Introduction

I started my deep dive into music fandom in the mid-90s.  Because I was still young and without steady employment, I had to be very judicious how I spent those precious few dollars.  I needed musical bang for my buck so I would usually skip buying soundtracks since it seemed like a lot of soundtracks only had a track or two worth listening to.  While this isn't the best example, I asked a friend in middle school to dub a copy of the Batman Forever Soundtrack onto a blank cassette for me so I could hear the, at the time unreleased, Sunny Day Real Estate song.  No, I didn't care that U2 had a brand new song on there, I wanted the Sunny Day Real Estate song.  Obviously, we can all agree that "Kiss from a Rose" is the real winner but that's how my brain worked in 1995.

Back then, the notation "previously unreleased" was like a drug to me and I was definitely addicted.  I wanted to hear every song that all my favorite bands recorded.  Sure Rushmore had a great soundtrack and score, but did it have any unreleased Pavement?  I was much more interested in hunting down new songs which is probably why I feel like the best rock soundtrack of the last 25 or so years (non-Hedwig and the Angry Inch division) is Romeo and Juliet and not Guardians of the Galaxy.

When Napster arrived, I was able to dive into any soundtrack that I'd ever been interested in without any repercussions.  I could listen to that one song from that one soundtrack from that one movie that I never bothered to see.  I could now hear every throwaway or hidden treasure that my favorite bands released.  I even learned of some new bands on the way.  Combined with having high speed internet, it was the greatest year to be a freshman in college.

Recently, someone mentioned some facts about Meet the Deedles and how it's accompanying  soundtrack is all ska. I corrected them that the soundtrack was not in fact all ska, not because it was important to me, but because I was excited to present the only fact that I knew about this movie.  There weren't a flood of memories coming back to me, but just a single memory about one song.  In fact, I didn't even check if this was the only non-ska song, it didn't matter.

It did make me think about all the other soundtracks that I listened to during my high school and college years and how cobbled together a lot of them seemed. Obviously, this doesn't apply to the standard soundtrack: the film score with the occasional pop song to play over the credits.  I'm talking about the soundtrack with a bunch of artists who contribute songs, some unreleased and some not, some written for the movie and others taken from the b-sides vault. They're a weird marriage of the film and music industry that's supposed to be mutually beneficial.   Sometimes, you get Romeo and Juliet where it even works as a great standalone album and sometimes you get the Empire Records Soundtrack that had that really good Gin Blossoms song and briefly relaunched Edwyn Collins' career while briefly doing nothing for Liv Tyler's.

Sometimes songs can even transcend the movie.  I don't know a lot of people that re-watch The Bodyguard or Titanic on a regular basis, but when those big ballads from Whitney (courtesy of Dolly) or Celine play at a department store, everyone knows what movie those songs came from.  That god damn Simple Minds song from The Breakfast Club not only bookends one of my favorite Futurama episodes but it also resolves both the A and B plots of Pitch Perfect, which now that I write this out, sounds like a result of lazy screenwriting.

It would be a dream of mine to be a soundtrack coordinator for a film since that would be the perfect intersection of my 2 passions.  Clearly, there's more nuance to the job than picking the best song for a scene and I'm sure the process is both fascinating and frustrating. Who decides whether they should get an artist to record original songs for the soundtrack?  Who decided that rap artists and rock artists should collaborate for the entire Judgement Night Soundtrack?

I'll be exploring some lesser known soundtracks, lesser known than Judgement Night even, not to re-evaluate them as some sort of hidden masterpiece, but because they all have left some sort on indelible impression on me over the years.  The world doesn't need another think piece on the brilliance of Purple Rain, but it might need a think piece on how out of place it would be for a hypothetical Prince (RIP) to score and soundtrack a whole Batman movie or any superhero movie in the present day.

Like I've mentioned, these soundtracks can be strange beasts. This doesn't even take into account soundtracks that have songs from the movie and songs "influenced by the movie".  I'll try to keep from diving too deep into the business side of things unless it actually adds to the mystique of these albums.  Perhaps, it'll explain some of these one-off collaborations like Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, the lead guitarist from Incubus, Pharrell and Hans Zimmer making a song for The Amazing Spiderman 2 (Andrew Garfield edition). It may or may not, but I'm excited to find out.

It only seems fitting that I start with the confusing album that sparked this project in the first place.  Chapter 1: Meet the Deedles.  Enjoy.