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1971 1972 1973 1974 2008 Film H Isaac Hayes Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

The Shaft Anthology: His Big Score And More!

7 min read

Order this CDReleased in 2008 (to an audience that almost immediately bought out the print run of all 3,000 copies that were pressed), Film Score Monthly’s The Shaft Anthology is a revelation even if you’re already familiar with the existing release of Isaac Hayes’ album of music from the original movie. For one thing, the album released by Hayes alongside the film did not contain the original recordings as heard in the movie, but took the common approach of a more album-friendly re-recording that had better flow as a listening experience. (This frequently happens because film scores tend to contain a lot of discrete cues that might seem to be jarringly short to those not accustomed to listening to scores in their original form, hence the time-honored tradition – upheld by Williams, Goldsmith, and many others – of re-recording “concert” arrangements that sew the better short pieces together with linking material.) As a result, there is much here that was not on Hayes’ hit album – and even where there’s material that the two albums have in common (such as “Theme from Shaft”), the film version is a different recording, sometimes quite noticeably different. FSM’s 3-CD set aimed to deliver the full score from Shaft down to its shortest track, and with Hayes backed by the Bar-Kays or Movement (or some combination thereof) as his backing band, even the briefest track is a treat to hear.

The plan was to bring Hayes back for the sequel, Shaft’s Big Score!, but as the original film and its soundtrack had made him a hot commodity, Hayes simply didn’t have an opening in his schedule to handle scoring duties on the second movie. Tom McIntosh, who had lent orchestration expertise to Hayes on the first film, was still under contract to MGM and present on the studio lot, expecting to assist Hayes again, but instead found himself collaborating with director Gordon Parks, who opted to try his hand at scoring his own picture (paving the way for John Carpenter). (The delicate subject of who did the most actual musical work on Shaft’s Big Score! – and thus who should get the toplining screen credit – remained something of a long-running point of contention between Parks and McIntosh.) Whoever did the work, the Shaft’s Big Score! is better than you might expect. On the one hand, you’re probably not expecting the songcraft to be on Hayes’ level, but it’s certainly not lacking in either effort or orchestration. (Needless to say, everything in this entire box set is expertly played and extraordinarily well-produced – Hayes’ score from the original film is populated by musicians from the Stax Records stable of players, so it seems to be understood that, with that as the starting point, everything else in the Shaft franchise has to be at that level.) It may not be Hayes and his backing band, but the music of Shaft’s Big Score! is also not a letdown. Since the film’s director had direct input into the score, the second movie’s soundtrack is arguably more “soundtrackish” than the first, but still finds time to pause for a song (“Type Thang”, “Don’t Misunderstand”, “Move On In”) or two. The template established by Shaft is hewed to closely.

Though the extensive liner notes booklet acknowledges Shaft In Africa, it also reveals that the rights to that soundtrack – available elsewhere – did not allow it to appear in the box set, which means that almost half of disc two and all of disc three are devoted to the previously-unreleased-in-any-form complete episode scores from CBS’ short-lived Shaft TV series. That such a series happened at all – with Richard Roundtree remaining in the starring role, and on CBS, arguably the stodgiest old-school network on TV at the time – is still one of the most counter-intuitive moves in the history of film and TV, though to no one’s surprise, the television rendering of Shaft was vastly watered down from the far less filtered version of the character from the big screen. The result was a show that heavily compromised the films’ version of John Shaft, and probably made CBS’ older, largely white audience break out in a cold sweat. Still, the music tries to hold up its end of the bargain of connecting to the film franchise: the melody of Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft” is quoted often, and the TV episode scores spend equal time trying to summon the movies’ classic soul vibe, and dwelling in the space where a lot of ’70s TV music dwells (i.e. we can’t afford as large an orchestra as a movie, but we’re going to make the best of it). When there are tracks like “Cars And Bridges” connecting the TV series to the sound of the movies, There’s still a lot to love within the reduced expectations of Shaft: The Series.

4 out of 4Long out of print and much sought after, at least parts of The Shaft Anthology live on in other releases (Shaft’s Big Score! is available separately, and the first disc (minus the last two tracks) containing the complete score from Shaft itself is now part of Craft Records’ more easily attainable 2017 release Shaft: Deluxe Edition. This leaves the television scores as the real “killer app” of The Shaft Anthology, taking up nearly half of the box set. It’s gotten pricey on the secondary market, but the whole set is worth tracking down.

    Disc One: Shaft ((1971)
  1. Title Shaft (Theme From Shaft) (4:34)
  2. Shaft’s First Fight (1:46)
  3. Reel 2 Part 2 / Cat Oughta Be Here (1:43)
  4. Bumpy’s Theme (Bumpy’s Lament) (1:44)
  5. Harlem Montage (Soulsville) (3:32)
  6. Love Scene Ellie (Ellie’s Love Theme) (1:43)
  7. Shaft’s Cab Ride / Shaft Enters Building (1:38)
  8. I Can’t Get Over Losin’ You (2:06)
  9. Reel 4 Part 6 (1:37)
  10. Reel 5 Part 1 (1:35)
  11. Reel 5 Part 2 (A Friend’s Place) (1:44)
  12. Source No. 1—6M1A (Bumpy’s Blues) (3:05)
  13. Source No. 1—6M1B (Bumpy’s Lament) (1:32)
  14. Source No. 1—6M1C (Early Sunday Morning) (3:05)
  15. Source No. 2—7M1A (Do Your Thang) (3:21)
  16. Source No. 2—7M1B (Be Yourself) (1:54)
  17. Source No. 2—7M1C (No Name Bar) (2:28)
  18. Shaft Strikes Again/Return of Shaft (1:36)
  19. Source No. 3 (Caffe Reggio) (4:23)
  20. Shaft’s Walk To Hideout (Walk From Reggio) (2:27)
  21. Shaft’s Pain (3:03)
  22. Rescue / Roll Up (10:44)
  23. Bonus Tracks)
  24. Theme From The Men (4:09)
  25. Type Thang (From Shaft’s Big Score!) (3:53)

    Disc Two: Shaft’s Big Score! (1972)
  1. Blowin’ Your Mind (Main Title) (3:30)
  2. The Other Side (1:49)
  3. Smart Money (2:10)
  4. The Search/Sad Circles (2:31)
  5. Asby-Kelly Man (1:45)
  6. First Meeting (1:56)
  7. Don’t Misunderstand (1:46)
  8. Fight Scene (1:06)
  9. Ike’s Place (4:09)
  10. Move on In (3:38)
  11. 8M1/8M2 (1:25)
  12. Funeral Home (4:02)
  13. Don’t Misunderstand (instrumental) (1:53)
  14. 9M3 (0:44)
  15. Symphony for Shafted Souls (Take-Off / Dance of the Cars / Water Ballet / Call and Response / The Last Amen) (14:06)
  16. End Title (1:16)
  17. Don’t Misunderstand (demo) (2:00)

    Shaft (Television Series, 1973-74)
    The Executioners

  18. Courtroom/Leaving Court (2:36)
  19. Dawson’s Trial (1:58)
  20. Shaft Leaves Barbara / East River / He’s Dead, Barb / Cunningham’s Breakfast (1:58)
  21. Visiting Jane / Act End / Jury Meets (2:02)
  22. Cars and Bridges (2:43)
  23. Leaving Airfield / Shaft Checks Hospital (2:22)
  24. Shaft Gets Shot / Shaft In Car (1:29)
  25. Night Blues (1:02)
  26. Day Blues (1:04)
  27. Pimp Gets Shot (2:59)
  28. Handle It / Follow Cunningham (3:31)
  29. Shaft Escapes / Stalking Menace (2:42)
  30. End Theme (0:30)

    Disc Three: Shaft (Television Series, 1973-74)
    The Killing
  1. Opening (2:33)
  2. Diana In Hospital (2:37)
  3. Window Shop / Leaving Hospital / Ciao (1:28)
  4. Restaurant Scene / Punchin’ Sonny (2:52)
  5. Hotel Room (3:05)
  6. Diana Splits / Booking Shaft (1:31)
  7. Shaft Gets Sprung / Searchin’ (2:09)
  8. Pimps / Lick Her Store / Wettin’ His Hand / Diana Ducks Out (2:12)
  9. Juke Box / Hands In The Box (2:31)
  10. Shaft (2:53)
  11. Iggie’s Tail (2:21)
  12. Kyle Goes Down / Case Dismissed (1:21)

    Hit-Run

  13. Opening (1:57)
  14. He’s The Best / Reenact / Good Day (2:38)
  15. Travel Shaft (0:42)
  16. Coffin Time (1:34)
  17. To the Club (1:22)
  18. Ann Appears / Shaft Gets It (2:14)
  19. Jacquard (2:31)
  20. Dart Board / Kissin’ Time (3:09)
  21. Omelette (1:55)
  22. Cheek Pat / Don’t Shoot / Shaft’s Move (1:05)
  23. Funny Time (0:58)
  24. At the Club (2:12)
  25. Ending (1:49)

    The Kidnapping

  26. Chasin’ Shaft (3:00)
  27. Sleep, Dog, Sleep (1:37)
  28. Here Comes The Fuzz (2:11)
  29. I Said Goodnight / Walkie Talkie (3:46)
  30. Shoot Out (2:34)

    The Cop Killers

  31. Rossi Gets It / Hospital / Who The Hell Are You? (2:06)
  32. Honky Horn (1:22)
  33. Sleeping Pigs (1:35)
  34. Splash Time (1:32)
  35. Shaft Gets It (1:50)
  36. Vacate The Van (1:41)
  37. Fork Lift (2:09)
  38. Shaft Theme (End Credit Version) (0:30)

Released by: Film Score Monthly
Release date: September 10, 2008
Disc one total running time: 1:10:18
Disc two total running time: 1:17:50
Disc three total running time: 1:18:49

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1981 2024 Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends: Original Music From The 1981 TV Series

3 min read

Order this CDDid anyone have this release on their 2024 bingo card, 43 years after the show premiered? I’m not saying it’s in any way unwelcome – far from it – just very unexpected. But Marvel is having (or, perhaps, has had, depending on who you ask) its moment, so one cynical view that it’s possible to take is that even the most tenuous connection to the Marvel universe is ripe for some fresh exploitation. But if that takes the form of memories from your Saturday mornings in 1981, can you really remain that cynical?

On the downside, it’s an exceedingly short album, but as was often the case with animated TV of this vintage, a composer was hired to assemble a library of music that could be deployed interchangeably from episode to episode. Even those tracks that seem like they’re tagged for use with specific characters or situations (i.e. “Electro Man Theme”, “The Green Goblin”, “Ms. Lion Theme”) were probably used outside of those contexts, repeatedly and relentlessly. Whatever the show’s editors thought would fit a specific scene, they’d cut it together from the show’s internal music library and make it work. The strange magic of this era of animation (and this is something that’s been covered in past reviews of such soundtracks as Star Trek: The Animated Series and Battle Of The Planets) is that the constant reuse bred a delightful familiarity; if you were watching these shows in real time every Saturday morning, these tunes burrowed into your head as much as anything you heard on the radio.

With its 1981 timestamp, the musical lexicon of Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends includes all-purpose funk (“Bobby The Iceman”), which almost sounds like a lost opus from Buck Rogers’ Space Rockers, and the slightly more sinister, sinewy “Firestar Theme”. If it ever seemed like there was an implied romance between Spidey and Firestar, the track “Spider-Man And Firestar” is probably responsible for planting 90% of that idea. Action tracks like “Three Heroes Prepare To Go” have distinct disco flavorings, just a reminder that disco didn’t just instantly die on New Years’ Eve 1979 – it hung around into the early ’80s and cross-pollinated with new wave and other genres.

3 out of 4It’s all lavished with lush production – honestly, it all sounds better than I remember, and much like the other specimens of vintage animation music cited earlier, there are real players, not a stack of synthesizers. I really was only ever a very casual viewer of Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends at the time, but I always jump at vintage animation soundtrack releases like this because they’re greater than the sum of their parts somehow. The intricate musicianship and production were worthy of something with a bit more staying power than an animated show that were frequently treated as disposable entertainment.

  1. Main Title – Spider-man And Friends (00:59)
  2. Bobby The Iceman (01:05)
  3. Firestar Theme (01:24)
  4. Spider-Man And Firestar (00:59)
  5. Three Heroes Prepare To Go (02:20)
  6. Electro Man Theme (01:21)
  7. The Green Goblin (01:21)
  8. Suspense Action (01:11)
  9. Loki Theme (00:44)
  10. Aunt May (00:42)
  11. Rock Jazz (00:35)
  12. College Theme (00:47)
  13. Impending disaster (01:35)
  14. Ms Lion Theme (01:32)
  15. End Title – Spider-man And Friends (00:30)

Released by: Dulcima Records
Release date: February 24, 2024
Total running time: 17:01

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2022 B Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Wars Year

The Book Of Boba Fett Volume 2 – music by Joseph Shirley

4 min read

Order this CDHey, remember that crazy turn that The Book Of Boba Fett took when it suddenly went all “we interrupt this broadcast to bring you an important message from the Mandalorian”? I’ll forgo my musings on that perhaps being why we’ve never gotten a season two, and just talk about the music.

Since this second volume of score from The Book Of Boba Fett covers the fourth through seventh episodes, the sudden shift from Boba Fett’s narrative to Mando’s is precisely where we pick up. It sounds more like music from The Mandalorian at this point, but the interesting thing happening here is that we’re getting Mando music a la Joseph Shirley. It doesn’t sound terribly different from Ludwig Goransson’s style, but considering that Joseph Shirley graduated from scoring this series to scoring the third season of The Mandalorian, it’s tempting to think of it as an audition piece. A jaunty pace creeps into the proceedings in “Faster Than A Fathier” as Mando tries out his new ship, and that tone becomes triumphant in “Maiden Voyage” as the space pedal is duly applied to the space metal. “It’s A Family Affair” shifts to a more pastoral – and more John-Williams-esque – feel as Mando goes to pay Grogu a visit at Skywalker’s School for Tiny Jedi. The Williams influence becomes overt in “Life Lessons”, complete with quotation of Williams’ themes for Yoda, Luke, and the Force itself. Like Goransson before him, Shirley proves that while he’s comfortable making the sound of Star Wars more percussive and electronic, he’s equally adept at layering in the classics of the Star Wars playbook very authentically.

Shirley also plays nicely with Goransson’s themes, delivering a more playful rendition of the piece last heard when Luke rescued Grogu at the end of The Mandalorian’s second season (a piece that was positively mournful in its original application). The setting returns to Tatooine for “From The Desert Comes A Stranger”, and stays there as much of the rest of the album concentrates on music from the final episode. Fett’s theme proper doesn’t come back with a vengeance until “Battle For Mos Espa”, and it remains at the forefront in “A Town Beiseged” and “Final Showdown”. With “A Town At Peace”, things calm down considerably and bring us to the end of the series.

4 out of 4The four tracks at the end of the album feature music from earlier in the series, with some of the show’s key scenes that mysteriously didn’t make the first album appearing here, including “The Reign of Boba Fett”, the six-plus-minute “Train Heist”, and “The Bonfire”. There’s also a source music track, “Hit It Max”, played by the remarkably bulletproof Max Rebo and his band – did he survive that bombing, or did his luck only get him as far as surviving the battle on Jabba’s sail barge? – which is no “Lapti Nek”, but at the very least I like it better than the number that replaced “Lapti Nek” in the Special Editions.

I really liked The Book Of Boba Fett while it was about, well, Boba Fett. It’s a pity that it didn’t get to even attempt to be its own thing for very long, especially with Temuera Morrison willing to don the armor again. But even if the series and its central character went no further than this, Joseph Shirley proved himself more than capable of providing music for wearers of Mandalorian armor everywhere.

  1. The Underworld (3:19)
  2. A Cautionary Tale (3:12)
  3. Faster Than A Fathier (4:59)
  4. Maiden Voyage (1:21)
  5. It’s A Family Affair (3:48)
  6. Life Lessons (3:56)
  7. A Gift (2:46)
  8. Teacher’s Pet (6:26)
  9. From The Desert Comes A Stranger (2:19)
  10. Two Paths Diverged (2:51)
  11. In The Name Of Honor (3:24)
  12. Battle For Mos Espa (2:30)
  13. A Town Besieged (6:46)
  14. Final Showdown (4:13)
  15. Goodnight (2:32)
  16. A Town At Peace (2:22)
  17. The Reign Of Boba Fett (1:22)
  18. Hit It Max (2:01)
  19. Train Heist (6:16)
  20. The Bonfire (1:41)

Released by: Disney Music
Release date: February 11, 2022
Total running time: 1:07:56

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2004 2020 D Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

The Don Davis Collection, Volume 1

4 min read

Order this CDIn 2004, the BBC aired an ambitious miniseries combining a little bit of “hard” sci-fi with an attempt to impart information to and educate the audience, framing it as a reality-TV-tinged mockumentary about a fictional crewed mission through the solar system. Keeping in mind that this was a year before the launch of 21st century Doctor Who, the resulting two-night event, Voyage To The Planets, was quite possibly the BBC’s most impressive sci-fi effort to that date (and thanks to a co-production deal with the Discovery Channel in the U.S., it was retitled Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets and shown Stateside as well). The mention of Doctor Who is not accidental; quite a few personnel associated with Voyage To The Planets, up to and including writer/director Joe Ahearne, played major roles early in the revival of Russell T. Davies’ version of Doctor Who.

And somehow – in between sequels to The Matrix, when his visibility was at a career high – Voyage To The Planets landed American composer Don Davis, and gave him enough resources to have at least a few live players, which he used to maximum advantage to keep an otherwise synthesized score from having too much of an icy, electronic sheen. The result is a score – unreleased for 16 years – that does have some hints of Davis’ Matrix stylings, but leans much more heavily on the kind of noble, give-the-French-horns-lots-of-whole-notes-in-major-keys feel that has powered many a space exploration epic. With Davis having to work to disguise just how small his ensemble of live players is, there are few opportunities for Voyage To The Planets to be as “big” as, say, James Horner’s Apollo 13 score, but it still successfully conveys the nobility and sense of wonder that the show’s fictional space mission demands.

The “Walking With Spacemen Theme” that kicks off the album is the backbone of the score, returning as a motif throughout (and giving a nod to the early working title of the project, which was initiated by the producers of Walking With Dinosaurs). Various locales visited by the crew of the Pegasus – Venus, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and beyond – receive their own thematic treatments, tipping their hand as to the relative degrees of how inhospitable they are to human life. These tend to be the passages that get the closest to the dissonance of Davis’ scores for the Matrix trilogy, but the material in between returns to a more heroic default setting. (One of the most spectacular examples of Davis more dissonant “we’re in trouble” music arrives in “Forbidden Rays and Asteroid”, which may also be the peak of his skillful arrangements successfully disguising the live-player-to-synth ratio.)

