According to one metric, these are the two greatest soundtracks of all time

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I’m not going to keep in suspense. Here’s the metric:

Times in which Lady Steed and I watched a movie and immediately had to have the soundtrack. It was non-negotiable.

The first was in 2001. We were in Vegas, en route between Utah and California, pausing to visit my brother. We also caught a movie. We had to choose between Ocean’s Eleven and Amélie (can’t go wrong there!), and went with the former. We loved it. It’s such a cool movie and so well written and acted and edited, etc etc. Just a killer movie. And the music! The music’s incredible! I came up with a surefire money-making plan. Put a vending machine in theaters with cds of the now-playing movie’s soundtracks. I would have purchased it then and there, even at a premium.

Of course, now anyone can do that by pulling up their phone…and they’ll probably just stream it rather than buy it. This is an idea who’s moment peaked before I had it. The Nineties were the heyday of soundtracks and the idea would have made hand-over-fist from circa 1994 to 2000. But I think also you coulda sold plenty of copies of Help! and Blue Hawaii back in the day. Maybe they did. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

Anyway, before we left town we went to Best Buy or something and bought the soundtrack.

Something soundracks did from this era (another example: Napoleon Dynamite [2004]) which I don’t like—even for movies I love and quote to this day like Ocean’s Eleven and Napoleon Dynamite—is intersperse the songs with quotes from the film. Sometimes they’re even over the top of each other.

Don’t do that.

The Ocean’s Eleven soundtrack got way less play from us because I don’t want to hear actors giving lines, even great lines, when I’m listening to the killer jazz riffs of David Holmes and people he likes, from Elvis to Perry to Quincy to Debussy. The music is so good. Even though they botched it, I’ve no regrets buying it. Great soundtrack. And, for 289 months, the only soundtrack in the history of Planet Earth to be so great we had to purchase it as soon as we left the theater.

There are soundtracks I like more. Romeo + Juliet is a favorite, but I knew the album years before I saw the movie (it came out while I was on my mission; Lady Steed had the album when we got married). Toys may be my all-time favorite soundtrack but, even though I loved the trailer, it was in and out of theaters way to fast to see first. Bambi might be the sountrack I’ve listened to the most times, but I saw the movie lonnnng before I bought the music. I definitely bought the soundtracks for A Goofy Movie and Garden State and Fantastic Mr. Fox because I dug the movies and their music but days or weeks or months passed before I bought the music. By the time I bought the Keeping the Faith soundtrack I couldn’t really even remember what I thought about the movie or the music.

But constrained to buy the soundtrack immediately? That finally recurred on Friday, January 23, 2025, after seeing The Testament of Ann Lee. A movie with music unlike anything else I’ve mentioned so far.

It’s a mix of old-timey hymns and noise music, but you get flavors of many other things here and there. Weirdly it reminds me of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (amazing, but purchased years later), but the reasons for that are hard to explain if you haven’t listened to Ann Lee tomorrow.

Ann Lee is sort of a musical. By which I mean it’s a musical but it’s unlike any musical I’ve ever seen before. Did you know it’s possible to make a musical excised of all its fantasy? I didn’t know that! But it ends up you can!

Sadly, this is not available as physical media. Happily because that meant I bought a download as soon as we got home but sadly because I don’t know, for instance, what tracks Alan Sparhawk sings on. There’s a lot of information I WANT TO KNOW about the soundtrack for The Testament of Ann Lee and it doesn’t seem to be publicly available (though this was interesting). This is very sad. Since no physical version, I guess Discogs will never know either?

(Incidentally, if this is not enough horror for you, check out the many, many AI-generated “books” titled The Testament of Ann Lee now for sale on Amazon.)

That Sunday, I listened to the soundtrack several times. It’s intense and beautiful and strange, like the movie itself. It demands that we ask questions about the place of women in our religious communities and the place for the ecstatic in our lives and the role of agency for good or nill and how beauty and ugliness combine to create meaning.

Anyway, since I wrote my review (which will go live here at the end of the month, or you can see a slightly different version on Letterboxd now), the movie has only grown in my estimation. I haven’t stopped thinking about it and now I can sing all the songs as well.

Two masterpieces.

The greatests of all time—at least according to one mertic.