With the Final Episode of How I Met Your Mother and its use of Cat Stevens’ The Wind, which I immediately recognized, I asked myself: How many times a Cat Stevens song has been used in a film or TV show? Well, lately I’ve been listening to a lot of his music which I admit to like a lot since my childhood. The cause of my recent hook is because I’ve been watching skateboard videos of circa 1990 featuring a skater named Rodney Mullen, a real wizard with a skateboard by the way, and he always used Stevens’ music in his parts.
With a quick search on IMDb we arrive at 62 credits for Soundtracks or the use of one of Cat Stevens’ song. I’ve decided to trim the results and present my favorite use of the songs in each film I preferred.
Song: The Wind
Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000)
A masterpiece about music and very auto-biographical for Crowe who was a music critic at an early age.
Songs: Where Do the Children Play?; On the Road to Find Out; Trouble; Don’t Be Shy; Tea For the Tillerman; If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out; I Think I See the Light; I Wish, I Wish; Miles From Nowhere.
Harold And Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
Well, the entire soundtrack seems to be from Cat Stevens and it’s his biggest contribution on a motion picture. The movie wouldn’t be the same without this soundtrack!
Songs: The Wind & Here Comes My Baby
Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
A quirky film that I really like as for any Anderson film I’ve seen. Wes Anderson knows how to use music in films just like one of his masters Martin Scorsese and other provocateur Quentin Tarantino.
Interesting post. I think I remember hearing Tea for the Tillerman used as the closing song in Ricky Gervais' series Extras
ReplyDeleteIt is possible I'll have to check this. There were too many to actyually list them here and I wanted to hightlight the best ones.
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