The first record Tom Hanks ever bought: “As in an eagle’s nest”
When you’re busy acting in as many films as Tom Hanks has done over the course of his 45-year-long career, you’d understand that he might not always give himself much time to relax and listen to music. Given that he’s rarely ever had a break of longer than one year without being in at least one feature-length film over the course of that time, you’d imagine that most of his life is either spent on set or learning lines and that his idea of quality time would be to switch off completely.
Arguably, this downtime could be spent listening to music, but knowing Hanks and his interests in space and typewriters, it’s not so much of a given as it would be for known audiophile actors such as Elijah Wood that Hanks has a collection of LPs gathering dust in a corner of his house.
He might have inducted the Dave Clark Five into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, appeared in a Carly Rae Jepsen music video, and written, directed and starred in the musical comedy That Thing You Do!, but it’s hard to tell how much further than that his interest in music goes. There’s a Desert Island Discs appearance from the actor as well, where he listed a total of eight songs that shaped his life in some way or another, and his selection is relatively varied, if still not very revealing.
Picking songs from Talking Heads (‘Once in a Lifetime’), LL Cool J (‘Mama Said Knock You Out’) and Richard Strauss (‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’), the selection he presented to Kirsty Young on the long-running BBC Radio 4 show doesn’t do much to suggest that he has zero interest in music, but also isn’t the sort of selection that someone who is pretentious and picky about what they listen to would offer.
In a 2016 interview for the NPR show Fresh Air, Hanks was asked a series of questions about his music taste, and the main question that the actor mused over was what the first record he ever bought was. Instantly, Hanks revealed that he had never purchased singles in his youth, but he recalled the first long-player that he had acquired. “The first record I actually bought was an LP named Aerie, as in an eagle’s nest, by John Denver,” he told host Terry Gross.
However, Hanks did reveal more about his listening habits growing up, and it wasn’t buying records that thrilled him most. “The radio gave me all the musical satisfaction that I needed,” he confessed, saying that “to have a radio of my own next to my bed where I could go back and forth between my favourite stations at Oakland and San Francisco – that was the bigger deal for me.”
When asked about whether he was the sort of teenager who hid his radio under the pillow and enjoyed late-night listening sessions, he amusingly told the interviewer that his parents were “so disinterested in what was going on in my bedroom that I didn’t have to pretend anything. I could stay up as late as I wanted to.” Whether Hanks is still more of a radio guy these days isn’t known, but it’s sweet to imagine the actor getting excitable about such a simple pleasure.
