Category: Music

This week was Jackson Browne’s birthday on October 9, so this post celebrates his birthday and wraps up our series on Taxi Driver music. Previous posts have touched on music from Van Morrison and Kris Kristofferson that influenced Martin Scorsese in the making of Taxi Driver. In this final post on our “Taxi Driver Music” series, we consider a song that the director actually used in the film, Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky.”

In a scene in Taxi Driver after Travis Bickle has shot a man who was robbing a store, he sits at home, alone with his gun, watching American Bandstand. The scene reflects his loneliness and isolation, emphasized by the contrast between Bickle and the scenes on the television screen where young men and women embrace each other as they dance. It is the dance of life, and Bickle has isolated himself in a way that excludes him from the simple joys of life. And that isolation is leading him into a spiral of madness.

Interestingly, in watching the dancing on the television, it does not appear to me that the dancers actually are dancing to “Late for the Sky.” Their movements do not seem to match the song, so maybe Scorsese wanted to use the song “Late for the Sky,” so he found an American Bandstand clip that most closely matched the song. Or I may be wrong and the dance is to “Late for the Sky.” Watch the clip for yourself and decide.

“Late for the Sky” is the opening and the title track from Jackson Browne’s album, Late For The Sky (1974). Even without the visual of the lonely insane man with a gun watching lovers dance, it is a sad song. Browne sings about the end of a relationship: “Awake again, I can’t pretend / That I know I’m alone, / And close to the end / Of the feeling we’ve known.”

Relationships may end in different ways, but often instead of a sudden explosion, they end after a time of drifting apart. Then, one wakes up one morning and wonders what happened “in the bed where we both lie,” which is a great line that may be read with at least three different meanings because of the different definitions of “lie” (including the old expression about sleeping in the bed one makes).

Finally, in the song, Browne asks, “How long have I been sleeping? / How long have I been drifting along through the night? / How long have I been running for that morning flight / Through the whispered promises, and the changing light / Of the bed where we both lie,/ Late for the sky.” It is a beautiful song of loss, and its overall tone perfectly fits the loss Scorsese wanted to convey in Taxi Driver.

So ends our third and final post about the relationship between music and what Martin Scorsese called “a movie about a man who hates music.” If you missed the previous posts, check out the post on how Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks influenced Taxi Driver and the post on the role played by Kris Kristofferson’s “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.”

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