La La Land, Channing Tatum, and my new single "The Weekend"

An attempt at writing an American drinking song

I have just released my third song of the year, called “The Weekend,” and it’s been a long time coming.

During the pandemic, I rewatched La La Land and had a similar feeling to the first time I watched it back in the cinema. I thought it was fun, had an amazing ending, but was overall a little too flat to be hailed as some masterwork of film as some people say it is. This led me to finally watch The Sound of Music for the first time, which I found to be a triumph, and rewatch Mary Poppins, which I found to be just as wonderful as it was when I was a child.

After this trio of movie musicals, I wanted to know the history of this genre and thus found a YouTube video which broke everything down (or at least the English-language ones). The man who narrated the twenty-minute video had some pretty harsh words for La La Land, especially lambasting its lighting and use of lead actors who were not really singers or dancers. He compared LLL to a brief scene in the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar!, in which Channing Tatum plays a sailor in a bar in a musical number. The narrator points out the contrast between this scene and the opening scene of LLL. The difference was clear. The Coen brothers filmed it like the great musicals of the fifties and sixties, while Damien Chazelle’s scene lacks a kind of vividness.

None of these criticisms have anything to do with my new song except for the fact that I’d thought about writing a kind of musical piece set in a bar before, just like the Channing Tatum scene. The original inspiration was a cross between the musical scene in the bar in Disney’s Tangled and the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a drinking song culture like they do in the U.K. for example. I decided I wanted to write a drinking song that people could put on in a bar, sip a pint, and sing along to.

Of course the question was- what should the song be about? I thought about what led people to go find a bar and put down a few drinks, and the answer, of course, was a hard day’s work. “The Weekend” is a workers’ rights anthem of sorts, and an attempt at a combination of satire and catharsis.

If you haven’t already, I invite you to give it a listen on your preferred streaming service and see if it resonates with you. Thanks for reading and have a work-free day.