Mark Isham: Trouble in Mind (soundtrack)

I searched for this album for the better part of a decade and found it in an unlikely place. Tim and I were on holiday in Barcelona — our get-away-from-it-all break at the end of the traumatic year of 1999 — and I came across this when we did our tour of CD shops on the last morning.

It's not one of those great soundtracks that transcends the film from which it was taken, but I really love that film. For the latter part of the '80s, after I discovered this film, Choose Me and Remember My Name, Alan Rudolph was just about my favourite filmmaker. Those three films are what I call his 'probationer trilogy': the protagonists return to a scene of a major turning point in their lives, sometimes, as in Trouble in Mind, literally from prison, and find themselves unable to avoid going back over the events that got them into trouble the first time round.

Rudolph himself seems compelled to repeat this theme, adding new layers each time (Nietzschean eternal recurrence, the Freudian talking cure in Choose Me, and even some Buddhist imagery evoking reincarnation in this film). But he does all this with a light touch, and I also love the enigmatic imagery (Hawk's model town, for instance), the naming (Hilly Blue is the criminal, Rain City is the location), and some great one liners (Wanda says something to the effect that "The reason I opened a early morning café is that early morning is the best time of day to watch the sunrise"; she says to Hawk of him and Georgia, "Between the two of you, there's almost a whole person"; and when Georgia shouts "Go home" to Hawk, out on the street outside her trailer home, he replies "I am home").

Perhaps best of all is Coop's transformation through the film, as he moves to Rain City and becomes more deeply embroiled in crime, from wholesome and hairy backwoodsman (looking like he might be a member of The Band) to a bouffant dayglo clotheshorse with an absurd quiff (The Stray Cats meet the B52s).

Marianne Faithfull's singing is great on the title track — inspired casting. The instrumental tracks are mood pieces by Mark Isham, playing his trumpet along with Pee Wee Ellis on sax. The two of them formed the horn section of Van Morrison's band in the late '70s and early '80s.

MusicBrainz entry for this album

Comments

[BillyWarhol]

I was trying to remember the Name of this Amazing Film forever + I thought the Soundtrack was Awesome*

;))