Late Night Stargazing

I’ve watched some stuff while I’ve been resting.

One of the things what I watched was Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

Here’s the plot: thrown together Steve Carell and Keira Knightley, your archetypal odd couple, who, faced with the impending apocalypse, go on a road trip together, the aim being to reconnect with important people from their past. Carell: an ex-girlfriend, Knightley: her family.

Knightley plays the cookie, vinyl junkie, who, when walking out on her boyfriend takes an armful of records with her.

The reason I mention this is because right here this is quite impressive attention to detail.

There’s a scene where Carell is alone in Knightley’s apartment, and he flicks through her vinyl collection.

Tonight’s record isn’t played, but you get a glimpse of it, and you (by which I mean me) find yourself nodding and agreeing that it’s exactly the sort of record that Knightley’s character would have owned, and you tip your hat to the researcher you insisted it was placed there. No songs from it feature on the soundtrack, it’s just there as an endorsement of the persona of its owner, left without comment for nerds like me to notice.

And notice I did, so here we are.

The album in question is The Magnetic Fields’ three disc opus 69 Love Songs, and this is probably my favourite song on it:

The Magnetic Fields – I Don’t Believe in the Sun

If Nick Cave had sung this. we’d be tripping over ourselves to proclaim this, and the record as a whole, as genius. Which it is anyway. A must-own: go buy it if you don’t already have a copy.

More soon.