Back in August, Hoboken indie-rockers Yo La Tengo announced they would be finally releasing their various film score work in a collection CD called, They Shoot, We Score via their own website starting in September.
They did that, we bought a copy and then forgot all about it. Well, it’s fantastic, we dug it up and decided today was as good a day as any to show-off some clips. Well, that and the fact that Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy & Lucy” is coming out in December and YLT scored her previous film, the excellent minimalist road-trip/estranged friends story, “Old Joy.”
Nope, YLT didn’t have anything to do with ‘Wendy,’ (there’s barely any music in it at all, it’s a micro-small picture), but their introspective and gorgeously pastoral work in “Old Joy” was literally something we asked Matador records about probably every six months we wanted it so bad (“Path To Springs” and “Driving Home” are both from that film).
Their work on the other super-winning and modest indie, “Junebug,” (helmed by the video filmmaker pal Phil Morrison – he directed their “Sugarcube” video), amounted to them simply reworking their 1997 song, “Green Arrow” (from I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One) over and over again in different forms, but it’s a lovely and sad, heartbreaking song and Morrison made a smart choice to tap its cinematic potential (represented by the track, “Ashley”).
Yo La Tengo also did film score work on John Cameron Mitchell’s “Shortbus,” and Michael Hoffman’s Michael-Keaton-starrer, “Game 6” and we include the track, “Game Time,” from our little preview below. You can buy, They Shoot, We Score, on the band’s website and we recommend that you do. Yo La Tengo’s music will next appear in Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age film, “Adventureland” which comes out in the spring of 2009 (it’s one of the best scripts we read all year).
