Buddy Holly, Thom Yorke and P.T. Anderson: The Axis of...Something

Easing back into things with a question. Do you know the Radiohead song "True Love Waits"? It's an acoustic track at the end of the "I Might Be Wrong" live album. It's a fantastic song, stunning in it's simplicity when compared to the songs from "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" on the rest of the album. But what I've always wondered is this: Is the title a deliberate echo of the Buddy Holly song "True Love Ways"? This is the band that gave us a B-side titled "Paperbag Writer". So, maybe, right?

Now, on the Radiohead EP/single entitled "My Iron Lung', there is a song called "Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong". A few years after the release of the EP/single, Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed a film called "Punch Drunk Love", which wasn't as good as the two movies that preceded it. Did P.T. Anderson lift his title from the Radiohead song? Remember, for the soundtrack of his next film, There Will Be Blood, Anderson employed one Jonny Greenwood, lead guitarist of Radiohead, to score the film.

Ricky Gervais' favorite song by Radiohead is "Bones", or at least that's what he told the BBC. My favorite Radiohead song is either "Lucky" or "Black Star" or "Knives Out" or, occasionally, "Idioteque".

I have seen more movies since the last time we spoke. One was titled "Walk Hard", and was funny and flawed and had some really good music and a great cameo by Eddie Vedder, and I would recommend to some people, but with the warning not to expect too much. The next movie was called "Into The Wild", and Eddie Vedder was also part of that movie (he did the soundtrack). "Into The Wild" is a good movie, but not a great movie, in part because Sean Penn is a better actor than he is a director, and he tries to get too cute with editing and flashing text on the screen, but if you've seen all of the really great movies from last year and want to see a good movie from last year, you should maybe see "Into The Wild". The third movie was "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead', which was directed by Sidney Lumet five decades after his first movie, "12 Angry Men" and for that fact alone is rather astonishing. It's a movie about two brothers who decide to rob their parents jewelry store. It doesn't go well for them from there. It has Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke and Marissa Tomei and Albert Finney in it, and it got ignored by the Oscars, but I liked the movie a lot. It's not as great as "There Will Be Blood' or "No Country For Old Men" or even "Juno", but it's good.

My sister is getting married, and I'm in charge of the music. Today, I got a list of songs that they want played at the reception. I saw that "The Twist" was on the list, which surprised me. I asked my sister's fiancee about it, and he referred to it as the song from "Wedding Crashers". I watched "Wedding Crashers" once, but outside of it reminding me an awful lot of "Meet the Parents" with Vince Vaughn as Ben Stiller and Christopher Walken as Robert DeNiro, and being disappointingly mediocre, the movie didn't make much of an impression on me. So I went to imdb, to check what songs were used in "Wedding Crashers" and there I discovered that they didn't want Chubby Checkers' "The Twist" at all. No, they want "Shout" by the Isley Brothers. My best guess is that because of the song "Twist and Shout", they got the two songs mixed up. This is what I'm working with.