Reviews of movie soundtracks isn’t really something we usually bother with but seeing there’s a general shortage in starlet news we’ll just do it to fill the site a bit. The last couple of weeks there were two soundtracks released that matter to this site; the one being Twilight and the other Bolt. Seeing Twilight is only a collection of random songs drawn from all sorts of artists we’re not going to bother with it. Instead we’re going to focus on the Bolt soundtrack. The reviews for the movies have actually been very good so far but the soundtrack is being ignored a bit, though there’s a reason for that.
It’s a movie soundtrack so there aren’t actually that many songs on the CD, most of it is part of the score. So it’s basically just music without singing; it helps create a certain feeling to a scene. While the background music in a movie still seems to be important the songs aren’t anymore. Over the years it seems that less and less songs are being written for particular movies, they usually put a song into a movie that did well on the charts or if it fits a certain theme. Bolt however contains two songs purpose written for the movie itself.
Lets start off with the score; the score was written by John Powell who is a big name in Hollywood though not the biggest. He’s not amongst the select few who has ever won an Oscar for Best Original Score of was even nominated; he won plenty of other awards though. He also has quite a bit of experience with writing original scores for animated movies like Kung Fu Panda earlier this year. So it’s all very solid and you can’t really fault the CD on that, it’s just something that someone has to be interested in. The bulk of the public usually doesn’t buy a soundtrack because of its score.
Now to the Original Songs on the CD; one of them being Howling at the Moon performed by Jenny Lewis. Jenny only has a very minor voice role in the movie so the song is actually her main involvement in the movie; she also wrote the song. There is a clear country feel to the song and that’s also something that the movie makers wanted to achieve, seeing the movie deals with a cross country trip for the main character Bolt and his companions. The song is a solid country song, nothing extremely exciting but not bad either.
The main thing on the soundtrack is the first track though. When you have Miley Cyrus and John Travolta as the main names on your movie poster it’s quite obvious who’s going to sing the main soundtrack. So obviously I Thought I Lost You is a duet by Miley and John. Again the general feel of the song is more of a country direction though less than Barking at the Moon. I’ve discussed the song a bit before though that wasn’t actually the full thing, it was only a 90 second clip to go with a promotional video for Bolt on the Disney Channel.
With the full song the same question remains though; why is John Travolta even there? Miley’s voice is a lot more powerful than Johns so he can only be clearly heard in his solo ports; Miley has more solo parts than John though. In general the song is quite catchy once you’ve heard it more often. Though there is one section in a solo for John Travolta where the lyrics get quite awkward to sing and don’t quite seem to go with the rhythm of the song.
Now the song itself might be quite alright but that’s not the interesting part. As before mentioned there aren’t that many original songs written for movies anymore so the Academy of Motion Picture had trouble filling the section over the last couple of years. Probably best illustrated by last year when they nominated three songs from the movie Enchanted in the category (though none of them actually won). There are already reports from Oscar insiders that I Thought I Lost You is actually one of the favorites for the category of Best Original Song this year.
That in itself is nothing spectacular; Disney has won six Oscars for Best Original Song in the last twenty years for their animated movies. The thing is that Miley wrote the song together with Jeffrey Steele (who Miley picked to write it with her), so we could actually see Miliey getting nominated for an Oscar in 2009, who would have thought that. Looking at what other songs could be considered for nomination it’s not that strange though; most of them just plain suck (mainly Another Way to Die by Jack White and Alicia Keys) or are boring as hell. If I were to guess the main competition would come from another Disney movie even from the same producer; Peter Gabriel did the song Down to Earth for Pixar’s Wall*E. It would be quite funny to see Miley lift an Oscar statue though, looking at how many people don’t actually take her seriously as an artist. They don’t even believe that she writes a lot of her own music, so it would prove most of those people wrong.
This however is about the Bolt soundtrack and not the Oscars so what’s the final verdict on the Bolt soundtrack? Well, all of it is adequate. Nothing really spectacular and the only really good thing on it is I Thought I Lost You. So we’re going for a three out of five for this one.
Tags: Miley Cyrus
