In Hollywood, Nina Simone’s Always “Feeling Good”

Not long after Nina Simone’s death in 2003, critic Dave Marsh wrote a new foreword for her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You (1991). In it, he concluded that the renowned singer-songwriter “hadn’t made an important record or written a well-known song since the early 1970s, so in a sense her absence will not be widely felt.”

Such a brusque assessment of her legacy is difficult to fathom. In the spiritual sense at least, if you’ve consumed any bit of popular culture made in the last three decades, she’s not been missing at all. At any given moment, the sound and soul of her voice might slip its way into a film or TV episode to mark a pivotal point in a character’s arc, or to buttress a slick montage, or merely to situate the audience in a particular far-off place and time. Sometimes she’s front and center, as the temporary messenger of an emotional beat; other times she’s just kind of lingering there underneath the action, a faint yet unmistakable echo.

Her omnipresence isn’t quite at The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” level yet—though it is teetering on cliché and runs the risk of flattening Simone’s artistry. IMDb is an imperfect source, but it’s useful for putting into context the breadth of her influence on modern filmmaking in the post–Quentin Tarantino needle-drop era. There she’s credited as appearing on over 300 soundtracks, more than a third of which are from within the last decade. A whole lot of those appearances are in the form of one song in particular: her lush, flittering 1965 recording of “Feeling Good.”

In 2024 alone, no less than three prominent on-screen narratives turned to “Feeling Good” for dramatic effect. Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), an embittered, terminally ill hospice care resident in the apocalyptic thriller A Quiet Place: Day One (2024), is suddenly faced with a more immediate mortal threat upon the invasion of deadly extraterrestrials with ultrasonic hearing. The movie’s final shot is of Sam, having finally made peace with her past and future, going out on her own terms. She wanders out into the open, desolate streets of New York City carrying a small boombox with earbuds plugged in, and through those tiny speakers you can make out the familiar sound of Simone:

Birds flying hi-igh, you know how I fe-el . . .

Natasha Rothwell’s comedy series How to Die Alone’s season 1 finale sees its messy protagonist Melissa, a 35-year-old airport employee, finally conquer her debilitating fear of flying and receive life-changing news: she’s received a $17,000 settlement for a near-death experience involving a poorly constructed piece of furniture. The excitement of this unexpected good fortune, coupled with the strides she’s made in her life, are too overwhelming to be contained in straightforwardly dramatic fashion.

Suddenly the screen’s color shifts to a black-and-white, old-timey filter, and Melissa looks up from her phone and directly into the camera, only to begin singing:

Birds flying hi-igh, you know how I fe-el / Sun in the sk-y-y, you know how I feel . . .

Melissa breaks out into an ebullient, humorous musical number. Rothwell is singing here, but Simone’s “Feeling Good” is obviously the reference point. (It’s heard during the episode’s end credits.)

And then there’s Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023), a days-in-the-life drama about mild-mannered Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), who diligently cleans Tokyo’s public restrooms for a living. The final scene finds him starting his day like any other, driving to get to work. Except he’s changed since the movie began, haunted by a brief, devastating reunion with his estranged sister and moved by an encounter the evening prior with a stranger who’s terminally ill. Now in the van, he pops one of his beloved cassette tapes into the player and there’s Nina, again conjured:

Birds flying hi-igh, you know how I fe-el / Sun in the sk-y-y, you know how I feel / Breeze driftin’ on by, you know how I feel . . . 

Three unique protagonists existing in vastly different points of life, and yet they all derive comfort from the same expression of Nina. What is it about her, and about this song?

Simone’s appeal as a cinematic reference is complex. Most boringly and cynically, it can be a shrewd creative decision born of industry trends and increasingly uninspired, nostalgia-fueled filmmaking choices; the ecosystem is such that studios and record companies alike are constantly angling for the next “Running Up That Hill” viral moment.

But then there’s Simone herself, a Southerner at her roots, born Eunice Waymon in Tyron, North Carolina, nearly a century ago—and that unmistakable contralto that can communicate strength, triumph, wit, and vulnerability, often all within one verse, and buoyed by the intricate, masterful arrangements of her songs. With “Feeling Good,” she sings of a renewed sense of purpose—of a new day, a new dawn, a new life—perfect for mapping onto a character who’s just turned a promising corner in their self-actualization. Her phrasing’s balmy and wistful, and at the song’s very start—the section nearly every film or show that references it homes in on, if nothing else—it’s bare and unaccompanied. This allows filmmakers to slip Simone’s voice smoothly into the character’s journey, like an internal monologue. Softer than a needle drop, it’s a needle landing.

