Jon Favreau describes what happens when Bill Murray walks into a bar

Carl Court / Getty-AFP

Nick Cave has been singing about mortality for decades, and he's really good at it. Whether the narratives are biblical or pulpy, the victims innocents or death row convicts, the circumstances comprehensible or cruelly random, Cave's songs are on intimate terms with the infinite ways a life can be extinguished. And yet, "Skeleton Tree", his latest album with his estimable band, the Bad Seeds, is a relatively concise song cycle shadowed by death that feels different than all the rest. Read the full review.

Jordan Strauss / AP

"Blonde" is a critique of materialism with Frank Ocean employing two distinct voices, like characters in a play, a recurring theme throughout the album and perhaps its finest sonic achievement. A party spirals out of control, the music rich but low key, a melange of organ and hovering synthesizers. Ocean uses distorting devices on his voice to add emotional texture and to enhance and sharpen the characters he briefly embodies. The upshot: They're all little slices of Ocean's personality with a role to play and they each sound distinct. Read the full review.

Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune

Warpaint's unerring feel for gauzy hooks and slinky arrangements germinated over a decade and flourished on the quartet's excellent 2014 self-titled album. But the band has always nudged its arrangements onto the dance floor — subtly on record, more overtly on stage — and "Heads Up" (Rough Trade) gives the group's inner disco ball a few extra spins. Read the review.

Not many albums could survive Ed Sheeran performing reggae, but Pharrell Williams always took chances — not all of them successful — in N.E.R.D.Despite the Sheeran gaffe, "No One Ever Really Dies," the band's first album in seven years, is a typically diverse, trippy ride from the group that established Williams' career as a performer in the early 2000s alongside Chad Hugo and Shay Haley. Read the full review.

Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune

"Black America Again" (ARTium/Def Jam) arrives as a one of the year's most potent protest albums. The album sags midway through with a handful of lightweight love songs, but finishes with some of its most emotionally resounding tracks: the "Glory"-like plea for redemption "Rain" with Legend, the celebration of family that is "Little Chicago Boy," and the staggering "Letter to the Free." Read the review.

"Love & Hate" shows Kiwanuka breaking out of that stylistic box. His core remains intact: a grainy, world-weary voice contemplating troubled times in intimate musical settings. The album announces its more ambitious intentions from the outset, with the trembling strings, episodic piano chords and wordless vocals of the 10-minute "Cold Little Heart." It's a striking, if atypical, approach to reintroducing himself to his audience — a five-minute preamble before Kiwanuka begins to sing. Read the full review.

Matt Kennedy / AP

Washington D.C. power brokers Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) and Lynne Cheney have a date with destiny in Adam McKay's "Vice," co-starring Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. Read the review. Nomainted for: Best Picture, Best Actor for Christian Bale, Best Supporting Actor for Sam Rockwell, Best Supporting Actress for Amy Adams, Best Director for Adam McKay, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing,

Atsushi Nishijima / AP

Queen Anne's (Olivia Colman) court wrestles with the question of how to finance a war with France. Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), the Duchess of Marlborough, uses her wits, her body and the queen's bed to coerce Anne into raising taxes on the citizenry in order to keep the off-screen battle going. Then the unexpected arrival of her country cousin, Abigail (Emma Stone), a noblewoman fallen on hard times. A dab hand with medicinal herbs, Abigail quickly rises above servant status to become the queen's new favorite. Game on! Read the review. Nomainted for: Best Picture, Best Actress for Olivia Colman, Best Supporting Actress for Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, Best Director for Yorgos Lanthimos, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design,

"Peace Trail" — Neil Young's second album this year and sixth since 2014 — is occasionally fascinating. It's also not very good, a release that surely would've benefited from a bit more time and consideration, which might have given Young's ad hoc band — drummer Jim Keltner and bassist Paul Bushnell — a chance to actually learn the songs. But the four-day recording session sounds like a getting-to-know-you warmup instead of a finished product. Read the full review.

Ross Gilmore / Redferns via Getty Images

On "Here" (Merge), the band's first album in six years and 10th overall, the front line of Norman Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley once again trades songs (four each) and lead vocals, over sturdily constructed pop-rock arrangements. But the band has taken some subtle evolutionary turns to where it's now a faint shadow of its "Bandwagonesque" incarnation. Read the review.

NBC

Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo" (GOOD/Def Jam) sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished album. It's a mess, more a series of marketing opportunities in which West changed the album title and the track listing multiple times, to the point where the very thing that made West tolerable despite a penchant for tripping over his own ego — the music itself — became anti-climactic. Read the review.

Carl Court / Getty-AFP

1 of 76

Expand

By Tracy Swartz

PUBLISHED: April 22, 2016 at 12:42 PM CDT | UPDATED: December 18, 2018 at 12:02 AM CST

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Bill Murray’s advice to “The Jungle Book” director Jon Favreau? Get a theme song.

During Wednesday’s episode of “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” Favreau recalled a trip to New Orleans with Murray to record music for “The Jungle Book.” Murray voices the bear Baloo.

Favreau said he and Murray hit up a few New Orleans spots, including a club with a brass band.

“In the middle of the song, when they saw it was Bill Murray, they stopped and just burst into ‘Ghostbusters,’ and it was the best. The whole room lit up and he loved it. And he leaned in to me and he says, ‘Jon, you really need a theme song,'” Favreau said.

Favreau, who lived in Chicago for four years as he trained in improv, said Murray’s comedy influenced his career path. Murray, who grew up in Wilmette, is a Second City alumnus.

“Part of the reason I moved to Chicago from New York was because I wanted to study improvisational comedy. I grew up watching ‘Meatballs’ and ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Ghostbusters,’ and I’ve been trying to work with him for a long time,” Favreau said.

“The Jungle Book” hit theaters Friday. “The Late Late Show” airs 11:37 p.m. weeknights on CBS.

.galleries:after {
content: ”;
display: block;
background-color: #144A7C;
margin: 16px auto 0;
height: 5px;
width: 100px;

}
.galleries:before {
content: “Entertainment Photos and Video”;
display: block;
font: 700 20px Georgia,serif;
text-align: center;
color: #1e1e1e;

var playlist = ‘chi_ent_movie_trailers’,
layout = ‘autoblurb’,
iu = ‘%2F4011%2Ftrb.chicagotribune%2Fent’;

Watch the latest movie trailers.

Jon Favreau describes what happens when Bill Murray walks into a bar

More in Entertainment

Whiting’s Pierogi Fest returns BP sponsorship money

Review: No simple lessons in the moving musical ‘Suffs,’ now in Chicago

After months of vandalism, North Center building gives way to new mural

Bonnie Tyler, who topped the charts with epic ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,’ has died at 75

Share this:

More in Entertainment