Steven Spielberg's desert island favourite is a song by his daughter
On BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in December 2022, Steven Spielberg chose 8 records and saved "Coolhand" by Buzzy Lee, the stage name of his daughter Sasha Spielberg.
By Riffiter
Steven Spielberg chose 8 records for BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, and the one he would save from the waves is "Coolhand" by Buzzy Lee. Buzzy Lee is the stage name of his daughter, Sasha Spielberg. The episode, presented by Lauren Laverne, was first broadcast on December 18, 2022, a few weeks after The Fabelmans, his film about his own childhood.
The 8 records
The BBC lists them in this order:
| # | Song | Artist | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | (The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance | Gene Pitney | 1962 |
| 2 | Little Fugue in G Minor | Bach | early 1700s |
| 3 | Michelle | The Beatles | 1965 |
| 4 | What the World Needs Now Is Love | Jackie DeShannon | 1965 |
| 5 | Come Fly with Me | Frank Sinatra | 1958 |
| 6 | The Ghost of Tom Joad | Bruce Springsteen | 1995 |
| 7 | Somewhere (West Side Story) | Reri Grist | 1957 |
| 8 | Coolhand | Buzzy Lee | 2018 |
His book was John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. His luxury was an H-8 Bolex film camera.
The father and the fugue
Two of the picks are about his family. The Bach fugue is the first. Spielberg told the programme it was "the song that identified my father to all of us", because every time his father came home from work and pulled into the driveway, he walked to the front of the house whistling it. He chose Leopold Stokowski's orchestral arrangement of the organ piece, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
"Michelle" comes with its own story. A girl from his college in Long Beach kissed him when the song came on the car radio, and he later told Paul McCartney about it. On the show he called the melody "heart-achingly beautiful."
The song he would save
At the end of every episode the guest keeps one record. Spielberg kept "Coolhand". Sasha Spielberg, born in 1990, is his daughter with Kate Capshaw. She released the song in 2018 as the lead single of Facepaint, her first EP as Buzzy Lee, produced by Nicolas Jaar.
A book and a song with the same hero
His book and one of his songs share a character. Tom Joad is the hero of The Grapes of Wrath, and Springsteen named his 1995 album and its title song after him. Nothing published from the show says he made that link. It is there in the list anyway.
Two more of the 8 point at the movies. "Somewhere" is from West Side Story, which he made into a film in 2021, and Reri Grist sang it in the first Broadway production in 1957. Gene Pitney's song shares its name with a John Ford western from 1962.
