Movies of the Mind: 5 Songs That Unfold Like Films

This week's songs are from Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Adrienne Lenker, Can, Gillian Welch, and Father John Misty

RIP Garth Hudson, last surviving member of The Band.

“There's no question in my mind that, at the time, Garth was far and away the most advanced musician in rock & roll” - Robbie Robertson

“He was a beautiful guy and the real driving force behind The Band.” - Bob Dylan

"We all knew that if Garth Hudson joined the band, it would put us up a notch, and we'd be unstoppable.” - Levon Helm

The Band - “The Genetic Method > Chest Fever” (Live, from The Last Waltz)

The Band’s music is wallpaper now. It’s in commercials, movies, and TV, probably sung on TV singing competitions. “The Weight” is one of those songs hardly anyone could tell where or when they heard it first, but they know all the words. Beyond those signature hits, I remember how I was first immersed in the myth of The Band. VH1 had a massive promotional boost for the 25th anniversary for The Last Waltz and its box set special presentation. My friend’s dad was a big Dylan fan and he had it on, blasting it in his living room from these huge speakers he had built himself.

Depending upon who you ask, The Last Waltz was self-serving myth-making from coked-out rockers, Scorsese propping up his friend Robbie Robertson, placing him at the center, or both. The music is too good to bother considering any of that. What’s certain is that all of those involved would agree Garth Hudson was the best musician in The Band. Below, I’ve included Hudson’s showcase moment from The Last Waltz, which merges classical and rock & roll. But also check out this heartwarming cut of Hudson playing the clavinet part in “Up On Cripple Creek.” For a time, these guys loved playing music together. We’re lucky to still have the music.

“I always thought songs were like movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.” - Tom Waits

Consider Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, which used instrumentation to guide the listener through a story —characters, setting, action—with no words at all. Listen to the William Tell Overture or Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and images, or some sort of narrative, might surface while you listen.

There are a number of fully fleshed out film adaptations of story-songs: “Harper Valley PTA”, “Ode to Billy Joe,” and “Highway Patrolman” are a few examples. More recently, music videos conjure up images for us; they adapt someone else’s interpretation of the song. This can happen whether the song contains characters, settings, or words to paint the picture, or not. Music can feel cinematic on its own.

Let’s set aside “needle drops”—key moments in TV and films that are enhanced by a perfect song choice. These are special in their own right (and deserve their own entry). I’m thinking more about a song that feels like a movie in and of itself. It’s got a beginning, middle, and end right there in your mind as you listen to it.

Thick with atmosphere and storytelling devices, here are 5 songs that unfold like films, and deliver an impact that extends beyond just listening.

“I had some angel dust. Conned Billy into smoking it with me. We recorded ‘Cortez,’ I’m sitting there nodding out. That was the take. I had the song all turned around. I thought the second chord was the first chord. It’s only three chords.” - Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro

Neil Young & Crazy Horse - “Cortez the Killer”

Young had toyed with various writing exercises, including writing songs as if they were to be in a Broadway musical, which yielded “A Man Needs a Maid,” “Out on the Weekend,” and “Heart of Gold,” all of which are about the blossoming romance between him and Carrie Snodgress. He could create characters, settings, and situations, and speak to his own feelings through them.

The chord progression of “Cortez the Killer,” and the ruminative pace at which it’s played, feels like it could continue on forever. There is no chorus, no beginning, or end. The song fades in and out, like a fleet of ships appearing out of a dense fog. As he sings, Young sounds like he’s working through some stuff he’s not sure he wants to talk about—and at the time of recording, he was. He was in the process of splitting with Snodgress.

In Shakey, the extremely detailed biography of Young—full of evasive and self-contradictory conversations with him—he claims he’d never thought much of Cortez before the night they recorded the song. But he just as soon gets right into Cortez’s state of mind in the next sentence: “When he’s on the boat, on his way over I don’t think he knows what’s gonna happen yet—I’m not sure Cortez might’ve felt he was doin’ the right thing at the end.” It’s notable then that Young pivots out of the depiction of Cortez’s fateful meeting with the Aztecs into the first person in the last verse. Like Cortez, he starts to question his own path:

And I know she's living there
And she loves me to this day
I still can't remember when
Or how I lost my way

I first remember hearing “Cortez the Killer” in middle school. We were studying the Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations and our teacher played it for us. I can still picture her face scanning the classroom observing our reactions. It’s not a particularly accurate account of Cortez’s conquest or the Aztec people. But it’s vivid, ominous, and evocative nonetheless. My teacher, like Neil Young, hoped to open up the mind’s eye into an ancient world, but Young might have been doing that so you weren’t looking at him.

