SONG OF THE DAY
“Wise Up” by Aimee Mann (Magnolia Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1999). Written by Aimee Mann.
WHERE I HEARD IT
I can’t get this song out of my head, practically ever since my friend-in-music Mikey D. gave me the Magnolia soundtrack close to three years ago. It’s long overdue for a blog post, and I guess you can say that day has come when you just can’t get any other song into your head because a song is so dominantly demanding all of your attention. Yep, that’s pretty much a typical song of the day choice for me. I don’t work hard to find these songs, they find me. And they don’t let go until I tell you about them.
INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)
– Magnolia is the soundtrack to the Paul Thomas Anderson motion picture of the same name. The album is largely culled from the work of Aimee Mann, enough so that she gets title billing on the album, though it does include tracks from Gabrielle, Supertramp, and Jon Brion.
– Many of the songs feature prominently within the film, with “Wise Up” even being sung by the cast at one point, but only two of the songs were written expressly for the film, those being “You Do” and “Save Me”.
– “Save Me” would garner Mann an Academy Award nomination for Best Song, losing to Phil Collins’ contribution to Tarzan.
– The tracks “Deathly”, “Driving Sideways”, and “You Do” show up on Aimee Mann’s following album, Bachelor No. 2.
– Magnolia is a 1999 American psychological drama film produced, written, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, narrated by Ricky Jay, and starring Jeremy Blackman, Tom Cruise, Melinda Dillon, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ricky Jay, William H. Macy, Alfred Molina, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards, and Melora Walters.
– This film was also the last appearance in a feature film by Jason Robards.
– Aimee Mann (born September 8, 1960) is an American rock singer-songwriter, guitarist and bassist.
– Mann became friends with film director Paul Thomas Anderson. This developed as her husband, Michael Penn, and Brion composed the soundtrack for Anderson’s movie Hard Eight. Mann gained greater public recognition in 1999 — indeed, more than for anything else since “Voices Carry” — when she contributed eight songs to the soundtrack of Anderson’s Magnolia.
– Anderson deliberately worked from Mann’s lyrics to create the film’s characters and situations.
– Mann played the role of a German nihilist who sacrificed her green nail polished little right toe in the movie The Big Lebowski (1998).
– Mann and her band appear as themselves in the 2002 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Sleeper”, performing the songs “This Is How It Goes” and “Pavlov’s Bell” at The Bronze. She has one line in the episode: “Man, I hate playing vampire towns.”
– She and her band also play themselves in a 2002 episode of The West Wing, “College Kids”, performing a cover of James Taylor’s “Shed a Little Light” at a Rock the Vote concert.
– Mann played a cleaning woman putatively based on herself (the music industry now being unprofitable) on the Independent Film Channel show Portlandia; the episode aired 4 February, 2011.
– Mann met fellow singer-songwriter Michael Penn in the late 1980s and with comparable songwriting styles and record-industry woes to share, they struck up a friendship during the recording of I’m with Stupid (to which Penn contributed vocals), which blossomed into romance and their marriage in 1997.
– Penn is the brother of Academy Award-winning actor Sean Penn and the late actor Chris Penn.
– Aimee has a sister, Gretchen Seichrist, who lives in Minnesota. Gretchen is five years younger than Aimee. She is a painter and has released two independent albums under the name, Patches & Gretchen.