When considering any great work of art, be it a painting, a novel, or a piece of music, it’s natural to wonder what might have inspired it: ‘the story behind the song’. Mark Lanegan’s new album, Straight Songs Of Sorrow, flips that equation. Here are 15 songs inspired by a story: his life story, as documented by his own hand in his new memoir, Sing Backwards And Weep.
Feldman’s 75-minute work dedicated to his friend John Cage was written in 1982. In this new version, Aisha Orazbayeva (violin) and Mark Knoop (piano) set out to draw the listener into the charged space between the performers.
Nominated for both a Grammy and an Academy Award, the soundtrack combines lush, reflective incidental music with mid-20th-century big-band compositions, and Isham skillfully integrates these themes as they relate to the contrasting lifestyles of the film’s central characters.