In light of the deep concern encompassing the country following this week’s presidential election, you might be looking for a cinematic reminder that ultimately love wins. That message is at the heart of Jeff Nichols‘ gentle, true story drama “Loving,” and the director has once again sought out the composer David Wingo (“Midnight Special,” “Mud,” “Take Shelter“) to bring his musical touch to the picture.
Starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga, “Loving” chronicles the relationship of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple who married and then spent the next nine years fighting for the right to live as a family in their Virginia hometown. The civil rights case that they brought, Loving v. Virginia, went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the resulting 1967 judgment invalidated state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Wingo’s delicate score is a key ingredient to the film’s power.
“Jeff [Nichols] at the end of the day saw ‘Loving’ first and foremost as a love story, and that was how he wanted to tell it. So the score needed to be elemental and simple to a certain degree while avoiding any sentimentality to capture the grace and beauty of Richard and Mildred,” Wingo said. “All of my scores for Jeff have had orchestral elements to varying degrees, but he knew that the main themes for ‘Loving’ needed to be traditional orchestral scores without any modern elements. The other main thing that Jeff needed the score to accomplish was to really reflect the always present anxiety and tension that they were living with all those years. Those pieces don’t just operate in a different way than the other themes, but are completely different instrumentation as well, with hardly any orchestral elements.”
The “Loving” Original Motion Picture Soundtrack arrives digitally on November 11th (and can be pre-ordered right now), and physically on November 18th. Listen to our exclusive stream of the full album below, which also includes the original song “Loving” by Ben Nichols.