01 December 2005

nick cave & warren ellis - "the rider song" (from the proposition original soundtrack, available for preorder here.)

"the rider song," if i understand right, is the end-titles music for the proposition, the first movie that nick cave has written. i believe he has said that the film is so violent--shock! i wonder if it's also biblical!--that he wanted people to go home w/ a nice, gentle melody to hum along to.

"the rider song" is such a song, then. it's a collaboration w/ warren ellis, whose violin always has a way of undermining the nice and gentle. the lyrics, wherein the sun, the moon, and the stars are personified, tell a tale of something like the odyssey, only really really abridged, w/ some psalm 23 thrown in for good measure--it's a bit "sheep may safely graze," actually. the sun, though, isn't apollo, nor the moon artemis; one gets the sense that there are no gods in cave's tale, and that there's a God is v. much a subject of doubt. this is, of course, where ellis's violin comes in. it is the only element of the song that conveys to the listener just what the movie might be about; it likely plays this role throughout the entirety of the soundtrack. death, destruction, and chaos, and warren fiddles.

sounds like a movie!

No comments: