Scarlett Johansson’s favourite song from the 1960s: “When he played this song, I cried”
Scarlett Johansson has always been the indie kid’s choice of Hollywood megastar. There was always something impeccably tasteful about her, especially when she made her transition from being a child star to an adult via pictures like Ghost World and Lost In Translation. Then, when she’d settled as one of the world’s most famous movie stars, she branched out into the world of music. Shocking everyone by not only being pretty good at it, but what she made being genuinely cool.
It began with an appearance on the compilation Unexpected Dreams – Songs from the Stars, where she opened the set with George Gershwin’s classic ‘Summertime’. She further showed off her lush, sultry contralto in a way that made a generation of indie kids fall even more head over heels for her than they were already, joining The Jesus And Mary Chain onstage at Coachella to sing ‘Just Like Honey’. From then, you had the Tom Waits covers record Anywhere I Lay My Head, which saw Johansson collaborate with the likes of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and David Bowie.
Every time Johansson has dabbled in music, a different side of her effortlessly excellent taste has shown. However, this goes far beyond her work on screen as well. In an interview with KCRW conducted in 2009, Scarlett Johansson talked through five of her favourite songs of all time and, just like most things about her, they ended up being enviably cool.
This was a list that contained a classic Frank Sinatra hit, a New Order classic and a semi-obscure gem from TV On The Radio. It also contained, fittingly enough, the beloved Tom Waits number ‘Burna Shave’. However, arguably Johansson’s favourite song on the list was written in the 1960s. The still-astonishing Beach Boys marvel ‘In My Room’.
How did Scarlett Johansson discover this Beach Boys classic?
In the interview, Johansson details how she discovered the song thanks to her mother. She describes how her mother was a teenager in the 1960s and kept her ears open to all the exciting sounds of that decade. She was living in Greenwich Village, New York as well so had all these leading lights of the era playing live around her too, like the Moody Blues, Richie Havens and Jimi Hendrix.
When Johansson was young, her mother shared all those records with her. In particular were her Beach Boys records, which were in constant rotation when she was young. That said, it wouldn’t be until Johansson’s adulthood that ‘In My Room’ really impacted her. As she says, “A couple of years ago I went to a Brian Wilson concert in London and I would have to say it was maybe the best concert I’ve ever been to; it was amazing. …the first half of the show he played you know some of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits and then the second half of the show he played the entire “Pet Sounds” album.”
His playing of ‘In My Room’ at that concert knocked Johansson for six. In her words, “When he played this song, I cried. I cried. I don’t think that I’ve ever cried that hard at a concert before. I find his whole story very touching and this song, really, the lyrics were very poignant. I think that a lot of people have that when they’re a teenager, where their room is really sort of their safe haven and they can hold all their secrets there.”
Proof, as if it was needed, that the music taste of Scarlett Johansson is as legit as it gets.
