Phofo: Light That Menorah
[Here’s Phofo’s website where you can hire him to write music for your TV show, film or commercial]
We’ve occasionally dipped our toes into the shallow pool that is Hanukkah music here at SMM, in part, because as I noted last year, it hasn’t really inspired much good music. Confronting our new theme of Strange or Weird Holiday music, though, I found a contender, “Light That Menorah,” by Phofo, which fits the theme, even if it still isn’t a great holiday song.
In fact, other than the title, it is kind of difficult to tell that it is a Hanukkah song at all. It starts out as an electronic instrumental tune that sort of chugs along, until about a minute or so in, when some distorted vocals, buried in the mix, may be saying “light that menorah.” Or maybe not. At almost 2 minutes in, we get a bit of klezmer sounding music, and some more of the distorted vocals. A snatch more klezmer follows. It then rocks for a little while and then sort of peters out, like a dreidel before it stops spinning. It is, to my ears, more than a little weird.
But certainly interesting. There’s no “album cover” to use as the featured picture for this post, so, instead, in keeping with our theme, I used a picture of a Strange and Weird Menorah.
The song is credited to Phofo, and using my strong Google skills, I determined that Phofo is a composer who has written the score for Disney's Club Penguin, Sushi Pack (a Saturday morning cartoon on CBS), the animated feature film, Los Campeones de La Lucha Libre and Shep & Tiffany Watch TV (which was on Bravo). He is also a producer, has written for McSweeney’s and was a music consultant to PRI's This American Life.
But who is Phofo? That took a bit more work on the Google Machine. Turns out, he is a lawyer named Adam Weitz. Some of you may know that I, J. David, am also a lawyer, and that I blog as a creative outlet. Weitz also has a creative sidelight to his lawyer work, but he gets paid for it (presumably).
And that makes me jealous.