Film Soundtracks on Vinyl: A Starter's Guide
A great film soundtrack gets a second life. The movie ends, the credits roll, and the record keeps going: on your turntable, at a dinner party, in headphones on the train. Some of the most loved records in the shop started out as movie music: orchestral scores, synth landscapes, needle-drop mixtapes, and albums of original songs that outgrew their films.
The ten records below are the film soundtracks we hand people first. Every pick is a pressing we carry, chosen because it is the right record, not the convenient one. Work through them and you will touch New Hollywood, blaxploitation, the first summer blockbuster, Studio Ghibli, and the mixtape era. When you are ready to dig past these ten, the soundtracks collection is the bin to browse.
Nino Rota - The Godfather (Original Soundtrack) (Cannoli Cream & Moe Green Color) Vinyl LP
Start with the most recognizable film music ever written. Nino Rota came to Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 epic with decades of Italian cinema behind him, much of it beside Fellini, and he scores the Corleones like an opera: the lonely trumpet, the waltz that follows the family from wedding to war, the love theme drifting in from Sicily. This La La Land pressing comes in Cannoli Cream and Moe Green colors, a nod fans will clock. Rota scored The Godfather Part II as well; ask at the counter and we will point you the right way.
Marvin Gaye - Trouble Man (Motion Picture Soundtrack) Vinyl LP
Marvin Gaye followed What's Going On with something nobody expected: a film score. Cut for the 1972 crime picture and released on Tamla, Trouble Man is mostly instrumental, all Moog bass, muted horns, and after-hours saxophone, with Gaye's falsetto surfacing on the title song. Half a century later a Marvel movie could hand it to Captain America as everything he missed in one album. The single T Plays It Cool b/w T Stands For Trouble is in the bins as a 7 inch, and What's Going On belongs beside it on any shelf.
John Williams - Jaws (Original Motion Picture Score) (50th Anniversary) Vinyl LP
Two notes. John Williams played the shark with two notes, and beaches have never fully recovered. The 1975 score is bigger than its theme: the sea-shanty brightness of the Orca heading out, the skittering strings as the cage goes into the water. Spielberg's mechanical shark barely worked, so the music had to be the monster, and it was. This 50th anniversary edition gives the score the pressing it deserves. Williams runs deep in our racks: Star Wars: A New Hope and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets both carry that unmistakable signature.
Various - Grease (Original Soundtrack) Vinyl LP
Grease is the rare movie musical whose songs became pop songs. John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John trade "Summer Nights" and "You're the One That I Want," and the title track, written by Barry Gibb and sung by Frankie Valli, welds the 50s setting to a 70s disco strut without apologizing for the anachronism. Every side plays like a curtain call. If you grew up on the movie, this 1978 double LP is pure memory on wax; if you did not, it works as a party record from the first needle drop.
Vangelis - Blade Runner (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Vinyl LP
Vangelis scored Ridley Scott's 1982 film largely alone in his London studio, coaxing rain-slicked neon out of a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer, and then the album sat unreleased until 1994, which only deepened the legend. "Main Titles" still sounds like a city waking up, the "Love Theme" gives Dick Morrissey's saxophone the loneliest room in film music, and the "End Titles" pulse never ages. Same universe, different corner: Blade Runner Black Lotus, the anime series soundtrack, is in the racks too, and the 2049 sequel's score continues the story.
Pulp Fiction (Original Soundtrack) Vinyl LP
Quentin Tarantino built his 1994 soundtrack like a DJ set: Dick Dale's "Misirlou" kicks the door in, Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man" cools the room, Chuck Berry, Al Green, and Urge Overkill keep it moving, and the dialogue drop-ins put you right back in the booth at Jack Rabbit Slim's. It rewired what a soundtrack album could be and sent a generation digging for surf records. His other needle-drop pictures reward the follow-up: Jackie Brown, his soul-deep Elmore Leonard adaptation, and True Romance, which he wrote, are both on the shelf.
Joe Hisaishi - Princess Mononoke: Soundtrack (Remastered, Limited Edition) Vinyl LP
Joe Hisaishi's 1997 score for Hayao Miyazaki's forest epic is the grandest thing Studio Ghibli ever put to tape: a full orchestra swinging between menace and heartbreak, with the Ashitaka theme standing among the most beautiful melodies in film. This remastered pressing is a Japanese import on Studio Ghibli Records. Hisaishi and Miyazaki built a whole world together, and the racks hold more doors into it: Howl's Moving Castle and Porco Rosso are the next two to open.
Various - The Big Lebowski (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Vinyl LP
The Coen brothers credited T Bone Burnett as a music archivist, and his job was to build the Dude a record collection. The result abides. Bob Dylan's "The Man in Me" is now inseparable from the opening credits, Kenny Rogers & The First Edition's "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" scores the great bowling dream sequence, and the Gipsy Kings' Spanish-language "Hotel California" introduces Jesus. Library music listeners will clock Piero Piccioni's "Traffic Boom" in there too. Burnett's next soundtrack job sits one spot down this list.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Music From the Motion Picture) Vinyl LP
T Bone Burnett again, this time building the Coens a whole Depression-era radio dial: Appalachian ballads, gospel, chain-gang hollers, and bluegrass, anchored by the Soggy Bottom Boys' "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" with Dan Tyminski singing for George Clooney. Alison Krauss floats through "Down to the River to Pray," and Ralph Stanley's unaccompanied "O Death" stops the room every time. The album set off a roots revival that has not really ended. We carry the standard pressing, and the 25th anniversary Dapper Dan red edition for the full pomade effect.
Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 Vinyl LP
The mixtape as plot device. Peter Quill's Awesome Mix is the cassette his mother made him, and the 2014 album turns a Walkman's worth of AM gold, Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling," Redbone's "Come and Get Your Love," David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream," 10cc, the Runaways, into the gateway soundtrack for a whole generation of collectors. This is the record we sell to someone buying a first turntable and to parents buying a kid's first LP. When side two runs out, Awesome Mix Vol. 2 keeps the party going.
Ten records, fifty years of movies, and not a dud side in the stack. The soundtracks collection is where the digging continues, and if the game side of the screen calls to you, the video game soundtracks collection is its own deep bin. Come by the shop and tell us the one we left out; that argument is half the fun.
