Coach Carter Soundtrack

What is the perfect Soundtrack?
Given the wants and habits of novelist Nick Hornby’s characters (not to mention his own, as unlucky devotees of The New Yorker learned from Hornby's shoddy attempts at music criticism), you’d think a movie adaptation of one of his tales would be set to a rather carefully chosen soundtrack: a compendium of important songs from years past, each with a specific meaning and role. You’d think there’d be a lineage, a statement about pop culture and its influence on a certain generation of self-indulgent British men of the upper middle class. That there’d be a comfortable grounding in tradition. That the history of pop would keep us attuned to the development of the plot and maturity of the characters.
Yet in this case, you’d be wrong.
One of the most significantly novel contributions to the movie About A Boy -- a heart-stringer blessed with decent writing and the now-distinguishedly wrinkled who-me? glances of that ever-dashing cad, Hugh Grant -- is the original soundtrack and incidental music composed and performed by the Brit singer-songwriter with the coincidental name, Badly Drawn Boy (a.k.a. Damon Gough).
It’s innocent in that Mark Mothersbaugh-Royal Tenenbaums way via the childlike chimes of a celesta, mildly raw and therefore bittersweet on account of prickly acoustic guitar strumming, tuneful in a ’70s lite-rock method (perhaps to gel with the movie’s climactic set-piece featuring Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”), and often above rhythms that jump the normal 4/4 pattern and instead shake things up in the middle of the bar with syncopations and unexpected twists. In all, an original set of movie tunes that does the one thing most movie tunes can’t: please listeners who choose to hear the album as exactly that -- an album.
Brilliant!, as a Hornby character might utter upon receiving a gift of hip new trainers. Of course writing movie music that works for its film is a virtue. But writing songs that live lives of their own after the flick hits the video store is quite another thing. One that often eludes even the most successful musicians. So why haven’t we heard of Damon Gough before?
Simple. Badly Drawn Boy is an indie artist (his strong 2000 debut is called The Hour of Bewilderbeast). The kind you catch at a downtown club around, say, midnight, when you’ve already had a few drinks and are not so much listening to the music as contemplating what and who the rest of your evening has in store. The kind you groove to without analysis. The kind that serves as the soundtrack to your life if you’re an urban person under 40 or so who still sees the pub or pool room as a part of your social life.
It may not be pop, but it’s certainly populist, and that’s why it strikes a chord with a story about people on the fringe who find solace in each other. When artists like Sting pen music for a film about human emotions, it has a sheen, a professional glow it cannot escape. And music like that is hard to connect to on a truly gut level. It’s always just out of reach, regardless of how moving it is.
Gough’s tunes -- some are purely instrumental and orchestrated in a symphonic way with nice, if not sappy use of strings and winds -- don’t try too hard. Like the alienated characters in Hornboy’s tale, they’re potent, worthwhile constructs that exist outside of a grand drama, and mesh with one another because they’ve nowhere else to go.
The album is sort of a chameleon: a smorgasbord of influences whose one constant is loneliness of Gough’s lyrics and John Lennon-like voice. “A Peak You Reach” is an upbeat bluesy riff that bounces along to lyrics like “I’m freezing cold,” “forcing answers into questions” and “I want you to know I know it’s not easy.” “Something to Talk About” is perhaps the album signature song: It’s used as the backdrop to Hugh Grant’s soliloquies about how if men are islands, he’s Ibiza; it lives on account of its bass-line -- a heartbeat that takes you back to the outsiderism of Fine Young Cannibals.
Other tracks sound like they paid attention to the famous VW Cabrio commercial accompanied by the Nick Drake song “Pink Moon”; Drake’s music is jazzy and folksy at once, while calming and morose at the same time. “Above You, Below Me” bops about like a Renaissance gigue. And though it’s been said too many times in the music press, “A Minor Incident,” is a really tight paean to Bob Dylan songwriting, acoustic reality and being brave.
Of course, the About a Boy soundtrack may not be the finest film music ever written. But it has a lot of heart, and a good handful of well-written songs by a guy who’s very unpopularity makes his work more successful -- on the surface and below. Which is enough for me to recommend it. The only question now is if Badly Drawn Boy will be able to maintain that indie appeal in the wake of the serious success that surely awaits him. Only a fistful of artists ever have.