Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis – "Cruisin'" (2000)

Glad your going my way

I love it when we're cruisin' together

When I was a teenager, I listened to the radio to hear new records.

Later, the internet became my primary source for new music.

Today, I become acquainted with a lot of unfamiliar music at the group exercise class at my 91-year-old mother’s assisted living place.

Julia, the instructor, generally favors R&B songs from the nineties and the aughts – which is not exactly my musical wheelhouse.

She’s played today’s featured song in each of the last several classes, and it’s become a favorite of mine – which is something I never thought I’d say about a Gwyneth Paltrow-Huey Lewis duet.  (Yes, I’m talking about that Gwyneth Paltrow.)

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Gwyneth Paltrow’s father Bruce was a TV/movie writer, director, and producer.  (If you’re as old as I am, you almost certainly remember two television shows that Paltrow produced: The White Shadow and St. Elsewhere. 

Paltrow died from oral cancer in 2002 while he was in Rome to celebrate Gwyneth’s 30th birthday.

A very young Gwyneth Paltrow
with her late father Bruce

The father and his daughter worked on only one movie together: Duets, a 2000 film that Bruce Paltrow co-produced and directed.  Duets featured not only Gwyneth Paltrow (who was coming off an Academy Award-winning performance in Shakespeare in Love) but also up-and-comers Paul Giamatti (Sideways, 12 Years a Slave, Love & Mercy) and Maria Bello (The Cooler, A History of Violence, Thank You for Smoking).

Duets is about karaoke competitions.  (If you weren’t aware that there was such a thing as karaoke competitions, feel free to sit your ass down next to mine because I sure as hell wasn’t aware that there such a thing as karaoke competitions either.)

The plot of the movie revolves around three pairs of people who hook up in various implausible ways.  All of them end up competing against one another at a big karaoke contest in Omaha.  (How big a karaoke contest?  The first prize is FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS – that’s how big.)

One of the pairs consists of Paltrow and her absentee father, who is played by Huey Lewis, a professional karaoke hustler.

Paltrow and Lewis in “Duets”

The second pair are Maria Bello (another veteran of the karaoke competition circuit) and an alcoholic priest wannabe who is now a cabdriver.  (The cabbie part was originally given to Brad Pitt, who was Paltrow’s boyfriend at the time.  But when the couple broke up, Pitt opted out of the role.)

The third pair consists of Giamatti and a hitchhiking escaped criminal who Giamatti picks up.

As this Wikipedia summary of the subplot relating to Giamatti and his hitchhiker sidekick indicates, Duets – which one critic described as “six characters in search of a movie” – was one hot mess:

Depressed California salesman Todd Woods (Paul Giamatti) is so exhausted from business travel that he doesn't even know what city he's in; and when he gets home, his wife Candy and two children are too self-absorbed to even say hello.  Bored, he walks out on his family and his old life, and begins to drive aimlessly around the country. 

He wanders into a karaoke bar in New Mexico, where a fellow participant offers him beta blockers to help him overcome his anxiety and stage fright.  He gets hooked on the drugs as he keeps driving, and in Utah he picks up hitchhiker Reggie Kane, a charismatic but violent fugitive convict, who had already robbed the previous truckdriver who gave him a lift at gunpoint.  

The plucky convict is intimidated by Todd's emotionless demeanor, but the two form an unlikely and close friendship after Reggie reveals a beautiful singing voice during a duet at another karaoke bar.  As they travel, Todd's mental health deteriorates further and Reggie tries his best to keep him out of trouble; he first has to drag Todd out of a hotel when he threatens the clerk with a gun; then, after Todd's careless behavior causes a stand-off at a service station, Reggie intervenes but shoots and kills the attendant.  

Reggie arranges for Candy to meet them in Omaha in an attempt to reconcile them, but when she arrives, a still emotionless Todd rejects her, saying that he is finished with his former life.

 The “Duets” DVD case

Wikipedia doesn’t reveal which of the contestants wins the $5000 grand prize and lives happily ever after (at least until the $5000 runs out in a few weeks).

But I’ve got to think the very nice Lewis-Paltrow cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’” comes out on top.  Maria Bello’s performance of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” could give Lewis and Paltrow a run for their money, but I have a hard time believing that Paul Giamatti’s versions of the Otis Redding classic, “Try a Little Tenderness,” or Todd Rundgren’s classic “Hello It’s Me” won the big prize.

Here the scene from Duets where Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow – who turns out to be a pretty good singer – combine on “Cruisin’”:

Coldplay – "Viva la Vida" (2008)

For some reason I can't explain

I know Saint Peter won’t call my name

It is possible that the reason that St. Peter won’t be calling Chris Martin’s name because he and his mates lifted the most memorable chord progression in “Viva la Vida” from Joe Satriani’s 2004 track, “If I Could Fly.”  (Satriani sued Coldplay for copyright infringement, but the case settled before it went to trial.)

There’s another reason for St. Peter to bar the door to heaven to Coldplay: the lyrics to “Viva la Vida” are as bad as any you’ll ever hear in a popular song.

Whoever wrote those – the song is credited to all four Coldplay members – has served up a heapin’ helpin’ of historical and religious references and imagery that makes no sense whatsoever.  (Little known fact: when Macbeth spoke of “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he was referring to “Viva la Vida.”)

Paltrow and Martin split in 2014

Martin met actress Gwyneth Paltrow at a Coldplay concert in 2002.  (He was 25, and she was four and a half years older.)  The couple were married the next year.

Martin crushed it for over ten years before the couple separated in 2014.  Currently he’s crushing Annabelle Wallis, an English actress who is the niece of actor Richard Harris, whose recording of “MacArthur Park” may be the greatest vocal performance of all time.

Annabelle Wallis

PETA named Martin the “World’s Sexiest Vegetarian” in 2005.  But it seems that he went back to eating meat after his conscious uncoupling from Paltrow.

Martin is a very brown-eyed fellow, as his thoughts on religion show. 

In a 2008 interview he said, "I'm always trying to work out what 'He' or 'She' is. I don't know if it's Allah or Jesus or Mohammed or Zeus. But I'd go for Zeus."  Later, he texted that he was an "all-theist,” a word of his invention meaning that he believes in "everything.”  (Isn’t believing in everything really the same as believing in nothing?)

“Viva la Vida” was a huge hit for Coldplay in 2008.  It reached #1 on the pop charts in both the United States and the UK, and won the “Song of the Year” Grammy.  Over six million copies of the song were sold in the U.S. alone. 

I have a feeling “Viva la Vida” will be one of the songs Coldplay plays when they take the stage at the 50th Super Bowl later tonight.  

Here’s the “Viva la Vida” music video, which has been viewed over 239,000,000 times:

Click below to buy “Viva la Vida”: