I like the whole idea of a Seattle lineage. If I’d had Quincy Jones music that had worked I would have put it on there. … I think it’s called KEXP now, but it used to be called KCMU, “Music That Matters.” And it was.ĭid you think about including other Seattle artists of the past? Now of course you can just stream it, but I still have all these cassettes, and they’re filled with the greatest segues ever. for something, I could still be listening to KCMU. I used to make cassettes of KCMU so that when I had to come down to L.A. They’re intertwined for me: The music and the city and the people are all kind of beautifully twisted roots around each other. And Ann and Nancy Wilson are big music geeks and they were always surrounded by local musicians, and Kelly Curtis who was their publicist was managing Mother Love Bone, so I was immediately getting thrust into a community of great music and great people. So it was kind of like I was starting to be able to use some of this music that felt like it was only for those people that lived up there, and I was lucky to have gotten a taste of it.
THE SINGLES SOUNDTRACK MOVIE
We’d started to do a little bit of that in Say Anything, the movie before Singles, which was also partially shot in Seattle, and Mother Love Bone’s “Chloe Dancer” is in Say Anything. So much of it came from wanting to do a mix of Jimi Hendrix or Muddy Waters or Junior Wells, along with Mother Love Bone. You have a Jimi Hendrix tune, “May This Be Love,” and he’s a Seattle native, so you’re dipping back into history a bit. Right, the soundtrack is not just about Nineties Seattle. So I fell in love with the whole mix of genres, and I thought, “If I get to make a movie up here, it’s going to sound like this.” Or somebody would tape Kurt Cobain half asleep having a phone conversation and they’d put that on the air.
would have been called “cheesy R&B” was mixed in with Blood Circus or Mudhoney, and I just thought it was the greatest programming ever. They played a lot of what would later be called the “Seattle sound,” but they mixed it in with all kinds of stuff, like old blues. It was kind of the college station, and it was way to the left of the dial. to me was there was this great radio station called KCMU. And when I started going up to Seattle, and ultimately got married in Seattle, part of the whole kind of wonderful feeling of love and community that was so different from L.A. Well, so much of the enthusiasm came from meeting and falling in love with a Seattle, Pacific Northwestern native. What was your initial concept for the soundtrack, and how did that evolve over time? Crowe talked to Rolling Stone about putting together his ultimate mixtape. On Friday, just short of 25 years later, the soundtrack will be reissued with an 18-track bonus disc of demos, live recordings and alternate takes. Suddenly the Singles soundtrack, packed to the gills with choice material by almost every other significant act on the scene, was rushed to release on June 30th, 1992, almost three months before the film itself saw light.
held the film at bay, unsure what to do with it, for almost nine months, until the explosive success of Nirvana’s Nevermind put all things Seattle on the map.