“Janey” by Kevin Renick
Kevin, apart from being one of my mom’s best friends for a trillion years and basically the same person as me if I was a guy and had musical talent, wrote the title track for the movie “Up in the Air,” which you would have heard if you stayed through the credits. He just made a really good CD called “Close to Something Beautiful.” If your looking for a CD to buy, I recommend it. Plus, my mom is getting really irritated because she can never talk to him because he doesn’t have enough money to keep minutes on his phone. You could solve that problem. The whole CD’s not on iTunes yet, but I think it will be, and you can get a few songs on iTunes now.
Some of you have heard this story before, and if you have, you don’t have to read this, but it goes like this: Kevin lost his job a while back and wrote a song about it called “Up in the Air.” Then, he heard that the director Jason Reitman was going to be talking at his old college and decided to go. He also heard that Reitman was in the middle of working on a movie called “Up in the Air.” He had no idea what the movie was about, but he was like, “Hey! I wrote a song called ‘Up in the Air!’” and he recorded the song on a cassette tape in his living room the night before and gave it to Reitman the next day. And Jason Reitman was all, “Man, a cassette tape? I don’t have any way to play this.” So Reitman carries around the cassette tape with him for a while until finally one of his friends says he has a tape player in his car. Reitman sits out in the car and listens to the song. Bam! Song in movie. AND song in movie exactly the way it was on the cassette tape, which is all scratchy and with a message to Jason Reitman at the beginning. And guess what? It actually worked out kind of amazingly because the movie’s about layoffs and the song was about getting laid off but Kevin didn’t even know that.
Anyway, normally I would never write a post this long/telling you to buy things, but I’ve heard this story so many times now and I’m still not tired of it. It just… gives me some level of faith in the world, I guess, that you can hand a cassette tape to some guy at the age of 50 and suddenly be living everything you always wanted to. Is that cheesy? Probably. That’s okay.
