When we talked to Wes Anderson this week, we brought up “the vault,” the expression he and longtime music supervisor Randall Poster use for songs that they have on lockdown and sit on until the right movie and moment presents itself.
“One that came out in a nice way was, we had this [Bobby Fuller Four] song, ‘Let Her Dance’ for ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ and sort of late in the game we thought, ‘Maybe here’s our chance to use this song.,’” Anderson told us. “We’d had it sitting around for many years and we thought, ‘It’s going to end the movie, we’re going to do a dance scene to it.’ ”
Interestingly enough, Randall Poster—who’s done the music supervision for every one of Anderson’s films, going back as far as 1996’s “Bottle Rocket”—also brought up the vault this week too in an article with Rolling Stone where he listed his seven favorite uses of music in Anderson’s movies.
“Actually, we still have a number of songs in our safe that we’re saving for just the right moment,” Poster teased in the interview. Among the interesting tidbits learned in that talk is that Poster and Anderson had been sitting on that aforementioned Bobby Fuller Four song for 10 years. That’s patience. His story about going all the way to Calcutta, India to track down some of the masters to Satyajit Ray’s score music for “The Darjeeling Limited” is impressive too.
Perhaps most exciting? News that ABCKO Records—Anderson’s go-to label for all his soundtracks since “The Darjeeling Limited”—will release a box set of the duo’s 10 soundtracks later this year of their 22-year working relationship (via Orlando Weekly). That’s eight movies and depending on how many songs they release, potentially over 150 songs give or take (eight movies with maybe 20 “songs” or score pieces per movie as a very conservative guess). Hell, we’d put it on our Christmas list. Hopefully more details and tracklist comes out soon. And might we politely suggest surfacing hard-to-find score material and songs not already released on the previous eight soundtrack discs? Cause we own ‘em already and well, that would be awesome (and here’s a handy list of 17 Songs Not Released On Any Wes Anderson Soundtrack, up until “Moonrise Kingdom” anyhow).
Anderson’s latest “The Grand Budapest Hotel” opens in limited release tomorrow, March 7th. Check out our full interview with Wes here.
How do we get 10 soundtracks??? Wes has only made 8 films so far…
Perhaps it is actually 10 discs? Including The Life Aquatic Studio sessions by Seu Jorge – confirmed by the Rolling Stone interview with Randall Poster – and maybe a bonus disc of some kind? The Bottle Rocket short soundtrack was released on I-Tunes a while ago, but that wouldn't highlight their collaboration. The only other film they worked on together was the squid and the whale, tho that would seem out of place in this box, No?
I would suppose there is a bonus disc including tracks previously not on the soundtracks, though I'd think they'd fit better as bonus tracks on each disc. There have been CDs produced for oscar consideration purposes of Motherbaugh's scores to Tenenbaums & Zissou that include tracks that have not seen official release. An expanded tenebaums score/soundtrack could easily balloon to 2 discs. Anyone else care to speculate? 10 soundtracks doesn't work…
I wish you had discussed music more with Wes during your interview. He's possibly the best director at putting songs in his films, but I wish you would've pried a bit more. For instance, does he miss the pop songs since his last two films haven't had any? Did he ask Elliott Smith to record Hey Jude because he had already recorded Because for American Beauty? Why can't they still get the rights for all the Stones songs for them to be included on the actual soundtracks, or this box set. What other songs did they try to use in the films other than the Beatles in Royal Tenebaums? What do they think of the other box set coming out that has cover versions of all the soundtrack songs? Etc. I could talk to him for hours.