Scarlett Johansson Covers Jeff Buckley For "He's Just Not That Into You" Soundtrack

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Scarlett Johansson the budding rocker is back with a new cover, this time taking on Jeff Buckley for the He's Just Not That Into You soundtrack. Surprisingly, despite Johansson's desire to cover Leonard Cohen after last year's Tom Waits-inspired Anywhere I Lay My Head, the actress opted not to rerecord the Buckley-via-Cohen hit "Hallelujah," but instead to cover Buckley's own "Last Goodbye" (listen to it here via Stereogum). Whereas Johansson's vocals were often obscured by producer Dave Sitek's all-star production work on Anywhere, this time around Johansson's vocal cords are in the forefront as she croons over a sparse piano. While it's not nearly as beautiful as Buckley's original version, we don't hate it nearly as much as other music blogs seem to.

In other news, this He's Just Not That Into You soundtrack is somehow actually pretty decent. In addition of the Johansson, who's also in the film, the soundtrack features My Morning Jacket's "I'm Amazed," Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)," the Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait," plus tracks from Wilco, R.E.M., the Cure and a whole bunch of other artists we couldn't imagine affiliating themselves with a movie we absolutely have no desire to see. The soundtrack hits stores February 3rd, the film hits theaters February 6th.

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• Scarlett Johansson Album Available Online; Read the Review

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Song Stories

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Fishbone | 1985

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.

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