An ode to movie soundtracks

One of the most amazing things about music is the way that it seeps into our subconscious and has the ability to elicit a very specific feeling before we even know the artist or the name of the song. Maybe there’s a song that was played a lot in your childhood and every time you hear it now you get a wave of nostalgia about Sunday mornings in your kitchen. Or an album that played while your first love broke up with you and now it stings every time you hear it echo through a store. One of the most explicit examples of this sensation is the feeling of hearing a song from a movie you’ve seen. Without even knowing what song you’re listening to, you’re transported to whatever world you were in when watching that film. You’re cruising with the Dazed and Confused seniors of 1976, singing in the tour bus with Still Water in Almost Famous, or playing in the snow in Cambridge in Love Story. Songs in films play just as much of a role as characters do, and when a scene is perfectly paired with just the right song, it is embedded into our brains as if it’s a memory from our own lives. To honor all the music directors, sound engineers, and movie score composers that are behind every perfect pairing, I want to highlight three of my favorite movie scores. 

The Graduate: 

If you haven’t listened to this soundtrack on a cloudy day while pretending to be Elaine Robinson walking around UC Berkeley’s campus, you’re really missing out. Simon and Garfunkel’s folksy, Americana sound is a perfect match to the film’s satirical take on coming of age and criticism of the 1950s era of uniformity and the white picket fence family. The duo was asked by director Mike Nichols to underscore the commentary with music written for the film. This proved difficult as Simon only produced one song for the film which was rejected by Nichols, forcing them to use existing songs for the final cut. Interestingly enough, “Mrs. Robinson” was originally a tune that Simon wrote as a tribute to Eleanore Roosevelt — “Mrs. Roosevelt”— and was re-named for the film because Nichols needed one more song. 

Despite the songs not being written for the plot of the film, the songs perfectly accompany the scenes and we can’t imagine it without them. For example, “Sound of Silence” plays as Benjamin, a recent college graduate, basks in the California sun by the pool and then lays stoic as Mrs. Robinson, an adult woman he is having an affair with, unbuttons his shirt. His face unchanging, the song reiterates the melancholy theme of the scene, “Hello darkness my old friend/ I’ve come to talk to you again.” The scene segues into, “April Come She Will” as Benjamin indifferently moves through the motions of life. The song accompanies this sentiment impeccably as we hear, “August, die she must/ The autumn winds blow chilly and cold/ September, I’ll remember/ A love once new has now grown old.” This beloved film came at an important emergence of a counter-culture movement that rebelled against the mundane and rigid confines of American society and these songs will always have this cultural association.

Boyhood: 

This movie takes coming of age to a whole different level, filming for over a decade and following young actors as they grow up, resulting in a nostalgic and emotional three-hour experience. I felt I had to include this soundtrack because of the final scene in which Mason, the boy we followed since age 6, is driving to college in his blue truck while “Hero” by Family of the Year plays. I remember my whole family became addicted to this song after we watched the film, playing it on every road trip and staring out the window as if it was us that was driving away from childhood and beginning a new chapter. It was just one of those perfect movie and song pairing moments that encapsulated a specific feeling so well that you get goosebumps. The rest of the soundtrack is a wonderful collection of songs that chronologically document the feeling of growing up in the 2000s with artists like Coldplay, Vampire Weekend, and Britney Spears. It always felt to me that the music in the movie was raising the kids, holding their hands as they changed schools and experienced their first heartbreaks. Along with the songs of the decade, the father’s character, played by Ethan Hawke, uses music as his love language, playing songs by Wilco and The Flaming Lips in his short weekend appearances in the kids’ lives. Every song choice was deliberately selected to elicit feelings of nostalgia and weave together the narrative of this family whose life we follow. 

Do the Right Thing: 

While writing this article, I thought a lot about the power that musicians have when they are asked to create a song for a film. They are given the setting, the characters, the theme, and the context, and their job is to bring it all together; to create a melody and some lyrics that capture the vision of the director and sew together all the different elements of the scene. In the case of Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee selected Public Enemy to create the theme that would accompany the sweaty Brooklyn tension that Lee cultivated in his film. Lee originally envisioned a rap version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” but Public Enemy wanted to go in a different direction. According to a Pitchfork interview with Hank Shocklee, the producer of Public Enemy, Shocklee recalled being in Lee’s office by saying,  “I pulled down his window, stuck his head out, and was like: ‘Yo man, you’ve got to think about this record as being something played out of these cars going by.’’ And that’s exactly what “Fight the Power” feels like; it feels like real neighborhoods, with real people, with real anger, and a real need for change. Since the film, this song has become an anthem for many social justice movements over the years, illuminating the power that music has to push forward messages and mobilize people. 

Obviously, I was not able to fit all of my beloved movie scores into this article, — shoutout to Call Me By Your Name and Palo Alto— but the hope was that I would be able to communicate the core reasons why movie scores are so special. I think it boils down to intention, I love the idea that someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes and doing the matchmaking between song and scene. And one day, when we are out and about, we’ll hear a song and feel just as we did as we sat, with wide eyes, as we lived in that movie world for two hours. And I think that is a really amazing thing. 

Written by Daniella Ivanir