What music album would be used for a movie about your life?

Ooooooooooooooooooo! Awesome! I held this one for ages because I couldn’t think of anything ‘good’ enough, but then I realised that that’s not what its about.

It needs to be music that picks up the highs, lows, rolls, spills and unexpected turns of my life. As soon as I realised that, I understood that an artist’s album (Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Dido, Hayseed Dixie, whatever!) wouldn’t cut it.

Therefore the music album best suited to the movie about my life would be the soundtrack to The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring.

Put aside the fact that I am an incredible Lord Of The Rings fan anyway, Howard Shore has done the most incredible job on the score. This and Return Of The King in particular, did a wonderful job of picking up the action, the emotion, the urgency, the fear, the love of each and every second of the films. The score for The Two Towers was good, but not as good as the first and last.

I picked Fellowship because of the way the first part of the soundtrack is definitely about how things were. The Shire; calm, peaceful. Home to the hobbits who know little, if anything at all of the world outside their home. Or even how big the world really is.

The next part snatches these hobbits away from their home, introduces them to a very real danger that they are utterly unprepared for. They have to depend on themselves and each other to scrape through and make it to relative safety of Rivendell… but even there, they learn the real journey is yet to begin.

The Fellowship is formed, the music takes you through the story of each member and you can hear what each character brings to the piece as they all gather together to complete a mission upon which the fate of the world rests.

The rest of the score is about travel. Journeying. Always moving on and on, fighting each danger or challenge as it pops up, building on your own strength and that of your companions who would do anything for you because they love you, coming to a parting of ways… its all in there.

My whole life has been like that. Obviously not so much with the life threatening cave trolls and orc attacks, and certainly no balrogs or Nazgûl to worry about, but there have been significant ups and downs that I feel the music of this piece would do a fabulous job of reflecting. First love (ick, how gross… teenagers!), moving schools, tackling GCSEs, my parent’s divorce, nearly not making it into uni, first boyfriend and subsequent sexual encounter, first break up, realising that I’m bisexual and exploring that, graduation, my first home… it goes on. Normal life stuff that everybody goes through (well, not all of it I’m sure).

 

My 80 Post Challenge is brought to you with help from Tom Slatin’s 80 Journal Writing Prompts.