Movie theme songs no longer rule charts
Christy Lemire

LOS ANGELES—There was a time around 1997 when no matter where you were — in the car, on the StairMaster, at the dentist’s office — you couldn’t help but hear “My Heart Will Go On,” the soaring Celine Dion ballad from “Titanic.” Resistance was futile. It did go on, and on, and on — an example not just of great marketing, but of the kind of movie theme song that no longer exists.
These extinct songs were big and poignant on their own, but also used skilfully within their films. They became “a souvenir” of the theatrical experience, as six-time Oscar-nominated songwriter Diane Warren puts it. For decades, theme songs like “Evergreen” or “Arthur’s Theme” or “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” were huge radio hits, often peaking at No. 1 on the pop chart and going on to win the Academy Award for best original song. (All the tunes mentioned so far have received the honour; the list of winners throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s is staggering.)
But in the past few years, filmmakers like Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson (following the example set by directors like Martin Scorsese) have been more likely to choose pre-existing songs to punctuate a moment or create a certain mood. Then those soundtracks — like the ones for Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky,” Anderson’s “Rushmore” or Zach Braff’s “Garden State” — go on to be popular themselves.
It seems there’s just no room on the pop charts any more for an “Up Where We Belong” (from “An Officer and a Gentleman”) or a “Take My Breath Away” (from “Top Gun”). Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” rap from the 2002 film “8 Mile” is the rare recent Oscar winner that’s also had radio success — as catchy as “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” was from 2005’s “Hustle & Flow,” it wasn’t exactly radio-friendly.
What made those songs work, Warren said, is that “they’re hit songs, first and foremost. They fit the movie and they exist outside the movie.
“`I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,’” which earned Warren an Oscar nomination, “was a hit song,” she says. “It helps that it was with `Armageddon’ and it was used really well, but I think Aerosmith would have had a hit with that song (anyway).”
So where did those original tunes go?
Jesse Harris, the Grammy-winning songwriter of Norah Jones’ hit “Don’t Know Why,” who also wrote the music for Ethan Hawke’s “The Hottest State,” thinks filmmakers just don’t bother to seek out them out anymore.
“What movies used to do,” he said, is “create a nostalgia that was specific to the film itself, and the only way to do that is to use original music.” Of course, radio has changed vastly and become more genre-specific over the past decade, which hurts enormous movie songs with intended mass appeal, said Kid Kelly, a DJ on Sirius satellite radio’s top-40 channel Hits 1. He points out that adult contemporary stations, where many of these movie themes traditionally have been popular, can be broken down even further to “hot,” “urban” and “soft” subgroups.
“There’s so much fragmentation out there, it’s hard to find the right song,” he said. “So my guess is that they just stopped looking.” Singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche, whose music appears in the Steve Carell comedy “Dan in Real Life,” thinks tastes have changed irrevocably from the 1970s and ‘80s.
“It was a different time for songwriters. I started thinking immediately about that Burt Bacharach song from `Arthur,’” Lerche said. “It’s impossible today with the music climate, trends, styles, to imagine a songwriter like Burt Bacharach or his equal today writing a song like that. It’s just so unfashionable in a way. It would be perhaps a great song and a great moment in a film but it would never be a huge hit. It would never have a pop-culture impact, it wouldn’t be played on commercial radio.” “I don’t know,” he added. “Maybe if 50 Cent did the theme for some big romantic comedy.”