4 out of 4It’s a wonderful score overall, and an unexpected surprise so many years after the fact. (This is also a testament to the lovely niche material that can be unearthed by niche and boutique labels like Dragon’s Domain, balancing out the much more mainstream selections offered by the larger soundtrack labels.) Voyage To The Planets is seriously obscure stuff by U.S. standards – following its one-and-done airing on Discovery, the premise of a mockumentary-with-flashbacks mission through the solar system was sold to ABC, where it was expanded with more fiction than science and became a bit of a soap opera in the 2009-2010 season, a time when ABC was trying to pattern nearly everything on its schedule after Lost. (For what it’s worth, Dragon’s Domain, Defying Gravity had an interesting score too, even though the show itself was a big letdown.) To get Voyage’s full, wonderful soundtrack after all this time was a true treat – it’s very much worth a listen, whether you’re familiar with the miniseries or not.

  1. Walking With Spacemen Theme (2:22)
  2. Main Titles and Apollo (2:38)
  3. Take Off and Venus (5:25)
  4. Hot Planet Venus (4:15)
  5. Time and Space (2:04)
  6. Mars (3:30)
  7. Flare and Storm Patrol (3:43)
  8. Forbidden Rays and Asteroid (4:14)
  9. Dispatching and Jupiter Turn (2:09)
  10. G-Force (2:46)
  11. Moons of Jupiter (3:08)
  12. Zoe’s Trouble (5:15)
  13. Europa (1:52)
  14. Pearson’s Peek (3:19)
  15. Deep Space Despair (4:26)
  16. Burial and Resuming Work (1:40)
  17. The Planet of Peace (2:18)
  18. Pluto People (5:06)
  19. The Comet (2:55)
  20. Comet Stroll and Danger (2:55)
  21. The Calamity on the Comet (4:06)
  22. Happy Homecoming and Finale (3:43)

Released by: Dragon’s Domain Records
Release date: September 17, 2020
Total running time: 1:13:49

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2023 D Film Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Wars Year

A Disturbance In The Force – music by Karl Preusser

2 min read

Order this CDI’ve already raved elsewhere about the better-than-anyone-had-any-right-to-expect documentary about the making of the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, A Disturbance In The Force: How The Star Wars Holiday Special Happened. In short, it’s a better documentary than you ever expected about such an arcane, niche topic. The documentary actually has wider appeal than the subject it’s covering. That’s a neat trick.

Karl Preusser’s score for A Disturbance In The Force: How The Star Wars Holiday Special Happened is just over half an hour long (the frequent clips and needle drops in the movie don’t leave a lot of room for an original score), but there’s actually a lot to love in that half-hour-and-change. I found myself hoping that the whole thing would be drenched with disco cheese, but Preusser shows admirable restraint by containing that style reference to only three tracks (“So Bad, It’s Not Good”, “A Disturbance In The Force”, and “The Lost Treatment”, the first two of which walk right up to the edge of riffing on Meco’s disco cover of the Star Wars theme). The rest of the score riffs on John Williams’ style of arrangement without ever directly quoting any Williams themes. There are passages that are almost the Jawa theme, or hint at other Williams compositions, and this is an impressively sharp-eared feat made more impressive by the fact that it’s all carried off fairly convincingly with samples.

4 out of 4And now that this score, for a documentary about the Holiday Special, has been released? Go find and release the score from the special itself, you cowards. Seriously. I dare you. It’s got to exist somewhere in the files of the late composer Ian Fraser (who shouldn’t be obscure: he was a frequent music collaborator on Julie Andrews’ prime time variety specials, was the music director for the opening of EPCOT, and arranged the accompaniment for Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s “Little Drummer Boy” duet). Because chances are I’ll buy that too. You can bet your Life Day on it.

  1. So Bad, It’s Not Good (1:59)
  2. Charley Lippincott (2:24)
  3. Boba Fett Genesis (2:16)
  4. Fan Outreach (1:01)
  5. It All Started In 1978 (1:40)
  6. Maintaining Momentum (2:46)
  7. The Talent (0:54)
  8. Life Day (1:49)
  9. The Faithful Wookiee (1:36)
  10. The Lost Treatment (1:57)
  11. Costume Difficulties (1:31)
  12. Sell Toys To Kids (1:10)
  13. It Just Was Not Working (1:49)
  14. And They Loved It (2:14)
  15. Fanbase Grows (3:01)
  16. A Disturbance In The Force (3:30)

Released by: Gription Music
Release date: December 4, 2023
Total running time: 31:17

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2023 Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Wars Television Year

Star Wars: Visions Volume 2: Sith – music by Dan Levy

2 min read

Order this CDFor the second year running, Disney Plus celebrated Star Wars Day (i.e. May the Fourth be with you) by dropping a new batch of the highly stylized Star Wars: Visions shorts. The Visions mission statement is pretty simple: hand esteemed animators and animation studios a few minutes in the Star Wars universe, with no obligations to be canonical, or even necessarily serious. Their only obligation is to have some fun with the universe and the lore, in their own unique visual style. The inaugural 2022 batch consisted of shorts all done by respected anime studios; the slots in the 2023 batch (I hesitate to call it a season) were given to studios further afield, not just those in the world of anime.

Clocking in at just under 15 minutes, Sith, written and directed by Rodrigo Blaas, who served as the supervising director of Trollhunters: Tales Of Arcadia, was among the most visually arresting of the 2023 shorts. The entire story is animated in a very stylized, painterly style, befitting the main character – a recovering/escaped former Sith apprentice – who has gone into hiding to lose herself in her art. The score by Dan Levy (a French-born composer who seems to like the short-form animation format; he also die an episode of Netflix’s Love Death + Robots) drenches nearly the entire running time of the short, which is not unusual for the Visions shorts. With so little time, many of the animators and filmmakers contributing Visions shorts make the decision to let the score and the sound effects mix do the talking rather than slowing down too much for mere dialogue.

