Please hope me to sing Brand New Angel

February 24, 2010 8:56 PM

On the movie Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges sings this beautiful Greg Brown song called Brand New Angel. And I love it, but I'm not sure I'm correctly hearing the word that seems to be, essentially, the punch line of the song.

It's in the chorus, like here:

Open the gates
Welcome him in
There’s a brand new angel
A brand new angel
With an old ______.

I've tried all the Google searches that usually lead to finding mystery lyrics, but the two results I've found suggest 'idea' and 'violin' - both words work, but don't quite sound right to me.

So I've uploaded a clip that has the 2 choruses here. The word in question is at about 0:40 and 1:20 in the clip, or about 1:50 and 3:34 in the real song, if you happen to have it.

Please help me know the right word to sing!

posted by kingbenny to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

Best answer: I am hearing "violin", and believe that, especially since other lyrics say "He's put his bow down, and closed his case"
posted by that girl at 9:05 PM on February 24, 2010

Best answer: Just listened with my Beyerdynamic DT 770 headphones... pretty clearly "violin." Definitlely not "idea."
posted by smcameron at 9:05 PM on February 24, 2010

Best answer: I downloaded your clip, slowed in Audacity, and it sounds like violin. It doesn't sound like that though because his "l" is almost like a "d", almost as if he were singing with a cold. When he sang this in the movie, was he crying or close to tears? That could explain it.
posted by battlebison at 9:09 PM on February 24, 2010

battlebison: I'm not getting that at all. Listening to it again, to me, there's no question. It is *definitely* "violin" The "L" sound is fine, not remotely like "d". There's no question about it. Hard for me to even see how anyone could hear anything else but "violin", and it's not even obscured by the instruments. What kind of horrible speakers are you people using that you can't hear this plain as day?

... let me play it through some cheap radio shack minimus 7's...

No, still pretty plain. Not as plain as with good headphones, but... 1000x more obvious than say, any lyrics on AC/DC's Back in Black album, and those are pretty plain.
posted by smcameron at 9:23 PM on February 24, 2010

Through my netbook speakers it is clear as day - "violin". Violin also rhymes with "in", which "idea" of course doesn't. Nice song, by the way!
posted by crabintheocean at 9:30 PM on February 24, 2010

I wish they'd have shown that movie with subtitles. Jeff Bridges' singing was clear enough (the lyric you're looking for is definitely "violin") but his character's spoken dialogue throughout was so mumbly and slurred I couldn't understand half of it & picked it up only by context.
posted by headnsouth at 2:54 AM on February 25, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks for the help, Metafilter. I feel somewhat silly now, because I suppose it is pretty clearly 'violin' - but I'm with battlebison, to me it sounded more like a 'd' than an 'l'.

I was even listening with pretty decent reference monitors, but I've always been a little weak in the area of correctly hearing lyrics.
posted by kingbenny at 7:47 AM on February 25, 2010