Now that studios have discovered the commercial potential of movie soundtracks, scores that actually complement films have become a rarity. It's easier, after all, to slap together a couple of surefire radio hits and a few original tracks from hot mainstream acts than to actually use the soundtrack to enhance a film's atmosphere or further its plot and thematic scope. With movie albums virtually guaranteeing profits on even less-than-successful films, a director is taking a risk by assigning a score to a single band or composer, regardless of the final quality. Especially when that band is the radio-unfriendly Shudder To Think. |

"It's peculiar music that we make, even though the songs are very mainstream," opines Craig Wedren, the smooth-scalped frontman for punk-rock-turned-avant-garde-composer-group Shudder To Think. "And after 50,000 B.C. [their 1997 Epic release], everything went wrong. I had just recovered from cancer, our friend Tim Taylor from Brainiac, who we had toured with, had died, the record tanked. So we said, 'let's take this somewhere else, let's do a movie.'"

They were first commissioned to create -- of all things -- a slew of '50s and '60s-inspired pop songs for director Jesse Peretz's First Love, Last Rites, a tale of teen love set on the bayou that comes out next week. "We had sort of icons that we wanted to emulate," explains Wedren. "Otis Redding on 'I Want Someone Badly,' the Zombies on 'Automatic Soup,' Johnny Cash on 'Lonesome Dove.' And we just made lists of everybody we wanted to work with, starting with people we knew."

Listen to the album, and you'll be surprised to hear Jeff Buckley (who recorded the song "I Want Someone Badly" just prior to his death -- his last truly-produced song), Billy Corgan, Cheap Trick's Robin Zander, the Cardigans' Nina Persson, Liz Phair and John Doe perfecting pop gems written by Shudder. "Somehow the drama and things that people perceive as pretentious, melodramatic and overwrought worked on the film," comments Wedren. "There's this synergy."

That synergy was something that Wedren and bandmates Stuart Hill (bass) and Nathan Larsson (guitar) didn't anticipate, though it wasn't entirely unfamiliar. They had cut their mixed-media teeth on the theme song to Comedy Central's Viva Variety, and had performed numerous musical tasks on The State, but STT had always focused -- stressed out, even -- on their albums, which lost and gained fans and threatened their security as a unit, each time around. Their eclectic, theatric, textured songs were out of reach to most alternative/punk-tuned ears, and their stage shows were at times even less accessible (Wedren has been known to perform in his birthday suit). But the STT drama, sound and scope lent itself perfectly to moving images on a screen.

"With film, you're encouraged to try as many different types of music as it takes, from jazz to classical to pop to experimental to ambient to electronic," says Wedren. "You've just got to do it, to crank it out, and you don't spend a year polishing it in the studio. It's ironic, but despite the fact that you're anchored or limited by what's on the screen, it's much freer. We get to play roles for two months, and then it's done. We don't have to go out and peddle our music, we can just make it."

After First Love, STT stuck to the scoring, but in another direction altogether. The music for the Ally Sheedy lesbian flick High Art is "strictly ambient," and their contribution to Todd Haynes' much-anticipated Velvet Goldmine is all "Bowie-esque/Ziggy Stardust originals." Now that they've explored, branched out and discovered hidden talents, the band is ready to go back to the studio for another shot at polished popularity.

"We were obsessed for a long time with being popular and being huge and being embraced and accepted. But it comes with too much heartbreak," admits Wedren. "I love to perform, but I don't like touring. The grind -- the spin cycle of write, record, tour, write, record, tour -- doesn't lend itself to the creative process. And there's just less pressure now that we don't have all of our eggs in one basket. We're not going to live or die with the next record we make. We have other exciting things going on." (Heidi Sherman)