Nancy and Madeline

Don't you just love it when you "discover" an artist that everyone else has known about for some time and you feel remiss for all the time you spent without their music? I don't know how I didn't find Madeline Peyroux sooner. Actually, I did find her, but I was looking for something else at the time so I naively let her slip through my fingers. Luckily for me, I got a second chance.

We were sitting at a place called Bar Mut in Barcelona, not far from the apartment, having a very nice lunch of tapas, wine, and beer. I guess it was a place that had been there forever but recently been refurbished. What remained was the perfect blend of old charm and upscale modern elegance. It was the type of place you feel good just sitting in...and then the wine and food comes and you feel even better. Anyway, this was also the type of place that had a great jazz mix playing in the background. Using my best broken Spanish, I asked our waiter what it was I was hearing and he came back with Madeline Peyroux. I had looked at it online casually since returning home, but hadn't pulled the trigger yet. Then I made my second great find of the weekend.

This second discovery counts as even less as such as it was a hit Hollywood movie, still in theaters everywhere. Hardly a hidden gem. However, I think anytime you find something you really love, whether it was hidden under a rock or plastered on posters all over town, you feel like it's a discovery for you personally. The movie was "It's Complicated." What a wonderful return to form for Nancy Meyers after that waxed figure of a movie, "The Holiday." This was back into "Something's Gotta Give" territory and as much as I loved that one, I think "It's Complicated" has a shot at dethroning it on my personal queue. Only after repeated viewings will I know for sure, but the performances of Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin and the smooth, rhythmic writing made this movie play like a song nonetheless.

In the Nancy Meyers movies I don't like, the worlds she creates are too over the top. Like a towering piece of chocolate cake that's just too rich for more than two bites, the sets/settings of movies like "The Holiday" are too rich to be taken seriously as real dwellings and the characters that inhabit them become nothing more than paper dolls, shallow, one-dimensional caricatures that are secondary to the clothes they're wearing. BUT! When Nancy Meyers gets it right, she takes you right to the edge between realism and fantasy, to a place where everything is tasteful and entertaining, but does not feel completely out of reach either. In movies like these, and for me "It's Complicated" was one of these, she creates that chocolate cake that is just sweet enough to be seductive, each bite begetting the next, ultimately, pleasurably intoxicating. Ironically, these Nancy Meyers movies remind me how rich life can be even if I'm not spending the weekend at my beach house in the Hamptons, Christmas in a quaint English cottage, or fretting with my architect about the new addition to my Santa Barbara ranch house. They remind me that life can be as romantic as you wish it to be. Even a modest apartment can be a Nancy Meyers movie when the smell of fresh bread fills the air, when the soft light of candles pool, when a glass of wine opens up with a swirl, when the steady pluck of a jazz bass makes you tap your toes, and, most importantly, when you have someone to dance with.

To me, Madeline Peyroux is the soundtrack to life lived like a Nancy Meyers movie and I snatched it up as soon as we got home from "It's Complicated." I have been listening to her album, "Careless Love," ever since. It's been raining all week and as much as I would love to be at home with a pair of sweatpants and a movie fest, but listening to this album with a cup of coffee and writing this entry, make being at work a little more tolerable.