In Pairings, artists and creators pick the movies that complement their latest work.
Sen Morimoto is an artist and multi-instrumentalist in alt-pop, jazz, and rap whose new album Time Is On Your Side is out on October 23 wherever you get your music!
We asked Sen to pick a few movies that pair well with Time Is On Your Side. Here’s what he wrote about them.
“Da Funk”
When my brother moved out to go to college he left an old laptop behind. It had a few Daft Punk music videos burned onto it from LimeWire. We had very limited internet access so I would just watch these three videos over and over again. The choreography of “Around The World” and the old-school anime style of the “One More Time” snippet from Interstella 5555 dazzled me. If you can imagine those cartoon spirals going around in my eyes, it was like that. But the third one, “Da Funk” directed by Spike Jonze totally went over my head. It’s a 5-minute short film about a very human-like dog living in New York. The plot doesn’t really go anywhere in a traditional sense, and the ending is just sort of plainly sad. I usually skipped that one in the rotation. Now I really appreciate how the events of a plot can be simple while their emotional implications are complex or unexpected in a way that catches you off guard. I think when I’m lucky, the song I’m making can capture some of that disarming earnestness. Anyways, I’ve been making all of my own music videos for this album. One is a 6-minute short film about a human-like furry beast who moves to the big city, and it is kind of plainly sad. As I started compiling this list I had a flashback to watching “Da Funk” at the kitchen counter and thinking “wtf is this” but wow what an impact that video ended up having on me.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
My brother also left behind a DVD of Michel Gondry music videos, which totally changed my life—so I was very excited when this feature film he directed came out. It was my favorite movie back then. When I was writing the first song on this new record “Leave It All Behind” I was feeling really sad about losing memories to time. I’ve always had a pretty poor memory. Sometimes it feels funny—the sensation of not remembering a shared moment someone is recounting to you, like you’re just now arriving in a new timeline without its corresponding memories, but then when you start thinking about that void where a memory once was you start to feel really sad and existentially terrified. Anyways there’s a scene in the movie where Kate Winslet is sliding away on a frozen lake into the darkness as a memory of Jim Carrey’s is erased and he says “Please let me keep this memory, just this one.” I wrote that into the third verse of this song because I think it captures that feeling well.
My Best Friend’s Wedding
This is one of my favorite movies of all time. The Chicago of it all, peak Julia Roberts fashion, the perfect ending, and, of course, all of the Burt Bacharach singalongs. I grew up listening to a lot of Dionne Warwick, Carpenters and Tom Jones. One of my favorite CDs was Burt Bacharach Gold. The production on “Time Is On Your Side” is kind of a love letter to my favorite arrangers and composers of the ’60s and ’70s like Sly Stone, Roberta Flack, Burt Bacharach, Alice Coltrane. For Valentine’s Day last year Kaina and I went to see Dionne Warwick at River’s Casino. There was some error in the ticketing system and we were stuck waiting at will-call to find our tickets for 45 minutes at the box office. We’d nearly given up when a member of Dionne’s touring team happened to overhear our conundrum in the office. He was a sweet ol’ guy named Fred and he said he would take us side-stage for the rest of the concert, since we’d already missed half of it. What a show she put on. When she finished her encore, Fred brought us backstage to say hello. I couldn’t believe it, we were standing in an extremely normal looking room with one of the greatest and most glamourous artists of all time, and she actually spoke to us! I was totally frozen with admiration at first but I finally worked up the nerve to ask a single question, so I said, “Do you ever feel like Burt is watching from above?” Ms. Warwick turned to me, slowly, and then suddenly burst into song—“The moment I wake up….”
Punch-Drunk Love
There’s a song on this Jon Brion (huge influence of mine in general) soundtrack “He Needs Me” which is a cover of a tune originally sung by Shelley Duvall in Popeye that haunts me, it’s so beautiful. The melody is cartoonish and nostalgic and dreamy and a little ominous. I tried to write something similar for my song “I Saw You.” In general the way this film plays with color and how loosely it keeps track of time is really inspiring to me.
Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers
This was my favorite VHS tape growing up. The way the toast and jam looks DELICIOUS in the opening breakfast sequence is just amazing. I always had to have a piece of toast when I watched it. I tried my hand at some stop-motion claymation for the first time on the second single of this album “Chewing Gum.” I was trying to get a wad of gum to sing the song and it gave me a whole new level of respect for professional animators and claymation as an art form. It is really, really hard! I thought a lot about that old VHS tape while I was making it though, and that was a nice nostalgic feeling to tap into.
Napoleon Dynamite
This movie totally changed how I thought about movies and what they could be when it came out. It got so big that it kind of became a meme and lost some of its mystique back then, but it was really so special. I can hear a lot of its soundtrack in my own production with the wonky drum machines and tiny organs. The tone of the movie too feels really close to how I feel about art and the world, like it’s so serious and important but so friggin’ dumb at the same time.
