Time to Pretend

TIME TO PRETEND, MGMT

(February 2010)

Pre-leaving London: A lot of TV shows have great songs in their soundtracks, but very few of them know how to use them well. Take, as an example, Cold Case - because of their time-jumping stories, they play an insane amount of time-appropriate music, but never use it affectively. Shows like Grey's Anatomy, which uses a lot of indie-rock stuff, will have it playing in the background of an intense scene, and it's usually distracting for either the drama of the scene or the music playing. However, Skins used music really well in their scenes, and none better than MGMT's "Time to Pretend" in the second series finale. I heard it once the first time, then was stuck on it. In a weird way, it's a truly epic song, with its very grand dun-DUNs in the background and lyrics, though about the shallow rock-star lifestyle, has wonderful and thoughtful phrasing about the cyclical nature of life in a way that isn't usually mentioned in a song like this.

As a writer, music is really important to me when I write, and a lot of times, songs will figure in significantly to what I'm writing. I can only think of, maybe, one script I've written in the fifteen years or so of me writing where I haven't thought of a song to go in it (and that script was just written a month or so ago). I've decided that I want "Time to Pretend" to be in a script of mine - I can already see it, a music montage of characters growing up and getting into their twenties/thirties. Maybe I should be writing that instead of this blog?

Maybe that's not such a bad idea.