(Credits: Far Out / Tom Hanks / Publicity)
Sat 20 December 2025 17:30, UK
For Tom Hanks, the medium of film and music has always gone hand in hand.
There’s no doubt that he can make nearly any silver screen come alive, no matter what character he’s playing, but a lot of his finest performances have also been informed by the music at play, whether that was the breathtaking John Williams scores in Steven Spielberg’s greatest films or the batshit insane performance that he gave as Colonel Tom Parker in Elvis. But his taste always delved far deeper than the sounds of rock and roll.
Then again, you wouldn’t find a better disciple of classic rock than Hanks in Hollywood. He was always fascinated by what made The Beatles’ material sound so great when he first heard them, and he was more than happy to show up at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when he heard that The Dave Clark Five were being inducted. But back then, rock and roll was only one facet of what people listened to.
Long before the age of streaming, the music world didn’t need to be as homogenised, and while MTV definitely catered to specific genres of music every time they played videos, Hanks came from a world where he could discover a new genre of music every single time he turned on the radio. There would be rock, funk, and even folk music, but there was no other institution that could possibly compare with Motown.
The British invasion set a lot of bands to the top once the 1960s got underway, but when listening to Motown, everyone knew that they were listening to a musical juggernaut. Every single band that came out of Hitsville had to have a great track record from the word ‘go’, and whether it was listening to the sound of the Temptations or Stevie Wonder’s first records, Hanks was always there to hear what the soulful side of music had to offer.
But when looking at his personal record collection, nothing compared to hearing ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, saying, “Radio had everything on one channel, so you heard everything from Dusty Springfield to Johnny Cash to The Rolling Stones to Vince Guaraldi. From Motown alone, [my favourite is] ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’. But you do not want to hear this white boy from Oakland singing Motown.”
While Hanks doesn’t go into detail about which version of the song was his favourite, does he really need to? The best Motown acts could always borrow from each other, and when listening to this tender tune about heartache and learning that the love of your life is seeing someone else, it’s not exactly difficult for anyone to knock it out of the park as long as they put the right passion behind it.
Still, it’s impossible to think of the tune without Marvin Gaye’s version from the mid-1960s. This may have been before Gaye became interested in making message songs and going against the wishes of Berry Gordy, but if you listen to his voice on the track, you can hear his influence on everyone from Prince to D’Angelo from the way that he bends into the notes and effortlessly goes into falsetto during those high sections.
And despite many artists trying their hand at making the song their own, there’s no way to accurately turn ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ into a rock and roll tune. No disrespect meant to CCR in any way, but when you put an electric guitar behind that backbeat, it loses all the sense of swagger that it once had.
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