I've noted before that sometimes songs move me deeply.

It's happened again.

This time, it's Shelley Duvall's version of Harry Nilsson's "He Needs Me," from the soundtrack of Robert Altman's Popeye.

The song plays extensively in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, which I saw in a midnight screening last night. It's a moving, puzzling film, and the use of a song is a masterstroke.

(Typically of a midnight campus screening, someone vomited right behind me.)

This morning I dusted off my Popeye soundtrack--I'm a major Altman fan and a minor but appreciative Nilsson fan from way back--and played the Duvall aria.

And it moved me.