This past Friday, the twenty-three-year-old British singer Sam Smith, noting that he had been “dreaming of this moment for a long, long time,” released the song “Writing’s on the Wall,” which will play over the opening credits of the new James Bond movie, “Spectre,” due in November. Smith seems to have spent more time dreaming about the début than he did working on the song. In an interview with NPR, he said that he and his collaborator, Jimmy Napes, wrote it in less than half an hour, and that the demo he quickly recorded ended up in the final version (which was produced with help from the British house duo Disclosure).
You can call this inspiration or undue haste—some have praised the song, which pairs Smith’s famous falsetto with lush orchestration, as revealing 007’s softer, more vulnerable side. Others have called “Writing’s on the Wall” a lesser version of the last Bond song, Adele’s “Skyfall,” which sold millions of copies, won an Oscar, and brought a new measure of respectability to the Bond-song genre. Still others pointed out that it sounds an awful lot like Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song,” from 1995. (It does.) Roger Moore said he liked it. So does the British public: when the charts come out this week, it’s expected that it will be the first Bond single to hit No. 1 on the U.K. pop charts.
Smith and Co. may indeed have created a passable sequel to “Skyfall,” but they cheated, skipping the most important and difficult requirement of the project: a reference to the Bond movie’s title, “Spectre,” is nowhere to be found in the song’s lyrics. Plenty of people can write a perfectly good pop song. But very few can write a perfectly good pop song that also contains the title of the latest in a long line of absurdly named James Bond movies. Do you think that anyone ever sat down planning to write a song about a Thunderball or a Moonraker or a Goldeneye? And what songwriters would come up with such batty koans as “Tomorrow Never Dies” or “You Only Live Twice” on their own? You don’t choose James Bond songs, they choose you, and like haiku, the form is central to the art.
Sure, this isn’t the first Bond song to stray from the formula. “All Time High,” performed by Rita Coolidge, for the abominable 1983 Roger Moore outing “Octopussy,” thankfully left the unmentionables unmentioned. Chris Cornell’s “You Know My Name,” from “Casino Royale,” contained neither word from the title, but it did rely on an extended gambling metaphor. Plus, nothing rhymes with “royale.” Jack White and Alicia Keys were too savvy to put their names on a song called “Quantum of Solace,” or even to mention the full title, but White nonetheless slipped a nod in at the start of the second verse: “Another tricky little gun giving solace to the one / That’ll never see the sun shine.” I’m not quite sure what that means, but no one knows what a quantum of solace is, either. Perhaps the best title moment occurs in my favorite Bond song, “Nobody Does It Better,” from 1977, which was composed by Marvin Hamlisch, written by Carole Bayer Sager, and performed by Carly Simon. The song delivers the movie’s title by way of misdirection, in an indelible lyric: “But like Heaven above me, the spy who loved me / Is keeping all my secrets safe tonight.”
What rhymes with spectre? Not much. Vector, hector, rector? (Shirley Bassey, the queen of the Bond song, could have done something delicious with “nectar.”) Still, of all the brain-numbing James Bond titles, “Spectre” isn't especially unwieldy. The title of “Writing’s on the Wall” refers to a premonition of bad things to come, and the song mentions being haunted by a “million shards of glass.” Perhaps this is meant to be evidence of some Bond-song evolution, a release from the chains of literalism that left the illustrious likes of Gladys Knight with the unfortunate duty of singing about licenses to kill and whatnot.
But it’s in the ludicrous whatnot that the glory of James Bond lies—in the glorious bombast, the mixture of the clever and the idiotic, the willingness to say or do something deeply silly. Performing a Bond song means lowering oneself to the lovably tacky standards of the series. If Paul McCartney could do it, then why shouldn’t Sam Smith be expected to try? The strictures of the Bond song have produced glimmering turns of phrase (“I don’t need love, for what good will love do me? / Diamonds never lied to me”) and dozens of absolute howlers (my favorite, from Sheryl Crow, “Darling, you won / It’s no fun / Martinis, girls, and guns / It’s murder on our love affair”). But Bond is all about taking the good with the bad—the beautiful women and the freakish villains, the nimble quip with the boorish bit of sexism—with a sense of humor.
It’s no coincidence that Daniel Craig’s mostly dour, brute-force Bond has been given a more leaden, self-serious soundtrack. Yet at least Adele’s dark and swooning “Skyfall,” which she co-wrote with the producer Paul Epworth, performed its essential Bond-song duty, which is to give meaning to an ostensibly meaningless word or phrase. “Let the sky fall / When it crumbles / We will stand tall / Face it all together / at Skyfall,” she sings, in what turned out to be, for better or worse, a plot spoiler. In all, the song refers to the name of the movie about twenty times.
In its devotion to its title-proclaiming duties, “Skyfall” rivals what are two of the best Bond songs of all time, “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever,” both performed in glorious high-bombast style by Bassey, and both of which begin with the title of the movies for which they were written. “Diamonds Are Forever” doesn’t need James Bond to make sense. But “Goldfinger” is basically a character sketch. Without the villain Auric Goldfinger, there’d be no reason for the masterly lyric: “He’s the man, / the man with the Midas touch / A spider’s touch.” The fealty to the silly subject matter makes for a better, more specific song, and makes its insistent kitsch all the more memorable. The song descends into a kind of marketing madness:
O.K., we got it, gold. No one was more on brand than Shirley Bassey, and as far as Bond songs go, nobody did it better.
