The five songs Kevin Bacon could listen to forever: “It just hit so hard”
If you’ve ever been on the ‘internet’, which is apparently some kind of connection of tubes that you can send stuff through, then you’ll probably know about a thing called ‘The six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ which was/is a popular way to link pretty much anything together within six steps and arrive at the actor’s name.
It began when three buddies watched two Kevin Bacon movies back-to-back and started to wonder how they could link any film to one of his, eventually involving TV shows, the man himself, and even writing a book about it. After that, things went a bit crazy, with the ‘six degrees’ being mentioned in several shows and movies like Scream 2, plus a mathematical model being produced to explain the theory, and Bacon even started his own podcast called The Last Degree of Kevin Bacon.
Given that today we are going to be looking at Mr Bacon’s five favourite songs, it’s probably necessary that we do our own game of linking them together so we arrive back at the phone contract-hawking star of Footloose, Mystic River and countless ads for EE.
Bacon is a keen musician himself, writing and releasing songs and tends to curate Spotify playlists for each character he plays. He’s also been in the news lately thanks to his popular social media covers of the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, whose songs he puts a spin on by changing the lyrics to reflect his pet goats, while stomping around the animals with an acoustic guitar.
Asked by US station ABC to name his five top tunes, he kicked off with Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘Happy Feeling’ from 1975. The band’s founder, Maurice White, was best friends with Kenny Gamble, founder of Philadelphia records. Not only was Bacon born in Philadelphia, the movie Philadelphia featured a soundtrack on which was a song by Spin Doctors, whose track ‘Little Miss Can’t be Wrong’ is Bacon’s second choice out of five.
The Spin Doctors shared a record label, Atlantic, with Bacon’s third choice of John Prine, with his song from 1999 called ‘In Spite of Ourselves.’ One of Prine’s earliest songs contained the line: “If you held him to your ear, you could hear the ocean,” and Frank Ocean is Bacon’s fourth pick, more specifically his song ‘Thinkin Bout You’ from 2012’s Channel Orange.
Frank Ocean’s song ‘Godspeed’ was covered by singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile in 2024, and her hit ‘The Joke’ is Bacon’s final pick, with the actor saying: “Kyra (Sedgwick, Bacon’s wife) played it for me and said, ‘You got to listen to this.’ And we sat there together, and she was like, ‘Wait for it. Wait for it.’ And it just hit so hard.”
Brandi Carlile, this year, released an album with Elton John, who, in 2020, publicly thanked Bacon for nominating him to stay at home to keep people safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. There we go! We did it!
Kevin Bacon’s five favourite songs:
- Earth, Wind & Fire – ‘Happy Feeling’
- The Spin Doctors – ‘Little Miss Can’t be Wrong’
- John Prine and Iris DeMent – ‘In Spite of Ourselves’
- Frank Ocean – ‘Thinkin Bout You’
- Brandi Carlile – ‘The Joke’