3 out of 4Levy’s score starts strong – its deceptively quiet opening is a bit more interesting than the inevitable busy chase and fight scenes (because you can’t just quit being a Sith apprentice without some blowback from your former boss). The action music has more in common with The Matrix than with anything in the Star Wars universe, while managing to be less interesting than either of the two. It’s in the quieter, more contemplative moments that this score distinguishes itself as a standalone listening experience; the chase music is best when it’s accompanied by the actual chase.

  1. Blank Canvas (2:59)
  2. Sith Apprentice (2:43)
  3. The Chase (1:24)
  4. Light And Dark (2:57)
  5. Destiny (2:11)

Released by: Disney Music
Release date: May 5, 2023
Total running time: 12:14

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2023 Music Reviews Other S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Year

The Wonders Of The Universe: Music From The Big Finish Space: 1999 Audio Dramas

4 min read

Order this CDI’m going to contend that if you have a soundtrack with a track title that is both a plot point of its story, and the title of an episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show, you know you’re in for a good time. The great news is that there’s a lot more to The Wonders Of The Universe than “Space Madness”. In 2019, Big Finish Productions – purveyors of many fine audio dramas that have been reviewed extensively in theLogBook episode guides – announced that, as part of their ongoing collaboration with Anderson Productions, they would be rebooting legendary ’70s sci-fi drama Space: 1999 as a series of audio dramas, splitting the difference between adapting original TV episodes and brand new stories. This is top-secret Moonbase Alpha encrypted code for “here’s unfettered access to Earl’s wallet”. Naturally, there have been critics of any project that would dare to recast the roles once played by Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Barry Morse, and company, but overall the Space: 1999 audio dramas have been well-produced and well-written, offering connecting tissue that shows the writers have been paying careful attention to the original TV series’ weak spots and shoring those up narratively. And, of course, being Big Finish Productions, they’ve commissioned original scores for each one.

That’s where Kraemer, a veteran of such movies as Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher and countless other scoring assignments, comes in. Not just a talented composer, Joe is, deep down, a fan like the rest of us. That gets laid bare in the liner notes, not just where he talks about being a fan of Barry Gray’s original TV scores, but approaching the audio drama scores as if they’re at the same remove from Gray’s work that 1970s animated Star Trek had to be from the live action Star Trek’s scores. When someone makes a reference like that, it’s safe to start chanting “one of us! one of us!” in the background. Without directly, note-for-note quoting Gray’s season one theme, Kraemer manages to still do a stylistic homage to Gray’s despair-laden season one scores. The distinctive sound of Space: 1999’s first year on TV is echoed especially well in the aforementioned “Space Madness”, the first half of “Intentions Revealed”, and “A Chilling Discovery”. There are also some stylistic homages (some of them pretty in-your-face) to John Williams in tracks like “Time Is Running Out” and especially “Eagle One”. But Gray’s music remains the touchstone for most of what’s on this album. (Derek Wadsworth’s funky, near-disco stylings from Space: 1999’s season TV season are not referenced in the selections heard here, other than an orchestral-style rendition of his season two end credits.)

4 out of 4All of this is accomplished with synths and samples that do a reasonable job of mimicking the sound of a large orchestral ensemble, which is something that simply isn’t within the budgetary reach of Big Finish. In some ways, this means there’s actually a “bigger” sound than even the original TV series could have gone for, though the trade-off is that the orchestra is clearly a synthetic one, especially when you’re hearing it away from the dense mix of sound effects and dialogue that normally competes with the music in the mix. The unique demands of an audio drama mean that this music is seldom foregrounded the way it might be on TV, so if an orchestra of sampled instruments strikes you as a shortcoming, keep in mind that in its original (and, it must be said, intended) context, the music is jostling elbows with a dense, world-building layer of sound design. Kraemer’s original themes start to jump out after just a couple of listens, and that’s indicative of the approach of Space: 1999 a la Big Finish overall: it’s the story we already know, but now with more connecting tissue that reinforces the story as an ongoing saga and something less randomly episodic. I recommend both the soundtrack and the audio productions for which it was created.

  1. Theme From Space: 1999 (Season One) (2:30)
  2. Stellar Intrigue (2:26)
  3. Space Madness (1:56)
  4. Mysteries In The Dark (2:21)
  5. Escaping Threats (4:09)
  6. Scheming and Plotting (2:41)
  7. Time Is Running Out (2:31)
  8. The Coldness Of Space (2:18)
  9. Moonbase Mystery (2:10)
  10. Aboard Eagle One (3:30)
  11. Koenig Investigates (3:03)
  12. Intentions Revealed (4:19)
  13. Flight Into Peril (2:13)
  14. The Wonders Of The Universe (2:32)
  15. A Chilling Discovery (2:49)
  16. A Fitting End (0:55)
  17. Theme From Space: 1999 (Season Two) (1:32)

Released by: BSX Records
Release date: May 11, 2023
Total running time: 43:54

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2022 Music Reviews O Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Wars Television Year

Obi-Wan Kenobi – music by Natalie Holt, William Ross, and John Williams

5 min read

Order this CDWho scored this? The credits on the cover seem to make that an interesting question, as does the timeline of the public reveal that John Williams – who, we had already been told, was retiring from scoring Star Wars and from scoring films altogether – was contributing a new theme for Obi-Wan himself. Most of what is heard in the show and on this release is by Natalie Holt, who had already made a splash on another Disney Plus streaming series, Marvel’s Loki. But top billing goes to John Williams for the Obi-Wan theme, and the cover then tells us that theme has been adapted by William Ross. Anywhere Williams’ wistful new theme for the aging Jedi Knight appears in the show itself, it’s in a cue credited to Ross. One begins to suspect that Williams’ involvement (and therefore Ross’ involvement as well) happened at a very late stage, replacing work that had already been done by Natalie Holt. (A bit of research – and a bit of reading between the lines of all the industry-speak – reveals that this is precisely what happened. It’d be neat to hear Holt’s original theme and the replaced score cues to hear what the show would’ve sounded like before the guys dropped in to do a little of the work and claim a lot of the credit.)

Williams’ theme is nice, I will give it that. It does fit Obi-Wan where we find him in this movie – noble, but subdued. In the end credit rendition, there’s a big orchestral build-up that seems a little out of place, but otherwise a nice theme, and a bit more distinctive than the theme Williams penned for inclusion in John Powell’s Solo score (of which more another time). Its first major appearance as a piece of the score arrives in “Thr Journey Begins”; Ross’ adaptations of the Williams theme takes up five more tracks in the soundtrack outside of the opening titles and end credit theme.

