tweexcore:

Carey Mulligan - New York, New York 

I’ve become a bit obsessed with this version of “New York, New York” since I saw Shame. Carey Mulligan played the character absolutely perfectly, and this performance is one of the most emotionally charged in the film. But even as a song, it’s haunting, and I think it’s in the unexpected sparse arrangement, of a song usually sung with so much gusto, conviction, a celebration of all the possibilities of the city. 

Whereas, this version, the slow, stripped piano, full of pauses and hesitation, verging always on desperation…maybe New York was always supposed to be sad. The New York of empty sidewalks and gray skies, the desperate longing for an escape to somewhere that exists so often as the city of dreams, but the dreams so often broken. A solitary, fragile wish, pushed to its limits, even if the limits bring a tattered destruction.

I haven’t heard anything as sad and beautiful in a long while. 

(via milkchugger)