Notes speak louder than words

I've got a lot keeping me up at night lately, and some of it is blog-worthy, so here you go. It feels good to be able to actually connect to one of my blog posts, something that I've determined hasn't happened to me in 2014 yet. That's about to change, and it's all thanks to lyricless music. You should give it a try, some time. There's something about this kind of music that you can't get from songs with lyrics in them. Here are some of my favorite examples.

We all know that Inception is a great movie, and one of the reasons why is because of the incredible soundtrack (thanks, Hans Zimmer). If you listen to "Waiting For a Train," skip ahead to 4:00 or so. The strings go through a bunch of step-by-step movements, and if you catch this part around 4:38, there's one note that is held for a longer time. At 4:44 there's a lower note that comes in and creates this absolutely perfect harmony. This repeats a couple more times (5:02 and 5:23), and might be my favorite harmony ever.

I'm not totally finished with Breaking Bad yet (14 episodes left!), but one of the most memorable scenes for me was Walt throwing matches into his pool. It summed up everything in his life at that time, and there were no words, no dialogue, and no voiceovers. Just music.

Possibly the best example of music replacing dialogue in a scene is in The Social Network. Specifically, the boat race that the Winklevi twins were in. I know the actual score is from something else, but it's perfectly used to capture all of the emotions in the race.

And finally, also from The Social Network, "Hand Covers Bruise." I fell in love with this piece as soon as I saw the movie, and I remember one time laying in bed, falling asleep to the DVD menu as this played in the background. It's just such a simple and perfect piece. What I've come to realize is that my favorite musical technique, whatever you wanna call it, is a presiding note that just stays for the entire piece. It happens here with the feedback and what sounds like strings throughout the song. And the piano falls and it's perfect. This might be the best song to stare off into space to. Kind of exactly how Jesse Eisenberg does in one of the best scenes in the movie.