Thursday, December 17, 2020

A soundtrack

The Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? was released to theaters twenty years ago. It's one of the brothers' best and its soundtrack was enormously successful, too. T Bone Burnett produced the music, as he had also done for The Big Lebowski. The soundtrack helped revive interest in bluegrass. An essay about the music, "O Brother, Where Aren’t Thou?: The Two-Decade Cultural Impact of ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’" concludes with a quotation from Burnett:
The thing that has stuck with me the most over the years...is how many people have told me that they’ve played these songs at their weddings and at family members’ funerals and all these other major life events. Or that they remember their grandfather playing one of these songs on the front porch when they used to go visit him when they were children. These songs have entered so many personal lives at important moments and people seem really happy to have both those old reminders and the new memories. Something I always tell the artists I work with is that the song’s arrow shouldn’t point to themselves, it should point to the listener. Every time someone tells me a personal story about a touching moment involving a song from O Brother, then I’m reminded that we were successful at the most important thing.





"O Brother, Where Aren’t Thou?: The Two-Decade Cultural Impact of ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’

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