Soundtracks

I love soundtracks. I firmly believe an average piece of media can be elevated, and perceived to be better than it actually is, if the soundtrack is amazing. So, I want to talk about and share some of my favourite soundtracks that come to mind, in no particular order.

Film Soundtracks:

It would be a bit criminal of me if I were to start this with anything other than a superhero soundtrack. All the best superhero movies have incredible soundtracks, of course. But I’m going to pass on the cliche choice of John Williams’ Superman soundtrack, and instead hit you with Danny Elfman’s Spiderman theme. From a time where a song still rolled over the opening credits, this song hits with all the uncertainty and tension that the danger of being a hero comes with, but ends on the high note of optimism and victory.

A brilliant example of how a piece of music has made a scene for me is ‘Concerning Hobbits’ by Howard Shore, for Lord of the Rings. This song plays as Frodo and Gandalf ride through the shire and the audience is introduced to this fantasy culture. Fellowship of the Ring is my favourite Lord of the Rings film and this opening scene (after the god-long introduction) has to be one of my favourite scenes in the film, in no small part due to the music. The Hobbits and the Shire represent what mundanity is in Middle-Earth, so how do you make a world’s mundanity still feel magical and different if it is the first thing the audience gets to see? I feel like this music does at least 50% of the heavy lifting.

Then songs that drop so hard you might think the film is incapable of rising above them. You Know My Name performed by Chris Cornell, and written by him with the aid of David Arnold. It’s the opening song for Casino Royale and remains, to this day, my favourite Bond song. There’s some good contenders for that slot on Bond’s long history, but this song signals such confidence in itself, and the film as a whole, that it is as I said before: Hard to think the film might rise above it. Luckily it does, because Casino Royale is just brilliant.

But sometimes simplicity is all you need. Sometimes just sending a message is all a song needs to do to work as a supporting act in a larger production. John Carpenters Halloween score does this so effectively that, for all the many changes that franchise has undergone, his original soundtrack has been a universal constant for it. It tells you everything you need to know: You are not safe. And since that’s sort of the whole point of Halloween, that Michael Myers could be anyone and you wouldn’t even know, it is a great piece of music for capturing that.

Videogame Soundtracks

Because games are an interactive medium, their soundtracks don’t just have to elevate a scene in the same way as a film’s does, but it also has to immerse the player in the intended state-of-mind. If the shooting mechanics are a bit simple, the movement is a bit wide, and the blasting goes on for too long, a good song to shoot too might just make the shooting bearable, the movement feel elegant and minimise how long a section feels to go on for. American Venom, written by Woody Jackson for Red Dead Redemption 2, is one of the last songs of the game that plays during the final prolonged shootout atop a mountain and does this brilliantly:

On the other hand, a lot of games appeal to a player’s power fantasy and want you to feel less like you’re playing as a badass in a game, and more like you are the badass in it. The problem is that if you’re also trying to make your game believable, the soundtrack sort of has to do two things at once which might be at odds with each other. Martin O’donnell and Michael Salvatori pull it off in One Final Effort, written for Halo 3. The music has such scope that you know when it plays, you’re about to do some badass stuff, but starts and ends on slower, more intimate notes that suggest these moments arise out of the game’s setting and world in a way that doesn’t break the player’s immersion when they start doing absolutely insane stuff, like driving a car up a ramp to land on top of a four-legged spider tank.

But that’s just one genre of game I’ve covered in those songs. How about strategy? Oh great, more fighting music? Not necessarily. A good strategy game is as much about positioning, formation and deployment as it is the ultimate battle. In gameplay terms that translates to moments of tension and build-up. Warrior March, written for Rome Total War by Jeff van Dyck achieves this. The battle songs in this game are split into those that play when you fight and those that play while you march and manoeuvre. This is what plays as you march closer and closer to the enemy, send out your cavalry to claim the nearby hill, and reposition your men on the flanks while the enemy does the same.

I titled a post last week after a particular song in Morrowind because it invoked the sense of adventure I felt as I wandered and got slightly lost on a trail in Wales. That song was The Road Most Travelled by Jeremy Soule. RPG’s have a lot of situational elements and heavily rely on the player having a high suspension of disbelief. Something about the Road Most Travelled absolutely captures the endless possibility about what could be around the next corner of a fantasy world, while not being so out there as to jump the gun and make too many assumptions about how high the player’s suspension of disbelief actually is.