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This is a thread brought entirely on by my own anticipation of the next Dark Tower book, but it does bring up an interesting subject.
I don't know how to put this, exactly... If you were going to make a movie of one of your favorite books, what soundtrack would most suit the mood and atmosphere? Or, what music makes you think of certain works of literature?
To me, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis by Ralph Vaughn Williams is PERFECT for the Dark Tower. I can just see Roland striding across the apotheosis of all deserts to that music.
The original Requiem for a Dream music would be good for Neverwhere. I didn't like how they used that for the Two Towers. Too modern for my liking. But here, it'd be great. It's haunting in just the right way. The Mediaeval Baebes would work too. Really, I only think of the Requiem for a Dream song for the trailer... If one should ever exist, and should I direct it.
"Duncan" by Paul Simon would fantasic for American Gods. It has a sense of desperate, vagrant spiritualism that matches the novel tit for tat.
That's about all for now... I know there's something that I match Faure's Pavane to, but I just can't think of it now.
Posts: 2258 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Orgy usually goes quite well with Asimov, Brave New World, or any other number of science fictiony type books. Posts: 9057 | Registered: Nov 2000
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The Oh Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack was great. But it wasn't country. It was bluegrass.
On a related note, when I was in about 8th grade I was re-reading Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper. There's a scene in which a kid is being chased through town by some bad guys. I was listening to the song "South Side of the Sky" by Yes (from the Fragile album), and the song fit so perfectly with the scene that I've never heard that song again these last 15 years without thinking of it as the soundtrack to Over Sea, Under Stone.
I've always wanted to make a movie and use the album The City by Vangelis as the soundtrack. I don't know what the movie would be about. But that's the best potential soundtrack album I've ever heard. A movie built around it would have a much easier time being brilliant. It's sad that none of his actual soundtracks have ever been quite as good.
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I think the main difference is that Bluegrass music is still cool. It hasn't spent the last 30 years being totally screwed up by the likes of Toby Keith, The Oak Ridge Boys and Shaniah Twain.
Country music seems to have suffered the same fate as R&B. I can't believe that Ray Charles is classified in the same genre as TLC.
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Well, I agree that both country and R&B have gone down the toilet, I just don't think country was very far off the rim as it was. Posts: 4229 | Registered: Dec 2002
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The difference between country music and bluegrass is immense.
Bluegrass is, believe it or not, a contemporary of Jazz music and is the outgrowth from that art form. Ralph Stanley (who lamented Oh Death in O Brother) is the last living and performing link to the beginning of bluegrass.
Bluegrass also doesn't draw its roots from Country music at all, but from Old Time or mountain music which shares more with the reels and jigs of the Scottish highlands, Ireland and Wales than from the cowboy tunes that developed into Country music.
Bluegrass uses traditional instruments but eschews any form of percussion, relying on an upright bass and usually a backing guitar for the groundworks of a rhythm section.
Sorry, I've tended to take it for granted, growing up around folks like Doc Watson, Ralph Stanley, Wayne Henderson and their ilk. Funny, we always just used to listen and enjoy them as our traditional music back home. We never really thought of them as living treasures (as proclaimed by the Smithsonian).
Sometimes you never know how lucky you are until you get away from home... but that's another post.
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I was kind of just saying that as a jokingly inflammatory post. I didn't mean to offend. I just group bluegrass and country in the same "I don't like it" group.
Posts: 4229 | Registered: Dec 2002
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Speaking of "O Death", has anyone ever heard the Camper Van Beethoven version? It was released quite some time before the movie, so they were just doing a version of an old folk song. It's absolutely great, though.
Anyone know the legal implications of my posting a clip from the song to a website? I'm tempted; you've really got to hear it, especially if you're familiar with the OBWAT version.
Posts: 2804 | Registered: May 2003
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As I understand it Stanley has distanced himself from the "bluegrass" label because it has too-modern of a connotation. I believe he prefers the term American traditional music.
EDIT to add: While I enjoy Stanley's work [or what little I know of it], I have no problem with grouping his work under the bluegrass umbrella. I mean, the label "country" can mean a lot of different styles/genre incarnations.
AND: Speed -- I know the song. And I know Camper. But I've never here their rendition of the song. That sounds totally cool.
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This one time, I was riding a train in Rennes, France, on my way to Mont-St.-Michel and listening to U2's Zooropa. Rennes is half medieval, half 50's concrete in the zones that were bombed in World War II. The tunnels we would ride through had graffiti in French, English and Arabic. It was totally relevant - post war Europe is what Zooropa was trying to encapsulate.
