Cool Stuff: Try Not To Lose Your Head Over Danny Elfman's New Sleepy Hollow Vinyl Soundtrack
A man of science. A woman of mystery. A legend that will never die.
With the spooky season in full swing, you might find yourself revisiting Tim Burton's horror fantasy romance "Sleepy Hollow." When Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is sent to the village of Sleepy Hollow to investigate the decapitations of three people, he learns the seemingly impossible truth that the culprit behind these deaths is none other than the legendary apparition known as The Headless Horseman (Christopher Walken). Then there's also the enigmatic Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), a beautiful girl with secret ties to the supernatural terror.
"Sleepy Hollow" was one of the last movies Tim Burton made before becoming aggressively mediocre, and as with many of the filmmaker's productions, it's given a helping hand by the brilliant score provided by composer Danny Elfman. Now, you can bring the haunting themes home to your record player with the release of a new "Sleepy Hollow" vinyl soundtrack from Waxwork Records. Fans of bloody heads will be very pleased to see the artwork on this album. Check it out below!
'That's the problem, he was dead to begin with'
Waxwork Records has the "Sleepy Hollow" 2xLP vinyl soundtrack on sale today for $40 (plus shipping). In addition to the score being available for the first time on vinyl, it comes housed in a beautiful gatefold jacket featuring artwork by Steven Reeves, complete with matte satin coating and blood red spot UV gloss varnish. Inside, you'll also find a 12x12 art print that will be immediately recognizable to the "Sleepy Hollow" fans out there.
As Waxwork Records notes in their press release, the score is filled with "weighty brass, eerie choral pieces, and unnerving strings," creating the perfect soundscape for Tim Burton's gothic fairy tale. The fact that the record itself is presented in a "Skull White, Blood Red, and Black Steed Swirl" only makes this more of a must-have for fans.
Waxwork Records
Back in 1999, Soundtrack Magazine spoke with Elfman about his work on the score, the evolution of which turned out to be rather challenging. The composer said:
"It was so difficult, because in this score every cue almost overlaps every other cue! There's only about 10 minutes of movie that doesn't have score. So when it's like that, every change you make affects everything else. Sometimes they would cut 12 seconds out, and then that one cue no longer went into the other. And then they would move two scenes around, and it would involve radical rethinking of certain areas, much more than you would think a 6- or an 8- or a 12-second lift would do, because it used to flow seamlessly from one cue into the next, and now it's jarring. So I'd have to back-up, back-up, back-up, and then re-write the whole ending, and end in a different key. It's like dominoes. Once you start changing one area you have to start changing more and more and, when you thought you're only going to deal with two bars you're now dealing with forty!"
Hopefully you appreciate all his hard work all over again when you put this one on the turntable.