“I wasn’t trying to make something poetic; it was like, ‘Alright, I’m just going to state these things. I’m not going to think too hard about the poetry of it, or do it with that mentality.’ And that ended up making it feel so close to me.” -Adrienne Lenker

Adrianne Lenker - “Real House”

Adrianne Lenker, lead singer/songwriter of Big Thief, described this song as “a condensed montage of the most pivotal moments in [her] childhood” up through the death of her family’s dog. But we can almost set aside the lyrics entirely; the recording is so good, what she’s singing about almost doesn’t matter, the song is that affecting. The emotional weight is immediate once the vocals enter; We know nothing, but feel everything. How?

Lenker’s dedication to live-to-tape recording is a key part of it. You can hear the creaking of chairs as she adjusts her seat, the fingers pressing and lifting the piano keys. She’s left in the change in volume from her pulling back from the microphone. It puts you right there in the room next to her as she shares these small, intimate vignettes. Her memories, what she felt in the moment, the room she’s in—it’s all so tangible. You are there with her, swimming in the memories. In the silent spaces Lenker leaves for us, you can almost hear the shuttering of film running through a projector up in the booth behind you.

“Repeating rhythms and grooves over and over again very consciously was a whole new thing at the time—even though this is an old idea: You find repetitive patterns in every culture of the world. In Europe in the ’60s this wasn’t understood at all. But the truth is simple: Without any repetition there is no groove.” - Jaki Liebezeit

Can - “Halleluhwah”

The drums here are vicious. The persistence of the groove the bass and drums carry turns “Halleluhwah” into some like a meth-ed out “Run Through the Jungle.” The song is actually multiple sections edited together, with keys, guitars, and lyrics that provide frightening, fragmented images. The montage-like composition sits on a foundation of forward momentum from drummer Jaki Liebezeit’s menacing groove. Tension builds and diffuses across the track until it hits a psychotic climax. Like a good movie, it keeps you guessing, transports you somewhere else, and leaves you wondering a bit more about what you’ve just witnessed. If you don’t have 18 minutes to listen to the whole thing, I suggest you evaluate your priorities, but feel free to listen to the single version instead, which is cut down to a respectable 3:38 and still manages to pack a similar punch.

“I like songs to appear very simple and to flow by without any kind of hiccup, but there has to be this impression of other currents underneath. If the songs aren’t multidimensional, we lose interest in them.” - Gillian Welch

Gillian Welch - “Everything is Free”

There’s something of an impressionistic narrative to “Everything is Free,” but not really. It’s mainly about negotiating minimum-wage jobs and the pursuit of making art. However personally valuable that art is, there’s no money in it for most people. So what do they do instead? Released in 2001 (the peak year of CD sales), it could be a reaction to emergent Napster and digital music file-sharing. Either way, it is prophetic given Spotify’s nefarious tactics to avoid paying musicians.

Welch and her partner David Rawlings sing with a defeatist vacancy that comes when you realize that the desperate circumstances they are in are not unique, but a compromise forced upon everyone around them. The words, the melody, the instrumentation and the arrangement are stripped down to the bone. Everything about it is purely economical. Yet they create a rich sense of time and circumstance that is easy to enter into and see a little bit beyond the song itself.

“I’m not into anything that doesn’t have contrasts.” - Josh Tillman

Father John Misty - “Summer’s Gone”

Here’s an example where I’ll offer up what type of film comes to mind while listening to it, and it’s an obvious one: a 1950s musical. I can see a Gene Kelly-type singing it on an empty movie lot, dancing his way out at the end of an act, or at the end of the film itself. It doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to get there, and that’s kind of my whole point, isn’t it?

Father John Misty—the alter-ego of Josh Tillman—is something of a divisive character for some reason. I loved his first album, but thought his output since was fairly one-note. 2024’s Mahashmashana brought back the dynamism of his debut, so it’s only half-caked in ironic schmaltz (which is the correct amount). There are a few references to Fear Fun in “Summer’s Gone.” Despite sounding innocent and maudlin on first pass, one way to interpret the lyrics is as if it’s from the perspective of a vampire. “A Gene Kelly Musical but he’s a drugged-out vampire” is pretty much Father John Misty in a nutshell.

Formally and lyrically, it also offers a nice fade out. Roll credits.

These are a few examples of songs that have this effect on me. But this is such a subjective quality. Surely I can’t be the only one this happens to. Can I? What songs come to mind that do this for you?

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the listening.