Review: '20 Feet From Stardom'

When you listen to a great song what do you pay attention to? Who gets most of the credit? Usually it’s the lead singer, the person pushed into your face. The one factor that is constant is the background singers.  As times goes on with technology encroaching on the old ways of recording music, with singers even doing their own background vocals on records it’s a good time for the film 20 Feet from Stardom to come out. 20 Feet from Stardom takes a look at the people who brings the songs together with their melody and harmony. Through following a few back-up singers from over the decades it paints a picture of part of the world of music that most don’t know or pay attention to when they listen to a song or go to a concert.

20 Feet from Stardomfollows six singers all each from different eras. It begins with the stories of Darlene Love and Merry Clayton and their stories of how they got into the business of doing background vocals. As it goes on the film then adds Claudia Lennear and Tata Vega then later on Lisa Fischer and Judith Hill. While interviewing them the film also has interviews with some big name artists like Sting, Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen to speak on their feelings on background singers and what they bring to the table and their history with some of the people featured within the film. The film of course ends with more of how each of the singers are doing now and bring them all together in a studio to sing together.

Morgan Neville is experienced in making films about musicians and really outdoes himself here. The pacing of the film is excellent and completely draws you in to each singer’s story by placing the singers in a way that shows what time period or era they really came into success in. The film also has a way presenting each singer as a familiar character type. Darlene Love is like the one that got screwed out of stardom by the big time producer. Lisa Fischer is the one who at the moment of becoming the solo star decided to stay a background singer and so on.

One thing that this film falls into and it might not be totally its fault is the weird media push of the young singer Judith Hill. She’s on the poster and even though she isn’t brought into the film until around the middle of it she is shown a lot. This along with her being on NBC's The Voice this past season it just feels like it’s part of a plan to push this idea that she NEEDS to be a success. Even though she is talented I don’t know if making her the face is that fair to the others in the film. That being said her story does add to the film well in showing how things are now compared to how they were for background singing.

20 Feet from Stardom is seriously one of the best documentaries you’ll see this year. It’s also one of the best music documentaries to come out in past few years and it’s great that this is coming out in theaters instead of being a Rock Doc on Vh1. This is hopefully people will go out and see while it’s in theaters.