Matthew McConaughey once took an elaborate, multi-day trip to Niafunké in Mali on a hunt for Ali Farka Touré, the blues musician behind one of his all-time favorite songs, “Ai Du.” He didn’t exactly know where to find the artist. His journey to Africa only began because it came to him in a dream after he first heard the song.
“I got the liner notes, found out he was from Niafunké, on the Niger River, and knowing nothing else, I said, ‘Well, that’s where I’m going, and I won’t get a return ticket,’” McConaughey tells Rolling Stone while sitting down to discuss the songs that have defined his life. “I hitched a nine-hour ride to Mopti. Met somebody with a boat. We did a two-day trip up the Niger River to Niafunké, where I went to town, and we were looking for Ali. Hours and hours and hours. I’m finding Ali.”
To make a long story long, McConaughey finally finds Ali, but forgets the name of the song. “Sometimes you travel and you lose a sense of space and time and memory,” he says. “I forgot the damn name of the song. I love the song. I knew it was ‘Ai Du,’ and I’m sitting there not remembering the name of the song. Anyway, he gets up with a VHS and through translation, he goes, ‘I want you to listen to this song of me in concert. I stopped the rain this night.’ He put a VHS in. It was a concert he was playing in France, and it was this song.” He remembers it as “the most important trip I’ve taken in my life.”
McConaughey has deep memories tied to most of his selections, like when he played “Shout” by Tears for Fears in the car with his dad and was surprised to see him crank up the volume: “I remember as a young boy going, ‘My dad just turned up one of my tunes.’” His brother, Pat, is the root of his love for Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses,” and AC/DC’s “Beating Around the Bush.”
Some other picks simply remind him of the big screen. When he hears Steve Miller Band‘s “Take the Money and Run,” he thinks of Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona. “Great song for kicking off summer or a good night, where you just chuck the morals out and let go. Let’s just go pull some shit off. Two young lovers, nothing better to do,” McConaughey says. “My favorite comedy is Raising Arizona. Nicolas Cage, his wife in there, they’re all about, ‘We gotta go steal some diapers because we got a new baby.’ It’s like beautiful, comedic, small-time crimes.”
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McConaughey has lived as many lives on-screen as he has off. Th eRattle and Hum version of U2‘s “Silver and Gold,” he says, “got me through my year in Australia when I was an exchange student, two weeks out of high school, and I was living with a family in the middle of nowhere.” Rattle and Hum, in general, came at a time when McConaughey was “very, very strongly considering becoming a monk.”
Needless to say, McConaughey will follow his favorite songs to the ends of the Earth.
