Music and Movies
Kate Thornbury, Adam Levine, Stephen Wilson Jr., and movie scores
"Are you not entertained?"
—Maximus Decimus Meridius, from the movie “Gladiator”
Could you make a movie without music? Why would you try?! Music makes the scene sing!
On the day of the Gladiator II release, we’re diving into the intersection of music and movies. Our Bonus Track guest explores the transcendent OG Gladiator score, while Ben, Kody, and Jonathan each share a song they believe could—or already did—elevate a movie scene to greatness.
Misery by Kate Thornbury (Ben)
What makes a memorable movie soundtrack or song for a killer Netflix show? It’s all about “feel” - capturing the moment(s). Often, you only get a verse or verse/chorus to arrest the viewer - enhancing the scene by the song. Kate Thornbury’s recent album, Two Glasses, has several Netflix-worthy tracks. I’m highlighting Misery, the opener, because the jazzy, soulful “feel” could easily play behind a new blockbuster. Rare combo: Youthful, yet mature sound; lyrically rich. I’m a fan, you will be too.
Lost Stars by Adam Levine (Kody)
Begin Again is a movie about a broken-hearted songwriter teaming up with a washed-up producer to make creative and beautiful music. On a deeper level, it’s about recovery (beginning again) and the friends and music who help make it happen.
Mark Ruffalo steals the show with his usual charm.
The movie features original songs that are actually good.
And it all takes place during the summer in New York City.
I don’t have space to set up the backstory for the song "Lost Stars," but it appears at a pivotal scene in the movie, and Adam Levine’s high-pitched notes make the moment unforgettable. Even without context, I think you’ll feel something if you watch the scene.
Stand By Me by Stephen Wilson Jr. (Jonathan)
Stand By Me has charted in the US Top Ten twice: first in 1961, when it was written and performed by Ben E. King, and again in 1986, as the theme song for the film Stand By Me. It’s on my mind today because of an incredible cover by Stephen Wilson Jr. that I was recently introduced to. You can get a sense of his style in this rendition, which has led me to listen to a ton of his music over the last several days. Be sure to check out his other songs, especially “Father’s Søn.”
Bonus Track: Immortal Breath for Mortal Characters - The Transcendence of the Original Gladiator Score by Chandler Nick
. . . for in Elysium there falls not rain, nor hail, nor snow, but Okeanos breathes ever with a West wind that sings softly from the sea, and gives fresh life to all men.
Homer, The Odyssey, 4.560–5
The opening moments of Gladiator demonstrate what cinema achieves with remarkable pathos, perhaps above all other artforms. In a matter of seconds, the film transforms the mundane, the fleeting, and the provincial into the magnificent, the timeless, and the universal. As always at the movies, this transformation is achieved through a miraculous union of sight, sound, and score.
Sight. A farmer’s hand runs over heads of grain, golden-brown and ready for harvest. On his finger is a wedding band—precious silver marred by years of labor in the field.
Sound. Wind whispers amid the stalks of wheat. Somewhere far off—perhaps in another dimly remembered time—children laugh at play.
Score. A lamenting woman intercedes with dirge-like groanings too deep for words. And, underneath, a mysterious drone threatens to overwhelm a few brief notes of hope plucked by a doubtful guitar.
In this article I want to talk especially about the score. With his camera, the director has captured the earthen vessel of human experience. With his orchestra (and some help from the sound department), the composer has gilded that cracking clay with eternal gold. Earthbound images of family and farm have married ephemeral voices of desire and, together, conceived an entirely different kind of creative work, one that lives in the liminal space between the temporal and the eternal. One gladiator’s tragic history has become humanity’s epic struggle. On the wings of music, prosaic familiarity has risen to poetic ideal.
The track that accompanies this opening scene is simply titled “The Wheat” and was composed by Hans Zimmer. His entire Gladiator score, featuring tracks with titles like “Earth,” “Sorrow,” “Elysium,” and “Now We Are Free,” represents a successful attempt, through music, to elevate a film that could have been a mere blood-and-guts spectacle to a spiritual and moral exploration.
For instance, with “The Might of Rome,” Zimmer generously endows the Roman Empire with a certain Wagnerian bravado for its valorization of civic virtue, filial piety, and heroism in battle. But the effect of such triumphant fanfare is muted by the reminder of an earlier track like “The Battle,” in which Zimmer exploits the waltz as a musical form to highlight Rome’s hypocrisy. In a behind-the-scenes mini-doc on the film, Zimmer recounts his creative process:
“[The Roman Empire] is this civilized, formalized thing . . . but at the same time it’s all built on blood; it’s all built on savagery. And I was thinking, “How can I write a piece of music that has that sort of duality in it? . . . So I had this idea that all the action sequences should be waltzes. You can’t think of anything more fluffy and civilized. . . . Everything is just so—and perfect. I thought, “What if I take the shape and form of a waltz and just make them bloody, savage, and brutal?”
If Zimmer has just enough mischief in him to do a bit of outdated political satire like this, he has more than enough humanity and earnestness to attend to Maximus’s (Russell Crowe’s) dramatic arc over the course of the film. Because the soundtrack is so thematically cohesive, it tracks with, and even helps to more clearly define, Maximus’s descent and ascent from soldier to slave to gladiator to freeman.
It's one of the richest scores of the last 30 years. Without it, I don’t know if the original Gladiator would have made such a mark on cinematic history, which has justified the production of the newly-released sequel. When I see Gladiator II for the first time this year, I will listen to Harry Gregson-Williams’s score in hopes that it may possess at least some measure of Zimmer’s musical sensitivity to the depths of sorrow humans experience on this sin-soiled earth. And if we are especially blessed, the Gladiator II soundtrack will achieve the much harder thing that Zimmer accomplished in the last three tracks of his score (“Elysium,” “Honor Him,” and “Now We Are Free”): to ascend—by means of rhythm, melody, harmony, instrumentation, and arrangement—beyond the bounds of familiar earthly experience to some musical register that suggests eternal rest.
I do not believe in the Elysium of the Greco-Roman classicists. But I do believe in what Elysium has suggested throughout the centuries—in Homeric literature, in orchestral music, and now in film scores. I believe the Gladiator soundtrack, not unlike all the best transcendent artworks, has been given to us as a faint melody from One who intones eternally the “wind that sings softly from the sea, and gives fresh life to all men.” Therefore, to paraphrase a particularly wise classicist, may “the clean sea breeze of the centuries blow through your minds” as you listen to music that seeks to transcend our mortal frame and slip the bonds of earth. I’ve offered a transcendent film score playlist here just for that purpose.
Chandler Nick is an Arizonan, born and bred in the Sonoran desert. But he likes air-conditioned movie theatres too much to rightly call himself a cowboy. If memory serves, the film scores of John Williams were his first musical love. Since then, he has also taken to the film music of Hans Zimmer, John Powell, Howard Shore, James Horner, Emile Mosseri, and others. Of course, his Boomer dad also taught him to love classic rock. Chandler lives in Mesa, AZ with his wife Kellie and their 2-year-old son, whom one kind stranger once dubbed a “joy-bomb.”
What’s your favorite movie score? What movie will you see next? We hope this edition of the Swap will encourage you to take in the sounds of the scenes.
—TheMusicSwap
Love it. Just discovered Stephen Wilson Jr.