The first score cue, “Order 66”, lurches from pastoral to relentless action on a dime for the prologue in which we see the moment that the Emperor’s order to rid the universe of the Jedi affects a class of young padawans. That same propulsive action then shifts down a gear or two into lurking menace as the show jumps to the present day for “Inquisitors’ Hunt”. Tracks like “Young Leia”, “Days of Alderaan” and “Bail and Leia” have a different feel entirely as, for the first time since a fleeting glimpse in the epilogue of Star Wars Episode III, we get to see Alderaan as a utopian world that somehow hung onto its idealistic identity well into the reign of the Empire. The tone darkens significant;y as Obi-Wan leaves the safe obscurity of Tatooine to begin his mission (“Daiyu”, “Cat And Mouse”). There’s an unexpected bit of electronic instrumentation in “Ready To Go” that almost sounds like something that escaped from the Tron Legacy soundtrack; it’s not unwelcome, but does stick out a bit in a score that’s doing its best to stay in Star Wars‘ traditionally orchestral wheelhouse.

Some more exotic flavors creep in as Obi-Wan’s quest takes him further afield (“Spice Den”, “Mapuzo”, “The Path”), and things again take a dark turn as master and apprentice once again find themselves in the other’s proximity (“Sensing Vader”, “Stormtrooper Patrol”, “Hangar Escape”, “Empire ARrival”), the latter of which introduces a strident march that screams “the Empire is here” without just quoting Williams’ “Imperial March”. Holt even sneaks a quotation of Williams’ series theme into “Dark Side Assault” – see, she didn’t need outside help with that, did she?

After Ross shows up to drench another major Kenobi/Vader confrontation with buckets of synthesized choir in “I Will Do What I Must”, Holt gives us a brief reprieve from the action music with the quieter “Sacrifice”, before resuming the chase and finally getting a hint of “The Imperial March” in (“No Further Use”). As is typical, the major action setpiece (“Overcoming The Past”) is handed off to Ross’ arrangement of Williams’ theme, elevated to a grand level as Obi-Wan finally finds his footing within the Force again, leaving Vader in a weakened state both physically and emotionally. Two more Holt cues (“Tatooine Desert Chase”, “Who You Become”) tie off the story of Reva, an Imperial Inquisitor obsessed with tracking down Obi-Wan, with Ross again getting the last word with “Saying Goodbye”, which quotes both Williams’ newly-minted Obi-Wan theme and the original trilogy’s theme for Leia.

4 out of 4It’s all fine music. Despite the number of cooks in the kitchen, it does all integrate better than one might expect. Some of you reading this are probably shouting at your screens something along the lines of “We’re privileged to be getting even one new piece of Star Wars music from John Williams!” And there may be something to that, but as solid as Holt’s work is throughout, why was it not good enough for nearly a quarter of the score, if the soundtrack’s track listing is any indication? It’s a little unsettling to think that while the casting of the Star Wars steaming shows is growing more diverse (though, as the unfortunate pushback against the amazing Moses Ingram demonstrated, not without difficulty), other elements of production very much present the appearance of keeping the glass ceiling in place with Imperial zeal.

  1. Obi-Wan (4:06)
  2. Order 66 (1:40)
  3. Inquistors’ Hunt (3:09)
  4. Young Leia (1:04)
  5. Days of Alderaan (1:38)
  6. The Journey Begins (2:57)
  7. Bail and Leia (2:19)
  8. Nari’s Shadow (1:14)
  9. Ready to Go (2:26)
  10. Daiyu (2:25)
  11. Cat and Mouse (3:10)
  12. Spice Den (1:10)
  13. First Rescue (3:10)
  14. Mapuzo (1:17)
  15. The Path (1:35)
  16. Sensing Vader (2:49)
  17. Parallel Lines (2:12)
  18. Some Things Can’t Be Forgotten (4:47)
  19. Stormtrooper Patrol (2:34)
  20. Hangar Escape (2:33)
  21. Hold Hands (1:39)
  22. Empire Arrival (2:04)
  23. Dark Side Assault (2:37)
  24. I Will Do What I Must (2:48)
  25. Sacrifice (1:41)
  26. No Further Use (3:39)
  27. Overcoming the Past (4:28)
  28. Tatooine Desert Chase (2:19)
  29. Who You Become (3:36)
  30. Saying Goodbye (5:26)
  31. End Credit (4:02)

Released by: Disney Music
Release date: June 27, 2022
Total running time: 82:34

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2023 Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Trek Television Year

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season 1 – music by Nami Melumad

5 min read

Order this CDIt seems like every new Star Trek series that comes along in the streaming age has its own slightly different sound. All of them stay in the orchestral film music wheelhouse, but do something a little bit different within that wheelhouse: Discovery started out more contemplative and piano-heavy, Lower Decks plays it very straightforward so its music isn’t part of its jokes, Picard eventually settled into Jerry Goldsmith jukebox mode, and Prodigy – probably the best of the bunch and yet simultaneously the most overlooked because it hails from Nickelodeon, which seems to be a signal to some adult viewers to steer clear of it – is big, bombastic, larger than life, and yet fun when it needs to be. Prodigy composer Nami Melumad, a Michael Giacchino protege who had previously scored one of the shorts from the now-apparently-extinct Short Treks series, quickly gained notice for her work on Star Trek’s most recent animated incarnation, and was tapped to provide music for the eagerly awaited Strange New Worlds.

Strange New Worlds is a series that was, for all intents and purposes, created by fan demand to see more of the pre-Kirk-era troika of Captain Pike, Number One, and a younger Spock, established in Star Trek’s original 1964 pilot The Cage and revived (and recast) in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery. Set aboard the Enterprise years prior to Kirk’s command, but well after the events of The Cage, the series leans into its retro construction booth figurative (mostly-unconnected adventures to different worlds every week) and literal (its greatest gift to the younger members of the audience may be introducing them to mid-century modern furnishings). It’s a return to Star Trek’s roots – a message-of-the-week space opera, a modern formulation of the original series without the baked-in issues of the original series. It also has a bit of a retro sound, at least in the opening credits – there are hints and near-quotes of the Alexander Courage theme, and when the full quotation of that theme finally happens, it sounds like a theremin – a bit of a stylistic wink to the audience that, if the Star Trek was all started with was from the sixties, this is from even before then. The theme is by Jeff Russo, who previously created the opening themes for Discovery and Picard.

