Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2017 March 27 • Monday

Our 458th Soundtrack of the Week is Quincy Jones's music for this light romance in which Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow play proto-hipsters in late-1960s Manhattan, John and Mary.

Pretty much nothing happens in this movie. Some conversation, some location footage of New York City. I liked it. It's incredibly slight and unimportant and that's what makes it so good. Sometimes you need a break from horror and tragedy and angst and saving the world and all that kind of crap.

There isn't much music on the soundtrack album. A few tracks of classical music, which I think plays on Hoffman's stereo in the movie.

Then there are four different versions of a lovely song in 6/8 called "Maybe Tomorrow". One of them is an instrumental identified as the main title so I wonder if that was going to be the name of the movie at some point.

Things get pretty funky and nasty in the best way for "Bump in the Night". This is the track where you can hear some producer saying, "Get me Quincy Jones!"

There's a track of sterotypical silent movie-type music called "Silent Movie". It takes the energetic piano playing and adorns it with fuzz guitar and a bunch of other instruments.

Then there's a song called "Lost in Space", sung by Jeff Bridges. I didn't know he'd done this kind of thing way back then. It's really a great song with great lyrics that I think Bridges wrote. Maybe he wrote the whole song and this is Jones's arrangement. Whatever the case, it's the highlight of the album.