Once.

Once.

Tonight, I sort of blew off a deadline and we watched "Once," which is an amazing film starring the guy from The Frames, music I randomly and luckily stumbled into half a decade ago. Let me just cloud your judgement of the movie right now by telling you it's about an Irish musician. You love it now.

Right before the credits rolled, my eyes welled as I whispered "wow, it started... slow, but holy hell did it suck you in." (And you = me in that grammatical bad habit I like to drag around with me.) Sucked in indeed. It's one of those remarkable but infuriating things, infuriating in a good way, when you're so thoroughly convinced that something is so real that you walk around for days with your mind racing about the story, the characters, the connections. It's more than just wanting to know what happens next. It's just... more.

In one of the special features, the musicians/actors said that they always get people asking them questions about the film as if their characters were really them. That? Is awesome.

I don't want to link to all of the places where you can read about the story or listen to the songs online. I want you to see the movie and hold your breath as they start to sing together for the first time. So much of what made the film so beautiful for me was that huge swell of the music growing from just one person to that one person plus the other. If I had heard those songs a thousand times before, I surely would still love them, but I think they would just be musical things to me, not narrative things.

I have this habit of listening to songs over and over without even really paying attention to the lyrics, just getting lost in the music and the melodies and even the tones of the singers voices. My mind sometimes wanders even before the first word is uttered. It doesn't wander far - I'm still lost in the song. I think part of what created this in me is being a classical musician first before ever delving into song-writing or even having mature tastes in lyrical music. (and another part of it is an underlying attention deficit thing I'm increasingly realizing I've always dealt with). But it's so, so rare that lyrics or the story of a song grabs me first, and when it does, I'm, well, grabbed.

So don't listen to the Once music. Don't go to the myspace page where you can listen to them all. Don't download the soundtrack. Just watch it. Then buy the soundtrack.