But the scores accounting for most of the album’s (and show’s) runtime are by Nami Melumad, and they boldly get down to business. The pilot episode (which was unafraid to very clearly state the series’ entire mission statement unambiguously) is represented by four tracks, three of which accompany the big setpieces of the episode: “Everyone Wants A Piece Of The Pike” accompanies Captain Pike’s retreat into a wilderness cabin, while “Eyes On The Enterprise” sets the backdrop for Pike’s return to his ship, and “Home Is Where The Helm Is” covers the aftermath of Pike revealing the Federation’s existence to a planet on the all-too-familiar brink of world war. (“Put A T’Pring On It” is the quietest of the four pilot tracks, as Spock has to decide between a call to duty and a call to somewhat more domestic duties.)

Generally speaking, the big musical setpieces of each episode of the season are represented here, with some episodes getting more coverage than others (I was surprised to see only one track for the fanciful late-season episode The Elysian Kingdom.) The album’s musical focus, perhaps quite rightly, is on the music from the cluster of episodes that represented a mid-season series of storytelling slam dunks: three tracks each from Memento Mori and Spock Amok, two from Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach, and four from the Orion pirate romp The Serene Squall. Yes, Spock Amok‘s deceptively low-key riff on Gerald Fried’s immortal Amok time fight theme is here (“Are You A Vulcan Or A Vulcan’t?”); somewhat surprisingly, the season finale seems underrepresented by comparison, so we don’t get that episode’s take on Fred Steiner’s “Romulan Theme” from Balance Of Terror, the original series episode whose story A Quality Of Mercy spents much of its runtime riffing and remixing.

4 out of 4As was the case with her work on Prodigy, Melumad’s superpower is in her ability not just to kick butt with major action setpieces, but to make each episode’s more introspective moments memorable as well. Tracks like “Comet Away With Me” let her show off some less-percussive, non-action-oriented fireworks marking inner turmoil for the show’s characters. The solitary track from The Elysian Kingdom, “You’re My Mercury Stone”, is another track like that, and it’s simply gorgeous. Overall, the season one soundtrack hits a nice balance of music from action scenes and music from revelatory character moments as well. I look forward to hearing more of Nami Melumad’s work on both this series and Star Trek: Prodigy in the future. I don’t think it’s much a stretch to say that her work is the current sound of Star Trek at its best.

  1. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Main Title Theme) by Jeff Russo (01:52)
  2. Everyone Wants a Piece of the Pike (03:51)
  3. Put a T’Pring On It (02:56)
  4. Eyes on the Enterprise (04:42)
  5. Home is Where the Helm Is (04:17)
  6. Space Cadet (01:01)
  7. Comet Away With Me (02:36)
  8. Romancing the Comet (03:23)
  9. M’hanit and Greet (07:01)
  10. Since I First Saw the Stars (03:55)
  11. A Holding Pattern (04:44)
  12. Gorn With the Wind (05:29)
  13. The Pike Maneuver (02:03)
  14. Gorn But Not Forgotten (03:25)
  15. Are You a Vulcan or a Vulcan’t? (03:00)
  16. Spock Too Soon (02:03)
  17. Chris Crossed (03:44)
  18. Looking For Ascension in All the Wrong Places (03:04)
  19. Ascent-ial Questions (02:01)
  20. T’Pring It On (01:43)
  21. Pirates in the Sky (02:55)
  22. Will You Be My Vulcantine? (02:45)
  23. Won’t You Be My Pirate? (03:38)
  24. You’re My Mercury Stone (02:05)
  25. Don’t Leave in Uhurry (02:55)
  26. When the Hemmer Falls (04:09)
  27. No One’s Ever Neutral About Spaghetti (02:54)
  28. Throw Plasma From the Train (05:29)
  29. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (End Credits) by Jeff Russo (00:58)

Released by: Lakeshore Records
Release date: April 28, 2023
Total running time: 94:23

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2021 Music Reviews Other S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Wars Year

Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge

8 min read

Order this CDPoor Disney. You know, despite the fact that I realize that they’re a gigantic media conglomerate that no one’s really supposed to root for, I can’t help but feel for them. Opening an in-person Star Wars attraction had to be very high on their list of reasons to purchase Lucasfilm outright; after all, Star Tours had been doing fairly brisk business since the 1980s. Surely an entire Star Wars theme park would be the most obvious money-maker in the world for Disney – never mind movies and merch, Galaxy’s Edge would probably make back most of the astronomical purchase price of Lucasfilm by itself. And then COVID happened and emptied it out. And then they overcompensated and overshot the mark with the far-too-expensive-for-most-fans Galactic Starcruiser attraction, which remains perennially underbooked. Just as the sequel movies made depressingly clear that our beloved space heroes could find no lasting peace, this chain of real-world events just underlined that you can’t have nice things in the Star Wars universe.

But hey, let’s talk about this soundtrack’s very, very good reason to exist: we get to hear Star Wars a la Bear McCreary, which is the kind of thing one hears is the stuff of days long remembered. McCreary, of course, made his very splashy entry into the ears of genre soundtrack fans with the early aughts revival of Battlestar Galactica, to which he brought a pan-cultural sensibility that was telegraphing, from the first season, what the story eventually told us at its end: these people from other worlds are where all of our world’s music comes from. So yes, you do, in fact, hear every Earth culture in there. In a lot of ways, honestly, McCreary’s scores for each episode told the story more succinctly than the scripts did. He’s since put his very audible musical stamp on such things as Outlander, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Walking Dead, Lord Of The Rings: The Ring Of Power, and Foundation, as well as modern big-screen revivals of Godzilla, Child’s Play, and more. McCreary builds worlds in his music, sometimes better than the scripts that inspire his music.

