Album Review: Kimya Dawson - Juno OST

Today's post is about Kimya Dawson and the circuitous nature of music. I recently saw a clip online of the Moldy Peaches performing the excellent "Anyone Else But You" for the premiere of the movie "Juno." At the time I had never heard of the flick but knew the track from a different movie, "Murderball." Now I'll admit, I really didn't know anything about or by Moldy Peaches beyond that one tune, but I loved it immediately and it certainly has gone onto numerous mixes I've made the past few years. So I decided to click on the link for the "Juno" trailer and it looked pretty damn funny, so I went and saw it on New Year's Eve. I won't go into a review of the movie (for that's not really our purpose here), though I will say it was pretty good and had a boatload of great one-liners. Far more importantly, at least for our purposes, it has one of the best soundtracks I've heard in quite some time. The music was chosen as the result of a conversation between the director, Jason Reitman, and the star, Ellen Page.

From a recent interview of Reitman:

"At one point, I asked Ellen Page before we started shooting, 'what do you think Juno listens to?' And she said 'The Moldy Peaches'. She went on my computer, played the songs, and I fell in love with it. Diablo and I discussed putting a Moldy Peaches song in it where the characters would sing to each other. I got in touch with Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches and she started sending me her work, which was beautiful, and that became a lot of the soundtrack."

Suffice to say, Ms. Page has excellent taste and Ms. Dawson is a kick-ass performer. Part of the anti-folk movement of the 90s, Dawson's voice is somehow instantly captivating in spite of its somewhat monotone delivery. It certainly doesn't hurt that she's a brilliant lyricist and provides an intimacy in her work that's sadly missing in a lot of other stuff these days, quite possibly because she records in places like her family kitchen.

Learn more about Ms. Dawson at her website or her live journal. I'm warning you now, though, be careful when you Google her name. It's Kimya, not Kim. Your eyes may never recover from Kim's unsettling pr0n. Consider yourself warned.