First Listen: Karen O’s Score To ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ In New Featurette

Spike Jonze’s “Where The Wild Things Are” is down at San Diego right now where fans will be soon treated to what is likely new footage of the picture at Comic-Con 2009. To coincide with that event no doubt, Warner Bros. has released a new featurette (possibly the same footage the Con-goers are seeing?) of the picture with Jonze and ‘Wild Things’ creator Maurice Sendak.

It’s a cute and affable clip that involves the director and author talking about the genesis of the book, how it wasn’t well-accepted at first and how it took librarians and critics a long time to accept it before it became the bona fide kids classic that we all now know and adore. Scenes from the film are interspersed throughout the piece, and there are a few new clips and behind-the-scenes stuff later on that is pretty cool.
But the real draw here? Sweet, chirping and cooing music in the background with acoustic guitars, a female vocal and twinkling glockenspiels. Yup, that’s your first listen to Karen O’s score for the picture, and we must say it sounds exactly like we envisioned. (And if you’ve been reading this site long enough, you’ve surely read us saying, ‘it’s probably twinkling, sweet music with bells and little gentle girl melodies,’ which is essentially exactly what it sounds like). Keep in mind film composer Carter Burwell (“Adaptation,” “Being John Malkovich,” many a Coen Brothers film) also helped score some of the picture, so some of that music might be his (perhaps the melancholy piano tunes later on?), but there’s definitely some of Karen O’s music in this thing. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ singer has called her music “sweet, innocent” songs for kids, and that’s essentially what she’s delivered. Members of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, Jonze’s brother, producer Squeak-E Clean and Bradford Cox of Deerhunter assisted the recording of some of this material as well, but the score is credited to O and Burwell only — however, there does appear to be a pretty uptempo “pop” song at the end of the feature that sounds like O plus a whole gang of friends. We’ll be honest, we’ve listened to it already, it’s a little melancholy and we love it (it’s basically everything we hoped for).Oh and apparently YYYs Yeah Yeah/Folk Implosion collaborator Imaad Wasif helped out musically as well.
Sendak has some really kind words for Jonze in it too: “What I’ve seen him do, he’s turned [‘Wild things’] into his without giving up mine…with embodying mine with Spike Jonze, and astonishingly it maintains its peculiarness as a work, but it flows throughout. The whole thing is such a strange thing. I’ve never seen a movie that looks like this. It’s his personal this. He’s not afraid of himself. He’s a real artist that let’s it come through the work. So he’s touched me very much.”
You can see it below or you can see it in HD over at Apple. There’s actually a “new” trailer for the film over there as well (which is essentially a shorter version of the first that you’ve already seen). “Where The Wild Things Are” hits theaters October 16.