At the same time, I was reading The Sand Child (L'Enfant de sable) by Tahar Ben Jelloun, a French-Moroccan author whose work takes traditional moral themes and puts them in a whacked-out abstract, poetic postemodern fuzz.
It was the coolest moment ever.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Annie: the stirring together of train travel, landscapes, music and books have created some of the coolest moments of my life as well.
The latest example, although this didn't involved a train, happened a couple of weeks ago when I was riding the casual carpool into work. I was sitting in the back seat of the car reading vol. 1 of Paul Ricouer's _Time and Narrative_, a heavy philosophical work that I'm enjoying but finding difficult. The guy driving the carpool was someone I had ridden with before 3 or 4 times. He drives an ancient silver station wagon, has a '80s haircut, wears black jeans and always plays funky '80s music.
Anyway, so he's playing a Kate Bush album aswe're crossing the Bay Bridge into San Francisco and just as we go into the tunnel at Treasure Island I hear the opening notes of one of my favorite songs of hers "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)." I put my book down because the light is too low and my mind is buzzing -- you know that feeling you get when you're trying to wrap your mind around something difficult?
So as we come out of the tunnel I have that kind of buzzing, sated feel because my mind had been doing some serious work for that past 10 minutes, and the song really gets going and I look out the window at the Golden Gate Bridge and the SF skyline -- coit tower, transamerica building, etc. -- and the sky is blue but filled with a few huge cumulus clouds that seem quite low and are gray but not so gray to be rainclouds and the combination of feeling the movement, hearing the music, viewing the landscape, and the echoes in my mind from the reading was just awesome.
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H by Tool goes well with this scene in Harry Potter... I don't know why.. There are many others.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Annie: the stirring together of train travel, landscapes, music and books have created some of the coolest moments of my life as well.
Same here...though the one I remember most is a recent one. Last summer. Bus ride through Latvia en route back to Estonia. Bus driver got woefully lost, or in other words, 7 hours on the bus instead of 4. Harry Potter and TOotP in my lap, newly purchased and the UK version at that! (Yes, I'm cool.) I must have listened to all the CDs I had with me at least twice through, but I remember one particular moment when I looked up from my book and out the window at the sun beginning to set. It was about 11pm, I was watching the beautiful sun set through some birch trees, on a bus full of good friends, in Eastern Europe, reading Harry Potter, and listening to the Little Women soundtrack (Thomas Newman. he's the best!). I thought two things: "I'll have to tell Nate(my best friend) about this moment" and "I am so lucky to be here. There is no one in the WORLD right now in as cool of a situation as I am." It was great. Posts: 6415 | Registered: Jul 2000
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I just had a weird flash a couple days ago when I finished reading OIiver Twist for the first time. (LOVE that book!! Such a great plot!)
I was listening to my Evanescence album that same day and I decided that Going Under is a great theme song for Nancy. It's sad, but the lyrics seemed to fit right in. So now I think of her every time I hear that song.
Posts: 6415 | Registered: Jul 2000
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If Perks of Being A Wallflower were finally made into a movie (which was the idea from the get go, wasnt really going to be a book) i think it would have nothing but THE SMITHS playing throughout. Maybe Nirvana in one crucial scene, but otherwise, all smiths all the time.
Posts: 1572 | Registered: Jan 2004
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Acoustic Alchemy's Early Alchemy goes with Seven Son. Evannescence-Bring me to Life reminds me of this INTENSE young adult series called Fire-Us. They kept playing it on the radio when I was reading it, now they are intertwined. These HIM songs make me think of Seduced by Moonlight, Requiem for a Dream and I was a Teenage Fairy. Boulder Coaster by Acoustic Alchemy is pure Wise Child by Monica Furlong.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I always thought the second movement to Shostakovich's tenth symphony would be FANTASTIC for 1984. I mean, it's like the facist theme song. It's supposed to depict the personality of Stalin, and it pulls through well.
Posts: 2258 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Make sure your "mellow studying music" playlist doesn't have any Shakira on it when you're trying to write a paper in French. Two romance languages at once does some wacky messing with your head.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Annie, you're so funny. I actually quite like Evanescence. But I REALLY love the 80s hard rock bands like Poison, Warrant, Def Leopard, Van Halen, and Damn Yankees.
Surprising things to be learned every day. Posts: 6415 | Registered: Jul 2000
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