#if you have seen my two cowboys side a side b extended universe mixtape you'll also comprehend.

[bellshazes]

putting theme for ennio moricone not only once, but twice on the kingmaker playlist is such an impassioned decision and i would love to hear ur thought process behind it

also ive been listening to this playlist nonstop for like three weeks and now my current top genre on spotify is stomp and holler LMAO

MBD's restaurant, Pizza Lupo, features western posters on its walls; the love for Morricone, father of spaghetti western music, is so genuine and it shows in every note. Theme (for Ennio Morricone) conjures visions of a cowboy looking out over a landscape as the sun is just dipping below the horizon. It is a brief two minutes and forty nine seconds before something precipitous, that moment at the cliff's edge, a stillness that is gathering momentum. The guitar leads and 22 seconds later the cello joins, smoother and slow, bolstering, gathering resolve and momentum. It dangles and the cello falls like a leaf in the wind until the guitar returns with the swelling percussion, the cello now confident and going somewhere. Together, with the higher cry of the trumpet, it builds up and onward into a steady syncopated symphony of something just shy of triumph, a march that recalls the melodies and rhythms of Morricone's Chapel Shootout or other moments before shots fired and lives lost. It ends there, just shy of suddenly, the twanging guitar and sonorous cello and exhaling trumpet fading out in moments.

However. The bonus track extended version from Fuego contains within it the entirety of the original. The guitar, the cello opening; but at 49 seconds, the cello's solo has softer strumming, it draws out a repetition of phrases, it wallows in that low, low space of contemplation before beginning to rise. The guitar still returns with the mounting percussive march, but the second cello line catches on an upward tone, straining more and more from 1:30 all the way until 2:05 where the guitar and percussion cut out again, leaving a solitary lone, deep, cello to wallow for the briefest moment before the chorus of instruments come together like woven threads, the trumpet stretching out alongside it, overlaying a hope that can't be reached until the full march commences again at 2:49. The trumpet comes in and out, still weaving, and the march repeats and tries and tries and tries to come to the denouement but it ends as it had before.

Theme for Ennio Morricone (Extended Version) is still that cowboy looking out at the setting sun from the edge of something higher, but he resists; he struggles. There is a coiling in the gut that writhes and fights before being born again in the low, lonely pit of despair into something glorious and final and doomed. It is seeing the bleak future and resolving to go out blazing anyway. It is paralleled only in emotional journey by certain delicate, intricate, trembling pieces of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D but while they both dance toward and away from a realization there is no shy love here, only an inevitability you can either regret or embrace.

In the playlist, the first version separates the story of chasing down and finding and losing in The Other Shore redux that leads to rebirth and attempted change of identity of 52 Ford/Spring Break 1899 from the wild forward momentum of Steal Away, Rambin', Riders, Ball and Chain. The extended version guides us back to the bittersweet Raw Deal, the post-death, the mourning of Ghost Fields, Everything Must Rest, and leaves us in the embrace of the gutterseason, of being low down and still going before the cycle repeats because, well, there's still time to start again. The two moments captured in the Morricone tributes, extended and not, make me feel the same way I do when I think of Bdubs on the ruined snow fort tower insisting he's loved and dying because he embraced the possibility he might go out guns a-blazing too fiercely.