Rufus Wainwright - Agnus Dei
The Tragically Hip - Vaccination Scar
James Blake - Limit To Your Love
Pendulum - Propane Nightmares
The Crystal Method - Keep Hope Alive
Secret Chiefs 3 - Zulfiqar III
The Beatles - Tomorrow Never Knows
I looooooved that song in the remake of “The Thomas Crown Affair”. It was the perfect song for the scene it was used in.
I’ve purchased 3 CD’s because of songs in movies.
The other 2 are:
Humans Being by Van Halen from the movie Twister. Originally only released on the movie soundtrack.
In the Comfort of Strangers by Skin from the movie Time Code
It takes a lot for me to track songs down from a movie.
A co-worker lent me a tape of Closer by Joy Division. Wow.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3217H8JppI
“Hannelore”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di9JUmOIs0E
“Internationale”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk69e1Vcmvg
“You Were Born To Be Loved”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MRH5oNG7hA
The version of Let It Be sung by Carol Woods and Timothy Mitchum in Across the Universe absolutely blew me away the first time I heard it. The song was attached to the end of a podcast, and was pretty much played unannounced.
Second movement of Beethoven’s 7th.
Also, there’s one amazing crescendo in Bruch’s violin concerto. I feel cheated that it never repeats.
so many songs on this list that I aree with, but a few stand out from my musical past, in that I have flashbulb memory of exactly where I was and when I heard these songs for the first time:
Dear God - XTC
How Soon Is Now - The Smiths
Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
Once - Pearl Jam
Disarm - Smashing Pumpkins
My jaw “dropped” in this fashion just yesterday.
The radio show I was listening to featured an excerpt of the conversation between Chris Hadfield aboard the ISS and students at Chris Hadfield Public School. It was kinda cool. The segment ended with the host playing a song written for Hadfield: “Christopher” by Emm Gryner.
I had never heard of Emm Gryner before (shame on me - she grew up not far from here, and she played with David Bowie fercrisakes). That song was so beautiful: Ms. Gryner’s crystaline voice and the artful and simplistic poetry. It floored me! I was on my way home from work and it actually moved me to tears. I can’t explain why it had such a deep impact.
The mundane litany of factory lights, freeways, even seasons and jilted love, jammed up against the phrase “a place in the sky where it all disappears”
The refrain “Christopher floats to the stars/Christopher walks on the dark” is musically and vocally separate from the rest of the simply rendered tune and successfully celebrates our Canadian hero without being all gushy, inspires the wonder of space travel, and even instills a sense of isolation being on the ISS must be like. It is wonderful craftsmanship.
The lyrics are easily found with a google search, but I had trouble tracking down a recording. I wrote to the radio station to find out how to get this song: it’s on her 2002 album Asian Blue - on order now from Amazon.
Here are a few I didn’t see mentioned that affected me:
First, Samuel Barber’s Adagio For Strings. First because I learned about it on the SDMB about a year or two ago.
Second, Grateful Dead’s Dark Star from Dick’s Pick’s 4. 30 minutes of pure jazz ecstasy.
Third, Grateful Dead covering Tomorrow Never Know medley mixed with Baba O’Reilly and Same As It Ever Was
Fourth, the medley on side two of Abbey Road
Fifth, Eric Clapton in any cover of JJ Cale’s Cocaine
Sixth, Gimme Shelter by the Stones. My jaw dropped again when I saw them do it live.
The first two times I recall this happening were “In the Mouth a Desert” by Pavement and “Los Angeles” by Frank Black, within a couple months of each other in early 1993.
About a year later, I was driving across a bridge on a rural highway when I nearly crashed into the guard rails because I had become so entranced while hearing Sonic Youth’s cover of “Superstar” for the first time.
Finally, the one album that did it for me. A record store I frequented in the late 90s had a habit of selling albums before street date. I recall going to the store on a Monday in February to check out the next day’s releases. I noticed a new album by a band I had seen live the year before. I had enjoyed the band and their first album, so I picked it up, took it home, and put it in the CD player. 40 minutes later, as the album finished, I was so in love with the album that I went back to the player and put it on endless repeat. I had listened to the album 4 times by the time my wife came home a few hours later, and 10 times by the time I went to bed. To this day, Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” remains my favorite album. I played it so often that summer while my wife was pregnant that my daughter responded to the music after being born.
