Ryan Gosling names his favourite song by The Beatles: “You can’t ask me that”
Like many other actors before him, Ryan Gosling has dabbled in recording and releasing music. However, in keeping with his reputation as one of modern Hollywood’s most versatile and ambitious stars, he hasn’t gone about it in the usual way.
Whenever someone hears about a well-known figure in the movie industry making an album, eyes typically roll, and not without reason. While some of them have been pretty good, far too many of them have been transparent vanity projects and ego boosters that exist for no other reason than self-service.
As has been the case with his choice of onscreen roles, though, Gosling’s musical sideline has always been a little more esoteric. His debut solo album, Angel With Tatooed Wings, was released with a typo, whether intentional or not, before he formed the two-man group Dean Man’s Bones in 2005.
He and Zach Shields decided to play every instrument on the record regardless of whether they’d ever done so before, and their self-titled first album was an experimental, ambitious, and altogether weird slice of sonic gothicism inspired by their shared lifelong love of ghosts, ghouls, and things going bump in the night.
Of course, there’s also ‘I’m Just Ken’, the power ballad from Greta Gerwig’s Barbie that became a cultural phenomenon in its own right and culminated in a show-stopping live performance at the Academy Awards. With that in mind, Gosling being a Beatles fan sounds almost too twee given his left-of-centre musical proclivities, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t struggle to pick a favourite ‘Fab Four’ track.
“This is a real test,” he pondered after being put on the spot by News Times at the Toronto International Film Festival. “This is where the rubber meets the road, my friend, this question. This is a great question. Separate the wheat from the chaff on this one. OK, I’ll pick a record, then I’ll pick something from the record. OK, I’m getting there.”
After confessing that his mother was “a huge Beatles freak,” which meant he “grew up on their music and that’s all we listened to in the house,” Gosling’s mind instantly wandered to George Harrison’s solo collections before he got back on track. Humming several tunes to himself, he finally came up with an answer.
“‘Here, There, and Everywhere,'” he declared, settling on the ballad from 1966’s seminal Revolver. By his own definition of how he got there, it stands to reason the band’s seventh album is also his personal favourite. However, when he was quizzed on why that was his number one pick, Gosling refused to elaborate.
“You can’t ask me that,” he said in mock exasperation. “It’s going to take me another five minutes to figure that one out.” What can’t be denied is that the three-time Academy Award winner’s favourite Beatles track is ‘Here, There, and Everywhere’. On the other side of the coin, what can’t be confirmed is how he reached that conclusion, but it’s best to take him at his word when it took him so long to get there in the first place.
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