Jeff Goldbum names the best song ever written for a movie: “It knocks me out”
Jeff Goldblum has become a beloved icon for his offbeat delivery off-screen. Licking his lips like an incessant lizard, Goldblum has rarely disappointed his doting fanbase with a selection of quirks and nuances that have his eager fans reeling in joy. Part of this duality of comfortable strangeness comes from his love affair with jazz.
A keen piano player, Goldblum has even released a jazz album or two, all of which are based on his sincere love of music and the genre itself. It is easy to see how this has helped his timing to become one of the more apparently inadvertently funny people in Hollywood. Though some might think it’s all-natural, the truth is, Goldblum has been teaching himself through music since he was a child.
During a conversation with the Grammys, Goldblum revealed a host of songs and musicians who had shaped him as a child and beyond. One of the more pivotal moments came via Henry Mancini and his classic track ‘Moon River’, about which Goldblum said: “That was one of the first songs my first piano teacher, Tommy Emmel, gave me the sheet music for. I really sat and worked on that, and I started to get better at playing by playing that song.”
It goes on too, Goldblum was completely infatuated with Frank Sinatra. The crooner typified male energy for a generation of music lovers and it is easy to see how Goldblum tries to employ Sinatra’s debonair ways into his own mannerisms, often doffing a fedora and rarely being seen dressed in anything but the finest garms. Musically he inspired Goldblum, too: “I have always loved Frank Sinatra.”
He even paid homage to the star with one of his album covers: “It was in his swimming pool at his former home in Palm Springs where we shot a photograph for the cover of my second album. We put a piano in the middle of his pool!”
But perhaps the greatest thing about Sinatra for Goldblum was that he connected sound and screen for the young actor-to-be: “He’s such a good actor, and the gift of his voice. He acts all of these songs so deeply, originally and spontaneously.” There was another moment where these two factions of Goldbum’s character met, and it came in the form of Jennifer Warnes’ song ‘It Goes Like It Goes’.
This is taken from the Norma Rae movie, which boasts Sally Field in her Oscar-winning performance as the titular heroine. Combining gritty realism with emotional intensity, Warnes’ track accurately captures the movie, and it clearly had an impact on Goldblum.
Talking about the track, Goldblum said: “It’s originally from the movie Norma Rae from 1979, that Sally Field won the Oscar for. The title song is sung by Jennifer Warnes. It knocks me out. I get weepy, rich tears of delicious joy and sorrow.”
While his hyperbole would usually fall on deaf ears, he is right on the money with this piece of buttery perfection from Warnes. Delicate and boisterous in all the right places, it is a track built for making you cry at the cinema.