Piece of My Heart waaay back when. It was just “wow” right then and there. I quickly grabbed my tiny old tape recorder and recorded the rest of the song off the radio. I still have that tape.
I had just recently heard a couple of things about a new singer called Janis Joplin. But I didn’t know that this was her until the DJ announced it at the end of the song. Okay, so that’s why people were starting to talk about her.
25+ years ago I hear on a college radio station a cover of Haunted by a local group (Amanda Jones). The DJ said the original was by the Pogues.
Never heard that cover again. Never found a recording of it anywhere.
Trying to find the original wasn’t easy either. It originally wasn’t issued in the US on a regular Pogues album. It was on the Sid and Nancy soundtrack plus imports.
Great song, my all time favorite.
Yeah, me too, though I found it after loving the Sammy Hagarand Rough Cutt (warning: Hair Metal) version. Both great renderings IMO, I enjoy Joss Stone’s and Melissa Etheridge’s version, P!nk’s is just alright.
But Janis… wow. Some songs are written for and inspired by artists, some tapped out pop stars phone it in and purchase songs off the shelf, some attempt to ride the coattails and do a cover justice, but some artists sound like they mean that shit. I believe Janis.
Aretha Franklin— “Respect”
Beatles — “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”
Yes — “Soon” from “The Gates of Delirium”
David Bowie — “Warszawa”
Talking Heads — “The Great Curve”
Codona — “Mumakata”
Ofra Haza — “Galbi”
Happy Rhodes — “Warpaint”
Melissa Etheridge — “Silent Legacy”
Ani DiFranco — all of Not a Pretty Girl
Joan Osborne — “Spider Web”
Loreena McKennitt — “Marco Polo”
Indigo Girls — “Go”
Typically, I only see classical as jaw-dropping. I clearly remember being blown away when I first heard Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
In pop music, I tend to like more atmospheric stuff that sneaks up on you like “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush or “Breathe” by Lori Carson. But I’m often also caught by songs that have a killer hook to them, like “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis; from the moment that added the sax, they had to know they had something there.
Bachianas Brasileiras - Wikipedia No. 5 - Bidu Sayao
Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”
Dead Can Dance - “The Carnival is Over”
“Flames” from Isham’s soundtrack for “Crash”
Everybody Hurts by REM.
Creep, the Chrissie Hynde version.
‘Stepping Out’ and ‘Breaking Us in Two’ by Joe Jackson.
Reading the thread, it reminds me of so many others, memories I’d almost forgotten. The song I’m talking about I first heard first when I was very small while my family was on summer vacation. I’d just spent a day running them ragged at the Wildwood Boardward…
the clicking sounds of a wooden roller coaster before the rumbles & the screams… the smell of the burning oil that always filled my nose when I’d played on the bumper cars. There was even the occasional sound of a Philadelphia long “Oh”. 
There had been seagulls complaining, crying for the waves to stop pounding, the sun to stop beating, and the Cessna’s with banners to stop flying, but they hadn’t, not once 
. But the sun had gone low and the day was at its end.
For a special treat, we were all going to get to go out to eat at a restaurant: Ed Zaborer’s in North Wildwood for fresh seafood.
I was piled in the back of the station wagon, and as the car turned on, and this song was on the radio. My father didn’t turn it off, which was a treat. I just remember looking out the back windows as it played at the scenes that passed…
pretty girls in bathing suits and T-shirts and flip-flops, walking in pairs. Signs for hotels & dance clubs. Canadian license plates and NJ license plates all parked next to each other.
A powder blue square-back Corvette parked in a gas station with a “For Sale” sign on the dash board.
All seen by a little boy with his nose pressed to the back quarter-panel glass of a Country Squire station wagon.
It all seemed the perfect mosaic for the first time I heard Todd Rundgren’s “I Saw The Light”…
Strange, because I think the same way — I pretty much prefer classical over pop, but some of my favorite hooks in pop music come from saxes, which don’t figure in classical music. I’m thinking of songs like “Baker Street” and “Careless Whisper.”
Horns can put a song up there. “This Poem Sucks” by Mike Myers wouldn’t work without the sax, nor would “I Know What Boys Like” by the Waitresses.
Last song that did that for me was “Bartender” by Rehab.
ETA - “No Sleep” by Wiz Khalefa did too.
Just about every song written by Martin Simpson:-
Home Again
An Englishman Abroad
Will Atkinson
And best of all, his warts-and-all tribute to his father - Never Any Good