Critic's Choice Awards: Radiohead Guitarist Wins Critics Choice Best Score, Vedder Leaves Empty-Handed (But Probably Got a Good Swag Bag)

If and when Radiohead plays Los Angeles, guitarist Jonny Greenwood should schedule in a visit to Snoop Dogg's mansion. At last night's picket-free Critics Choice Awards, after Greenwood's absentee Best Score win for his work on Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, Snoop Dogg (with co-presenter Feist at his side) alerted the audience that "Jonny Greenwood couldn't be here tonight, so we accept this award on his behalf." We can already see Snoop using the crystalline-monolithic award as a paperweight for his rolling papers. One noteworthy artist who managed to attend the ceremony was Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, who was nominated for Best Song for "Guaranteed," from Sean Penn's Into The Wild. Sadly, Vedder lost out to Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova's "Falling Slowly" (from Once). Either way, both Vedder and Greenwood can expect to be invited to many ceremonies during this year's awards season, with Vedder already having been nominated for Golden Globes for Best Original Score and Best Song for his Into The Wild contributions.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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