In the early 2000s, author Nick Hornby was on a roll. His unique brand of light-hearted, popular-yet-intelligent stories were highly successful both as novels and as the inevitable films they were turned into.
Part of the appeal was the lovable, slightly awkward main characters who stumbled off the page and into readers’ hearts. If you’re not familiar with the novels, just consider the actors who played these roles on screen: John Cusack, Hugh Grant, Jimmy Fallon…all leading men who are neither gorgeous nor ugly, neither cool nor socially incompetent, neither hero nor anti-hero. It was the perfect formula.
The soundtrack for the 2002 adaptation of “About A Boy” could not have been better chosen. Damon Gough’s quirky, often understated folk was a great fit for the film, and his stage name, “Badly Drawn Boy” sounds like the title of a Hornby novel itself.
The film’s co-directors, the Weitz brothers, approached Gough to score the film because they had been impressed by his Mercury Prize-winning 2000 album, The Hour of Bewilderbeast. This song opens the album, and it’s easy to hear the emotional potential that the brothers Weitz heard in Badly Drawn Boy’s music.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The opening minute. It’s probably a safe bet that no other folk act has ever opened an album with a duet for cello and French horn.
2. The guitar is strummed quietly, almost timidly, as if by an apologetic and bumbling Hugh Grant.
3. The ending sounds abrupt, because of the way it flows into the second track on the original album. But (and I know this is kind of random) if you follow this song immediately with “Edge Hill” by Groove Armada, it’s almost as if they were meant to go together.
Recommended listening activity:
Saying hello to someone on an elevator, but then not quite knowing what to say next.