Hey, don't cry, okay? A great love is a lot like a good memory. When it's there, and you know it's there, but it's just out of your reach, it can be all that you think about. And you can focus on it and try to force it. But the more that you do, the more you seem to push it away. But if you're patient and hold still, maybe, just maybe, it'll come to you. I just have to be somewhere that she can find me. And I mean, hey, if you're going to spend the rest of your life in a memory, why not make it a good one?
the music in WOT is never random. even if it's just very soft background music, it's relevant to the scene. practically every time there's music playing while egwene is onscreen during s2, the tune is egwene's theme, rearranged and reinstrumentated in dozens of different ways to match the tone of the particular scene. mat has quick little snippets of his theme tune play during various scenes of his, often mixed with the old blood theme from s1, and it finally blares out in full glory for the first time during the horn of valere scene, to parallel how mat is truly finding himself for the first time. even secondary characters like liandrin, siuan, and aviendha have their own dedicated theme tunes that play during their scenes and are never repurposed as background music in other characters' scenes. and all the themes have lyrics in the old tongue that suit the character or concept the theme is about! in conclusion, lorne balfe is truly doing the Most, and i'm so grateful he's the composer for WOT and i hope he'll return for every season the show goes for.
ROWLAND S. HOWARD, Toronto, April Fool's Day, 1988.
Rowland S. Howard was one of a handful of my guitar heroes (a list that includes Andy Gill, Ricky Wilson, Keith Levene and Robert Quine.) This is probably why I made the effort to photograph Howard and his band when they came through town, despite not having an assignment or a venue where the photos would be published. I brought along my studio in a bag and found the same helpfully empty space behind the bar at the Silver Dollar Room, the same place where I'd photographed Lydia Lunch two months earlier. These three shoots I did early in 1988 were crucial and coincidentally connected as Howard worked with Lunch throughout his life (their collaborative "concept album" Honeymoon in Red had been released the year previous), as had Henry Rollins, the next subject in my ad hoc studio at the Silver Dollar, who would also work with Howard.
I found Rowland S. Howard to be polite and friendly, with impeccable manners - very different from the haunted-looking man who would stalk the stage chain-smoking in concert videos I'd seen of The Birthday Party of Crime & the City Solution. He was in town with These Immortal Souls, the band he'd formed with his brother Harry Howard, his girlfiend Genevieve McGuckin and drummer Epic Soundtracks (born Kevin Godfrey), but for some reason McGuckin didn't make the Toronto show, part of a tour supporting their first record, Get Lost (Don't Lie). I spent most of the three rolls of film I ran through my Mamiya C330 trying to get a decent portrait of Howard, but shot the band together on the last half of the third roll, where Epic is wearing a Black Flag t-shirt; These Immortal Souls were the first non-American band on the Flag's label, SST.
Rowland S. Howard smoked all through my shoot with him, which I spent trying to get something that captured his somewhat wasted elegance. My white backdrop, a painter's tarp, had taken on some impressive wrinkles while stuffed in the gym bag it lived in between shoots, and it's taken considerable skill and digital magic to get these shots to look as slick as I had imagined them while doing this shoot nearly forty years ago. In the end I think they capture a few different facets of Howard, who would be in poor health for many years after I met him, afflicted from Hepatitis C that would lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer and ultimately kill him in 2009, at just fifty. Epic Soundtracks would die suddenly in his London home in 1997, after recording several acclaimed solo albums. Autoluminescent, a documentary about Howard, would come out in 2011.
Can we talk about how House MD actually has such an amazing soundtrack? Like bangers from Gorillaz, Alanis Morissette, David Bowie, Radiohead, Mazzy Star, Korn, Amy Winehouse, Jeff Buckley, Metallica, and Fiona Apple. There’s so many amazing songs I could literally go on and on.
The full soundtrack on Spotify here if you want to check it out.
Hey everyone. If you're a fan of Osmosis Jones, and if you knew the movie was originally rated PG-13, you may want to make a playlist of what the original script's soundtrack would've been like before we had the final soundtrack! To get started, you can use Spotify or YouTube. Good luck on your playlists!