In his fascinating book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses some interesting tests surrounding jam. That’s right, jam. In one famous study, Columbia business professor Sheena Iyengar set up two taste booths with a variety of exotic different jams–one small booth with 6 jams and a larger one with 24. “Conventional economic wisdom, of course, says that [...]

I’m a big fan of Family Guy. One of my favorite episodes comes near the end of Season 3 in which Peter opens a bottle of beer and out pops a genie to grant him three wishes. After wishing to see what Kelly Rippa looks like when she’s off the set of Regis & Kelly [...]

While most of this blog hopefully focuses on the better aspects of film music, I’ve spent more than my share of time highlighting the negative as well. Perhaps that’s the jaded New Yorker in me. I’ve lamented the digital future, bitched and moaned that I have nothing to listen to, and questioned the Sizzler Effect. Tough [...]

Because I write about film music for a living, you’d think I’d be able to rattle off anecdotes about most any composer and be able to discuss their music in intimate detail. There are some composers I can do that with, and many, many more than I cannot. And after recent meetings with new film [...]

Did you hear a little Kenny Loggins in the background when you read the title of today’s post? Maybe a synthesized Harold Faltermeyer riff? Good. You were supposed to. But this post isn’t going to be about “the need for speed” or the TOP GUN score. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to [...]

I was still a relative film score virgin in 1978. I had only been collecting soundtracks for a couple of years by that point. I’d gotten to second base but had yet to go all the way. With nearly 35 years of film music collecting under my belt, that year remains remarkably clear in my [...]

ALFRED NEWMAN guards my apartment. In my entryway, a framed, bronze, first-day-issue Newman postage stamp welcomes visitors. This used to sit on my desk but it often got lost among the CDs, papers, To Do lists, and Post-It notes with time-sensitive tasks that I always ignored. So I gave Al a place of honor. (I [...]

For today’s blog post, I went back to the “What Film Music Means To Me” contest comments and pulled out this intriguing entry by Mark Ford. My blood when viewed under a microscope reveals the presence of black blood cells which appear in the shapes of musical notes. DNA testing further reveals an extra chromosome [...]

I bow at the feet of Jonathan Ive and the almighty iPod. It has changed the way I listen to music, mostly for the better. And as a New Yorker, I get to take my film music with me wherever I go while it blocks out most of the incessant hustle and bustle of the [...]

Congratulations to Tim Clark from Melbourne, Australia, the winner of the “What Film Music Means To Me” Contest and a $50 gift certificate from Screen Archives Entertainment. Thank you to everyone who participated and thanks to Tim Curran for tackling the unenviable job of narrowing them down to just one. Everyone who left a comment [...]