(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Even though he hasn’t gone as far as countless other actors by recording and releasing an entire album, Woody Harrelson has showcased his musical tendencies throughout his career in various ways over the decades across multiple forms of media.
The actor wrote his first original song at 11 years old, but it wasn’t until the end of his star-making tenure on Cheers that he formed a band. Manly Moondog and the Three Kool Kats never made an album, but they did hit the road for several mini-tours that saw them playing smaller venues in major cities.
He’s performed on movie soundtracks, including ‘Bad Jokes’ and ‘Whoop-I-Ti-Yi-O’ for A Prairie Home Companion and a cover version of Elvis Presley’s ‘Burning Love’ for Zombieland, and his self-penned 1992 track ‘Inside and Out’ finds him singing about seeing Grateful Dead, which is a story in itself.
Harrelson has also popped up in videos for U2’s ‘Song for Someone’, Willie Nelson’s ‘You Don’t Think I’m Funny Anymore’ and Johnny Cash’s ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’, so he’s been hanging around the music industry in plenty of different guises for most of his career.
However, if the Academy Award-nominated star could only choose one song to listen to for the rest of his life, he knows exactly what it would be. In most cases, putting someone on the spot like that would lead to a lengthy period of deliberation and a brain fart or two as the names of every song ever recorded suddenly escape from memory, but after a quick gag, Harrelson didn’t mess around.
“You only get one song to listen to for the rest of your life. What is the song, Woody Harrelson?” Stephen Colbert asked him, only for Harrelson to hold his hands up and confess, “I guess it’s time I reveal I’m a Swiftie.” Needless to say, he is not a massive Taylor Swift fan, which he clarified immediately afterwards when he launched into a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’.
After dropping a few bars, Colbert concurred: “That’s a good one,” he agreed. For clarification purposes, ‘Hallelujah’ isn’t the song that Harrelson would be forced to listen to on repeat until his dying day, but it’s the one he has to listen to every time he wants to hear music. It’s a minor distinction, but it’s an important one nonetheless.
It’s maybe an obvious choice, given the song’s enduring popularity and iconography, although Harrelson clearly admires ‘Hallelujah’ enough to not only belt out a few lines unprovoked put it on a pedestal of its own but single it out as the only song he’d want to hear from now until the end of time if he were given the ultimate Sophie’s Choice scenario for any music aficionado.
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