So, for no reason whatsoever, I’ve begun to listen to soundtracks more and more. The current crop of music that is trending in movies by people like Michael Danna (Moneyball, Little Miss Sunshine), Cliff Martinez (Drive, Contagion), and Hans Zimmer (Inception, Dark Knight Trilogy) is reasonably varied in production values and tempo/sounds, but all the movies I’ve mentioned above are favourites of mine, and so it may just be that since I love the movie, I love the soundtrack.

However, I would actually much rather sit and listen to an entire OST (Official Soundtrack) now than an album. That’s not to say I don’t listen to albums, because I do. But there’s a different emotion that is stirred.

And so to the evolution: I can’t remember an OST that I gave a shit about prior to about 2004 when I heard Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind‘s musical offering. I’ve tried to go back and listen to OST’s of older movies I love: Shawshank or Batman (1990, Tim Burton version), but they’re just too specific to the movie, with crescendos and down tempo beats to match parts of the movie. I know these still exist in more contemporary soundtracks, but they just seem to blend in much better and more smoothly for a fuller kind of listening experience. The OSTs we have going on recently are amazing, standalone pieces of art that should be embraced fully. I mean fuck – look at Trent Reznor winning an Oscar for his soundtrack to The Social Network! Or Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy – Daft Punk didn’t write the soundtrack for the Tron universe, Tron is set in the Daft Punk universe…

Go to Spotify or grooveshark.com and give them a go if you haven’t before, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.