Making 'Tracks

In 1991, the soundtrack to The Bodyguard had a long multi-week run atop Billboard's album chart, proving what years of successful soundtrack singles had yet to demonstrate--that a soundtrack album could also be a hit record. Since then, soundtracks have become abundant and heavily-marketed commodities. Still, most either comprise pre-existing hits or fail to yield many successful songs, and are incapable of being considered as a whole album. Nonetheless, over the past few years a number of innovative artists have taken a different approach to the soundtrack boom with individual artists creating entire soundtracks for films. Often commissioned by the film's directors because of some musical quality commensurate with the film, these artists are able to create appropriate and innovative concept albums with near-guaranteed mass appeal, enhancing their own success and that of the film.

Consider Badly Drawn Boy's work on the 2002 film, About a Boy.

Composing both the score and a series of original songs for the movie, Badly Drawn Boy, aka Damon Gough, was heavily praised by the music press for producing a soundtrack that could stand alone as an album. This acclaim, along with being featured in a high-profile, commercially and critically successful film, may have increased the public's awareness of Badly Drawn Boy and the size of the audience for his 2003 album, Have You Fed the Fish?. More importantly, About a Boy offered the opportunity for a creative diversion following the success of his 2000 album, The Hour of the Bewilderbeast, which also won that year's Mercury Music Prize. The cinematic nature of the effort allowed him to use strings, woodwinds and other orchestral elements on what was only his second album. Perhaps more importantly though, Gough's folksy, melodic and subtly emotional songs, characteristic of his sound, provide an ideal accompaniment for the gradual emotional development of the film.

While Gough's soundtrack gave him the opportunity to showcase his talents for a wider audience, the electronic, dance artist BT has attempted to use his frequent film scores to highlight his more accomplished musical background. Perceived as simply a dance artist, the classically-trained Brian Transeau struggled to convince fellow film composers and music supervisors to allow him to use orchestral elements. But ultimately he was able to incorporate string sections and small orchestrations into the scores of Driven and The Fast and the Furious. While his first foray into the genre was composing music for the appropriately underground-dance-scene-centric film, Go, more recently he completed the score for Monster, using the textured, ambient instrumentation of that effort to articulate the emotions of the film and demonstrate his own musical talents.

Similarly, Jonny Greenwood has used his work on the score for Bodysong, a British documentary that illustrates the "experience of being human" to reveal his multi-instrumentalist talents and diverse influences, allowing the Radiohead guitarist to distinguish himself as an artist in his own right. Greenwood, like BT and Damon Gough have chosen films that allow them to showcase their artistic talents, offering them the challenge and exposure of working in a different medium.