Music to write by

Once upon a time (in the West ) I had a "Great Western Movie Themes" LP and a "Great TV Western Themes" LP -- man, I played these until they were worn out and the needle kept jumping. I got a hankering to hear them again and just last week did a Google search on Western movie themes. Up popped several Amazon for-sale items, some at just a couple bucks apiece -- heck, the postage & handling (not unreasonable) cost more than the CDs themselves.

So I've got me two CDs right here, "20 greatest WESTERN THEMES" and "THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY Western Movie Themes" -- which as you'd imagine contain the Morricone Spaghetti Western classics plus others of equal significance, The Big Country, The Magnificent Seven, Return of the Seven, The High Chaparral, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, A Professional Gun, etc. (A third Western themes CD is on its way, seemingly from Hawaii since the UK warehouse didn't have a copy in stock <bewildered>)

Usually I don't like background music when I'm writing, it tends to distract, but Western themes are different, you can hear and taste what they're saying (the galloping hooves, the dust, the drama ) without having to stop and listen and get distracted.

Some themes I'm missing, which I had on those old LPs, are The Comancheros, and also from the TV series Hondo, and Lancer, which aired in the UK around the same time as The High Chaparral, late '60s early '70s. These were fine pieces of music which I'm determined to track down.

By a curious coincidence Brit weekend newspaper THE SUNDAY TIMES carried a giveaway CD yesterday containing 10 Morricone themes -- the 4 Spaghetti Westerns as listed above ("For A Few Dollars More" is playing as I type this), plus Cinema Paradiso (not my thing, unfortunately), The Mission (main title and Ave Maria, again not my thing), "The Harvest" from Days of Heaven (this Richard Gere film has beautiful music over the closing credits, alas this isn't it, tho' it's close), Moses the Lawgiver (sorry, never heard of it), My Name Is Nobody (annoyingly childish theme to spoof Western I barely remember, and which also appears on one of my Western theme CDs, I skip past this irritation as soon as it plays). I have to say, old Ennio writes a good tune, but not everything he's written calls to me.

-Derek