When you’re behind the wheel of your car and your favorite song comes on the radio, you feel as though you can do anything. When the windows are rolled up, it’s like you’re in your own personal recording booth and the natural instinct is to belt out whatever’s on the radio like you’re the headlining act at Coachella. It’s something that I do every morning to the sweet strains of Toto’s “Africa” as I roll into the Nerdist parking lot. But what if my windows were down? What if my colleagues heard my voice cracking as I try to replicate David Paich’s angelic melodies? I would be mildly mortified, even though it’s a song that I love dearly. Everyone has a song like this. Everyone. And that’s exactly why I had to ask the cast of Baby Driver all about their guilty pleasure songs, the songs that you would never expect them to be listening to behind closed doors and tinted windows.
https://open.spotify.com/album/1XaJOcLe3xMQ611SMHtOjaWhile at a Los Angeles press day, I sat down with stars Jon Hamm, Ansel Elgort, Jamie Foxx, Eiza Gonzalez, Lily James, and director Edgar Wright to find out what their guiltiest pleasure songs are and what we’d be surprised to hear them bumping in traffic. This is a particularly appropriate question for Baby Driver given that music is so thoroughly suffused into the film’s DNA. Edgar Wright’s latest film tells the story of Baby, a getaway driver who suffers from tinnitus, a neurological condition that causes the perception of sound when none is present (i.e. a so-called “ringing in the ears”). In order to drown out the painful sounds, Baby listens to music constantly, providing an epic soundtrack for the bank robberies and ensuing getaways in which he takes part. The result is a film that provides as much unexpectedly awesome action-comedy as it does unexpectedly awesome musical accompaniment, all meticulously edited and choreographed by Wright and his creative collaborators.
Baby Driver is in theaters on June 28, 2017. Read our review right here!
What is your guilty pleasure song? Let us know in the comments below.
Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter (@DanCasey).
