My Top 1000 Songs #587: The Shining Path
[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.] Here's some quiet, ethereal music that has lived rent-free in my imagination for decades. I think it gets filed under "soundtrack music"--yet it's possible the song's appearance in a film is something that happened only in my imagination. In contrast to Shriekback's edgy dance music (best exemplified in the amazing, previously-acknowledged " Nemesis "), "The Shining Path"--from 1986's aptly-titled Big Night Music --feels like an update to Brian Eno 's mid-70s ambient vocal tracks . It's dark, brooding, and absolutely beautiful. All these years later, it's still got huge emotional pull on me. Weirdly, I kinda associate it with Michael Mann's Manhunter film (the precursor to the more-frequently-invoked Silence of the Lambs ). Yet while a few other like-sounding Shriekback trac