AJ Schnack dropped a hint on his blog yesterday about the soundtrack for his new film, Kurt Cobain: About a Son, and I followed the link to Barsuk Records to take a look at it. It looks amazing–21 tracks, songs by David Bowie, Butthole Surfers and Iggy Pop, plus scraps of the Michael Azzerad interviews with Cobain that are used in the film. There are no Nirvana songs, but that’s to be expected (rights-wise, they are alleged to be prohibitively expensive), and really — if you’re interested in the film, you probably already own every Nirvana recording that’s been released.
As David Lowery points out, About a Son begins a one-week Oscar qualifying run today in Los Angeles, as part of DocuWeek. It’ll hit additional cities in the fall.
Thanks for the blog love. Want to clarify one point. As crazy as it may sound, the decision to not use Nirvana music was not a financial choice, nor was it obstruction from another party. I tried to put a Nirvana song at the end, but it struck all the wrong notes in a film that is not so much about him as a musician as it is him as a man. Ultimately, I thought that Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard’s score music worked better for the end of the film. It’s not the most commercial choice in the world, but I think it fits the movie I made. However, on your larger point that anyone can (and should) go home and listen to Nirvana (preferably In Utero as it was the album he was writing and recording at the time of the interviews) after seeing the film - I am in total agreement. Keep rockin the Spout!
[...] Friday, I wrote a bit of a gusher over the upcoming About a Son, in which I speculated that the film and its associated soundtrack [...]