When Disney bought Lucasfilm and made it clear that more Star Wars was on the way, of course we expected John Williams to return for the sequel movies (and he did, for all of them). But then side-story movies started happening, and it became clear that Williams’ presumptive absolute lock on the franchise’s musical sound was on the verge of expiring. Rogue One went through two composers, meaning that movie has an entire Alexandre Desplat score we’ve never gotten to hear. Solo was an odd musical duck: an experienced composer, new to the franchise, under the obligation to refer to a freshly-penned Williams theme for young Han Solo (an arrangement also in place for the more recent Obi-Wan Kenobi streaming series). But after Solo, and mere weeks before The Rise Of Skywalker, came The Mandalorian, with a very clear musical vision and a very clear message: John Williams does not have to be the only one who can do this.

But the moment that other composers started entering Williams’ well-constructed sandbox, with its established classical/romantic lexicon, I started wondering when McCreary might enter the chat. One of my other picks, Michael Giacchino, landed a Star Wars assignment almost instantly, replacing Desplat’s Rogue One score. But – allowing for the fact that his schedule with TV and movie projects alike keeps him incredibly busy – when would McCreary get to play in that sandbox and bring his impeccable sense of musical world building with him? The answer came in late 2021, at a time when Disney – trying desperately to keep Galaxy’s Edge alive as its own brand at a time when it still wasn’t the greatest idea to actually go there – created a virtual reality universe built around the Galaxy’s Edge storyline. Now you could stay home and explore that world without paying travel expenses or contracting a deadly disease. This was not only its own new product, but was also served as a promo piece for the “real” Galaxy’s Edge. And would it have its own soundtrack? Oh, of course it would – even Williams had contributed a symphonic suite for the opening of the attraction itself.

But other composers would be devising the music for the VR attraction – enter the very interesting combination of McCreary, Joseph Trapanese (Tron Legacy, Tron Uprising), and Danny Piccione (sound designer for a previous Star Wars VR game). McCreary is an obvious composer to bring to the Star Wars party; the lengthy opening track reveals that he’s adept at honoring Williams’ musical lexicon while also bringing more modern sonics into play. (If you found the synths in The Mandalorian’s early episodes off-putting, this will probably be more to your liking.) “Tara Rashin” not only sees McCreary bringing his trademark thundering percussion to the table, but also a theremin-like synth. More woodwinds, percussion, and a mysterious sound accompany the “Guavian Death Gang”, characters glimpsed briefly in The Force Awakens, who I always assumed probably killed people by pushing a button and burying their victims under an avalanche of fresh guavas. Hell of a tasty way to go. “Baron Attsmun” is also swathed in mystery, but has more string-driven grandeur. “Dok-Ondar Treasures” is very much a throwback to the style that won McCreary so many fans in the Galactica days; it’s safe to say that if you know Bear chiefly from Battlestar, you’ll be pleased with his contributions here.

But wait! Joseph Trapanese is also here. He did a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes for the Tron Legacy score attributed to Daft Punk (and then proved, by effortlessly scoring the animated spinoff series Tron Uprising, that he was deservedly the co-author of Tron Legacy‘s sound). His first three tracks bring something of the “big wall of ominous brass and pulsing synth notes” feel of his Tron work, though obviously without using the exact sounds so closely associated with that universe. It’s definitely a more synth-oriented approach.

Danny Piccione takes up the middle of the album, offering up shorter selections with more of a pop music sensibility; you could dance to this stuff, though he’s clearly trying to go for the “unconventional used of earhly instrumentation standing in for alien instrumentation” feel of, say, the original Cantina Band music. All five of his tracks tend to top out at around the three minute mark. These are all fun in-universe listens, not a million miles away from the “previously unreleased Cantina Band music” remit of the two Oga’s Cantina: R3X’s Playlist albums. “Azu Ragga” is the best of these tracks, succeeding in hitting an otherworldly but still tuneful balance.

Trapanese returns for five more tracks, including the album’s longest, “IG-88”, clocking in at over 15 minutes; again, appropriately enough for a bounty hunter droid, the technological precision of his Tron work is a useful frame of reference for what to expect here. A more orchestral tone is struck with “Life Wind” and “Sacred Garden”, which is the closest that Trapanese gets to the Williams wheelhouse of most prior Star Wars music. “Patience” sees the return of the slightly-reminiscent-of-Tron synth work, while “Fountain – The Message” does away with pulsating synth bass lines.

McCreary brings things to a close with three final tracks, “The First Order” giving the sequel era’s big had a theme that isn’t borrowed from previous iterations of the franchise. “I Would Do It Again” strikes a much more hopeful note, and by the time the end credits wrap up, you’ve heard a whole hour and a half of Star Wars music without a single Williams theme.

4 out of 4In the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t played Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge itself. I’m going entirely by how enjoyable its music is. Kind of a weird way to judge a soundtrack, sure, but if the music does anything, it actually makes me want to play the game (you know, if I owned any VR gear). Surely it’s quite an experience if it merits the considerable talents of these three composers. Also, let’s set these gentlemen loose on some movies and streaming shows. Because they just spent the running time of this album proving that any one of them is worthy of the task. And because this taste of Star Wars a la Bear McCreary is an indication that we could have a whole feast.

  1. Batuu Wilderness by Bear McCreary (11:05)
  2. Tara Rashin by Bear McCreary (02:55)
  3. Guavian Death Gang by Bear McCreary (07:48)
  4. Baron Attsmun by Bear McCreary (06:49)
  5. Dok-Ondar Treasures by Bear McCreary (03:31)
  6. Age of Jedi by Joseph Trapanese (03:33)
  7. Shadows by Joseph Trapanese (04:59)
  8. Ady’s Theme – Hyperdrive by Joseph Trapanese (02:51)
  9. Pinteeka Dub by Danny Piccione (02:37)
  10. Desert Dance by Danny Piccione (02:33)
  11. Ghenza Shuffle by Danny Piccione (03:04)
  12. Cyinarc by Danny Piccione (02:25)
  13. Azu Ragga by Danny Piccione (03:09)
  14. IG-88 by Joseph Trapanese (15:25)
  15. Life Wind by Joseph Trapanese (02:55)
  16. Sacred Garden by Joseph Trapanese (04:07)
  17. Patience by Joseph Trapanese (01:54)
  18. Fountain – The Message by Joseph Trapanese (01:27)
  19. The First Order by Bear McCreary (02:49)
  20. I Would Do It Again by Bear McCreary (03:18)
  21. Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge End Credits by Bear McCreary (02:37)

Released by: Walt Disney Records
Release date: December 3, 2021
Total running time: 1:31:40

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