, or yours, for that matter. He even started his own record label and works as a DJ when he’s not acting.
His musical journey began thanks to having an older brother who thrust albums at him and insisted he listen to them, starting with The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper, which is as good a way to start as any, and then onto grunge, Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, before he took a left turn into British electronica at exactly the right time, the mid to late 1990s, when he discovered the likes of The Chemical Brothers, Portishead and Moloko.
But even before that, he fixated on an artist who, after his passing, has taken on something of a mythical status; an undeniably historic talent who recorded his first music in the late 1970s but really came into his own in the 1980s, becoming one of the world’s best-selling musicians.
Wood told The Guardian: “Prince has been a huge part of my life since I was very young, really since I can remember. My brother is seven years older than me, and he was coming up on Prince as all of that was happening. So that was kind of the soundtrack to my youth: Purple Rain, Parade, Around the World in a Day. I was reared on Prince; it’s been literally the background to my life since I can remember.”
Prince’s ambition matched his talent – in 1984, despite not yet being what would be called a household name, he insisted that his management get him a contract to make a large-scale movie, in which he would play the star. Somehow this actually happened, and not only did it happen, but the movie, Purple Rain, was an enormous hit, earning him an Oscar for ‘Best Score’ and resulting in a movie soundtrack album that sold 13million copies.
But it isn’t Wood’s favourite of Prince’s albums; that honour goes to a double LP he released three years later that also sold in massive quantities and spawned several hit singles. The title track especially served as a kind of ’80s update to Marvin Gaye’s seminal social commentary ‘What’s Going On’.
Wood added: “Sign O’ The Times, I think if I were to pick a favourite Prince record, it’s always been my favourite. I think it’s his masterpiece… It’s so sophisticated and so crafted, and it’s also incredibly spare, musically. It also contains two of my favourite Prince songs: ‘Ballad Of Dorothy Parker’ and ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’, which I could just listen to endlessly. So yeah, Sign O’ The Times; it’ll forever be my favourite Prince record and something that I will constantly be revisiting.”
While there are plans in place for Wood to return as Frodo Baggins in another Lord of the RIngs movie in 2027, he’s been hanging out with other unusual looking characters lately with a guest spot on Rachel Sennott’s much talked about show I Love LA and he also put in a great performance earlier this year in Osgood Perkins’ gory and effective comic horror The Monkey.
