Soundtrack

This Is America (2018)
Digital Image

Many people, I think, are accustomed to thinking about soundtracks as collections of music that are featured in movies and TV shows.  This is how I’ve usually thought of them anyway.  In recent years, I’ve been broadening my ideas about what a soundtrack can be.  This change in my thinking on this topic was spurred when Elvis Costello released a compilation album, Unfaithful Music and Soundtrack Album, that accompanied his memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, back in 2015.  The notion that a book could have a soundtrack was very intriguing to me.  It planted a seed in my head that began to germinate.

“If there could be a soundtrack for a book, could there be a soundtrack for a painting?”, I wondered.  For all I knew at the time, this idea might have been explored by other creative people before me.  It was an interesting idea to me even if it may not have been an original one.

In 2018, I created a Jasper Johns inspired image that I entitled, This Is America.  I started this one as a drawing/painting on a sheet of paper which I later photographed and continued to work on digitally.  I initially covered the paper with quotes from various songs about my country and then layered color over the top so that the words were partially hidden in much the same way that the layers of newspaper were partially hidden by layers of encaustic paint in one of Jasper Johns' flag paintings.  The songs I chose ranged from inspiring and patriotic to pessimistic and cynical.  I assembled all the songs into a playlist that I think of as a soundtrack to this work of art.  Here’s a link to the playlist on Apple Music for those who are interested. 

Fast forward to the present…..

I’ve been experimenting with creating a soundtrack for The Strangers.  These are the “beings” that have been featured prominently in my art since the fall of 2022 (Read more about them here).  I’ve been creating a playlist of songs that, at this moment, are more accumulated rather than curated.  I sometimes call playlists at this stage “song dumps”.  Eventually, I’ll go through the list, remove some tracks that no longer resonate with me, rearrange the order, etc.  I’m actually thinking about splitting the playlist into two separate soundtracks: One of them will include mostly songs and the other one mostly instrumental pieces.  Here’s a link to this playlist.

As I said: this soundtrack playlist is a work in progress, but I’d like to comment on a few of the tracks that are likely to stick around.

1. Rise, Robots, Rise - Milton and Anne Delugg.  This one is from the soundtrack for an animated film called Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Stars.  I’ve never seen this film, but I heard a version of this track with lyrics that was played over the theater speakers at Royal Oak Music Theater just before Elvis Costello stepped out on stage when I saw him perform there back in the summer of 2011.  You can hear a little bit of this in this clip.  I didn’t discover the origins of the song until years later.

2. Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over) - Elvis Costello.  For the record: I’ve created very few playlists that did not contain at least one Elvis Costello song.  I included this one here not just because I’m a fan of his music, but because I like the title.  I sometimes think of the Strangers as “bugs”.  Rumor has it that Elvis played this one as his opening song at the last concert he performed just before COVID shut everything down and we all went into hiding.

3. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots - The Flaming Lips.  There are a few songs from this album included on this list.  The pink robot on the album cover was one of the influences for the look of The Strangers.  

4. Starman - David Bowie.  As stories about the Strangers have bounced around in my head over the last couple of years I’ve played with the idea that some of them, but perhaps not all of them, are friendly and have traveled from… wherever they come from… to connect with life here on earth in much the same way that the Starman in Bowie’s song has.

5. The Stranger - Bear McCreary.  The Stranger is a character from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power tv show.  In season one, he arrives in Middle Earth on a meteor.  It isn’t clear why he is there.  Is he evil or is he good?  We are left to guess throughout the rest of the season.  

There are many more things I could say about the songs that are on my Strangers soundtrack, but I’ll leave it at this for now.

 

Other random thoughts about soundtracks:

1. A playlist created for someone else is a soundtrack for a relationship.

2. “Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.” - Jean-Michel Basquiat.  This quote made me think about the playlists that music streaming services create for their subscribers that feature the songs that they’ve listened to most frequently over the course  of the year.  These playlists could be considered to be soundtracks for a year in our lives.