'That song grates on me': 'Flora and Son' director has no patience for 'bad music'

In musical dramas like “Once,” “Begin Again” and “Sing Street,” Irish director John Carney features people making connections through (usually) good music. He has no patience for bad songs, however, and that comes across in his movies.

In “Sing Street,” an older brother gives his sibling a life lesson: “No woman can truly love a man who listens to Phil Collins.” And in Carney’s latest movie “Flora and Son” (streaming Friday on Apple TV+), James Blunt becomes the target of a musician’s ire.

Eve Hewson, daughter of U2 frontman Bono, plays the title character, a Dublin single mom who finds a guitar in the trash and gives it to her rebellious teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan) to keep him out of trouble with the law. He’s not interested so she takes it up, signing up for Zoom lessons with LA singer-songwriter Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). In one of their first chats, Jeff asks Flora what her all-time favorite song is, and is aggrieved to hear it’s Blunt’s chart-topping “You’re Beautiful.”

“Lyrics need to be more than just ‘You’re beautiful’ or some series of platitudes for lonely women trying to make them feel better about themselves,” Jeff tells Flora. “That’s not a love song, that’s a self-help group.” (Blunt's probably crafting a witty response on his viral X feed, but USA TODAY reached out for comment in the meantime.)

In real life, Carney’s musical opinions are just as, well, blunt. “I row and argue a lot about music with people, and I'm quite opinionated and a bit intolerant probably,” he says. “It frustrates me: My wife will play bad music around the house, and I'll be like, ‘How are you doing that?’ And she's like, ‘Because it's my choice,’ and I'm like, ‘But it's offending me.’ ”

What gets on his nerves most: “Simplistic, simple-minded and derivative music.” “You’re Beautiful” makes that list – “I’m sure (Blunt) is a very nice guy, but that song grates on me," Carney says – as do "childish jingles" and “hooky ukulele (stuff) that adults are listening to. If this was a children's entertainer in the ‘80s, you'd feel sorry for them, and now they're No. 1.

“You can see that I'm a pain.”

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“Flora and Son” originated as an idea Carney had about “this wild sort of slightly unpredictable, volatile female character” and a narrative that was more about familial relationships than romance, as Flora and Max eventually bonded through their musical interests and started writing a song together.

Carney teamed with Scottish musician Gary Clark for the 1980s anthems of “Sing Street” and they also collaborated on the original “Flora” tunes, which have more of a hip-hop/modern pop flavor. (“High Life” will be submitted for the original song Oscar, a category won by “Falling Slowly” from Carney’s 2007 breakthrough “Once.") “You're trying to make three minutes of magic and you're trying to change people,” Carney says. However, “I’m not a professional songwriter firstly, so I'm a hobbyist."

Carney spotlights one of his personal all-timers on screen: Jeff recommends Flora watch a Joni Mitchell performance of “Both Sides Now” on YouTube. When it starts, Flora’s partly listening while doing dishes but by the time it ends, she’s enraptured in front of her laptop screen and crying.

The last song to touch Carney that way? Rufus Wainwright’s “Dinner at Eight.”

“That kind of hit me at that level of like, ‘Oh, yes, this is what songs can do.’ They're complex things about fathers and guilt but beautiful and melodically so different from the lyric,” Carney says. “Movies can be many things to many people and I guess songs can be many things to many people, but I just don't understand why you would take anything less when you can have something so good?

"Why would you have a hamburger when somebody put a filet steak with a glass of red wine in front of you? Bad music is not nourishing or good for you. ‘Dinner at Eight' by Rufus Wainwright is nourishing and good for you. That's just a fact.”