I'm normally pretty resistant to romancing rock band musician lifestyles (really!), but I have to admit the movie Once has really got under my skin. It's so tender and beautiful and convincing. In many ways the heart of it is this song, which represents a critical moment of connection in the movie and, as it happens, between the two players as well. Or, well, their own connection probably happened some other much more mundane way. But it is idealized in the scene built around this song, and all of that chemistry and electricity is poured into it, with the two of them shown playing together for the first time, tentatively feeling around for the keys and musical cues and so forth and then working themselves into the song and then suddenly hitting it. And I don't know how this song fits or does not into the (now former) relationship between Hansard and Irglova either, and after all the movie is a musical and a narrative work of fiction, so right right right. Poetic license. But "Falling Slowly" is not a song about being drunk, it's fairly obvious it's about that pesky other "in love" type of falling. Without the movie, the song might seem much more mundane, or overly sweet, or folkie in some tiresome way, though they are each one impossible for me to believe. But I can't say because the movie is how I experienced this song for the first time, and how I think of it, the filter through which I like to hear it. What I can say is that you really ought to go see the movie. Then tell me what you think of the song.
Yeah, I know that feeling ... a lot of songs, including some genuinely great ones, were not 'revealed' to me until I heard them used well in a movie. And not just talking about songs written for or even popularized by a movie either. I'll bet the phenomenon goes even stronger with classical music, for many people... a certain filter gets placed over one's mind when one hears music in a certain context, and it's removed in other contexts.
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