SOUNDTRACK
rassment, just ask me how much I loved that soundtrack.)
It wasn’t as if the soundtrack was anything new – tell that to “The Graduate” (1967), “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) or “Purple Rain” (1984) – but as streaming reshaped the music business, drawing attention away from albums, the soundtrack lost currency. You didn’t need to buy a whole CD if you were intrigued by one song from a movie, you could just queue it up on Spotify or another service. And to be clear, I’m not talking about soundtracks with mostly instrumental scores or those for moviemusicals like “Frozen” (2013). Even “A Star Is Born” (2018) felt like an outlier because music was so integral to the plot.
But we might be in the midst of a new soundtrack golden age. The LP for “I Saw The TV Glow” arrives in the aftermath of the pop delights of the “Barbie” soundtrack, which climbed the Billboard 200 last summer and earned Billie Eilish and Finneas two Grammys and an Oscar for “What Was I Made For.” Last year the “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” soundtrack, from producer Metro Boomin, was filled with dreamy hip-hop that sounded like the kind of thing that the hero Miles Morales himself would have listened to. And on television, the Apple TV+ period piece about Chanel and Dior, “The New Look,” recruited Taylor Swift’s collaborator Jack Antonoff to produce covers of tunes from the era by modern artists like Florence and the Machine and the 1975.
Schoenbrun explained that when they brought their idea for the soundtrack to A24, the studio was excited. “I don’t think that a lot of filmmakers are as big contemporary music nerds as I am, and I think internally they had been trying to do more music stuff,” they said. A24 established a music arm, A24 Music, in 2021, and is releasing an album of Talking Heads covers this month in conjunction with its restoration and rerelease of “Stop Making Sense.” The studio declined to comment further.
For Schoenbrun, the experience of building out the soundtrack, which mostly features original
songs, was a creative endeavor unto itself: They chose the artists, many of whom are queer, with the idea of codifying scenes of musicians they believed were worthy of teen obsession. They made each artist a 10-song Spotify playlist for inspiration. Then Schoenbrun spent more than a year and a half listening to the resulting
submissions in different orders. (They firmly believe that a soundtrack should not feature the music in the same order in which it appears in the film.) “I really did feel like, ‘Oh I’m giving myself the best gift ever,’” they said. “‘I get to make a mixtape that doesn’t exist yet from scratch.’”
When Schoenbrun was
working on the “TV Glow” soundtrack they said their producers asked why they were so obsessed with the musical element. “The way I would think about it is the soundtrack, if it works, reminds you of the movie and makes you want to revisit the movie,” they said. “And the movie, if it works, reminds you of the soundtrack and makes you want to revisit the soundtrack. It becomes less like a ‘fun thing that I watched for an hour in the theater’ and more, I think especially in a teen angst specific sort of way, a part of you, a place to return to.”
If that’s not a rallying cry for the rebirth of the soundtrack, then I don’t know what is.