(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
The main thing that musicians want to do successfully is create something that engages and captivates their audience. Regardless of whether you are Jeff Lynne or Childish Gambino, the aim is and always will be to make music that listeners can’t turn away from and feel incredibly engaged by from the word go.
In an interview recently, the rapper Childish Gambino wrote about why he loves to write soundtracks and make music for movies, as he believes in the modern age, this is the best way to keep an audience captivated when they listen to your music.
“The soundtrack forces the audience to participate in a way that I don’t feel like most things [do]…” he said, “It forces you to have an imagination. If you put out the soundtrack first, then I already see people being like, ‘This is very cinematic, this must be this part, this must be a credit sequence’.”
Gambino’s comments are fair, so long as whoever is making the soundtrack is involved in the movie-making process. There has to be cohesion present for the movie and the music to line up perfectly. This is no small process. Some of the greatest musicians in the world have struggled to transfer their skills to a soundtrack, as suddenly, the endless potential that comes with an empty track mix is restricted by images, theme, and timing.
Take Stephen King’s movie Maximum Overdrive, the horror film he directed about machines coming to life and taking over the world. It’s an awful film, but for all of its faults, it has a saving grace in the form of an excellent AC/DC soundtrack. Adding heavy guitar music to a gory film about killer cash machines seems right up the Australian band’s street, but even they admitted it was incredibly difficult putting the whole thing together.
“It was an interesting thing,” said Brian Johnson, discussing making the soundtrack. “It was the first time I’ve been involved in anything like that. The lads said it was a bit like movie making because they had to be watching the clips.” Guitarist Angus Young added, “It certainly was different for us to work with film.”
One of the main things that can contribute towards a film being poorly received is a poorly constructed soundtrack. There needs to be some form of cohesion between the movie and the music, and if there isn’t, it can lead to something difficult to watch that ends up flopping at the box office. This could be why Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu didn’t take off, as the studio had Jeff Lynne compose music for the movie; however, he had little idea of what the film was about and admits he has never seen it.
“’All Over the World’ was a song written for the Olivia Newton-John movie Xanadu. I wrote half the songs in the film, though I’ve never seen the thing. I don’t suppose anybody else has either,” said Lynne, “It was supposed to be really bad. But I’m really pleased with the music. This song never lets up, and it’s very catchy and optimistic. I don’t think I’ll ever see the movie after reading the reviews. I took it because I thought, ‘Well, I like Olivia Newton-John. She’s great. It would be nice to meet her’.”
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