And of course, Simone’s dulcet tone gives way to that booming orchestra, which struts in like a marching band—the horns, the cymbals a shot of victorious adrenaline. In A Quiet Place, the drop lands just after Sam pulls the headphones out of the boom box and at the same time as a giant preying alien drops down from the sky behind her, ready to pounce. The credits roll—Sam’s “new day” is a dignified demise.

“Nina Simone has an inbuilt melancholy in her voice, and it comes across in that song,” Nyong’o has said of the movie’s ending. “It’s in complete contrast to what she’s saying—the words are ‘And I’m feeling good.’ I think it treads that fine line between a cry of grief and euphoria somehow.”

That kind of dramatic power can be understandably difficult to resist. Simone nestles within a vast lineage of Black female vocalists who, as scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin has put it, are “capable of casting spells. It is certainly a voice concerned with its connection to the world of the spirit, its ability to invoke the presence of the divine.”

Griffin also observes how that bewitching power as harnessed by Simone and her peers has frequently been called upon and received by listeners of all ethnicities and backgrounds, especially in the wake of tragic national events: “Black women’s voices not only soothed white children with lullabies but also healed, nurtured, sustained black people.”

This duality carries into pop culture’s recurring repurposing, distillation, and commodification of Simone’s voice for characters and filmmakers of all kinds, from Bridget Fonda’s drug addict-turned-government assassin in the 1993 film Point of No Return to Pierce Brosnan’s rich thief in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) and beyond. 

For its part, “Feeling Good” is a malleable mid-century standard, lyrically broad enough to resonate with anyone, but capable of slipping into a deeper reading—more gendered and racialized—as delivered by Simone. And in fact, its origins are directly tied to Blackness, though its writers, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, were white. 

The song first appeared in the stage musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd (1964), a parable of the British class system in which the two white main characters, Sir and Cocky, play a rigged game of life. Sir (“the have”) is always changing the rules and keeps winning, while Cocky (“the have-not”) plays by the rules and always loses. In the second act, a character named the Negro suddenly appears, joining in on the game. Despite being more disadvantaged than Cocky because of his race, he manages to win because, as he makes his way around the game board, Sir and Cocky are too busy arguing with one another to prevent him from advancing. His triumph leads the Negro to sing “Feeling Good,” transforming the song into an anthem of resilience in the face of bigotry.  

Simone’s version of “Feeling Good” sits atop her most-played songs on Spotify, with nearly half a billion streams, likely in huge part because of its prolific deployment on-screen. It’s worth observing that her more specific and pointedly political songs like 1964’s “Mississippi Goddam,” written in response to the murder of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers and the deadly bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, are rarely called upon in the narrative space. On the other hand, recordings like “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” which she dubbed one of the “slightest” in her oeuvre, are returned to again and again. (Documentaries are the exception. Last year’s stunning experimental film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat makes excellent use of her inextricably entwined politics and artistry through her cover of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown.”)

The question arises: is Nina’s spirit trapped in mixtape purgatory, doomed to be reduced to “feeling good” at the expense of all other facets of her artistic legacy? There’s a case to be made that as she maintains a spell on the cultural imagination, she’s also been a little defanged in the process. In this era of meme-ification, a performer’s work is reduced to the disjointed form of a 30-second scene. The songs, regardless of their stand-alone eminence, begin to register as obvious cues and sonic wallpaper, placeholders for emotional depth in the storytelling or for the actors on-screen.

Still, the joy of art can be in how it builds from what existed before it. Simone of all people understood this deeply, as someone who frequently quoted other genres—classical, Christmas carols, spirituals—in her work.

Which is why, even as her collective summoning by filmmakers and music supervisors begins to feel too obvious or too safe, a well-executed exception can still satisfy. Wenders’ Perfect Days doesn’t just excerpt a verse of “Feeling Good,” but it presents the whole beautiful thing from start to finish, almost three minutes uninterrupted. The director has said that the “Feeling Good” lyrics were used to summarize the film in the script’s earliest drafts; eventually, he decided it needed to be in the final version. “They described how I imagined this character, his philosophy, and his way of living,” he told A.frame. “They were my prologue. It was only in the end that I realized they were the best way to end the film.” 

In a long, uncut take, he frames the character Hirayama’s face in close-up as he drives his van, the reflection of the city’s passing landscape washing over him through the windshield. The old man says nothing, but his eyes cycle through a range of emotions that Simone’s performance reflects—joy, sadness, wonder, grief, relief, optimism. It’s as if she’s singing to him, not just for him, and both are fully present.