Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2018 December 31 • Monday

One more Soundtrack of the Week, #550, for 2018. What should it be? Well, after being stirred by the MS 51 Vocal Music Department Winter Concert, of which one of the highlights was A. R. Rahman's "Jai Ho", from the movie Slumdog Millionaire… we'll do that!

It starts with "O… Saya", which has great percussion and a few other instruments laying down a driving and catchy rhythmic foundation over which a melody can take its time before giving way to M.I.A.'s rapping.

M.I.A. also has one of her own songs here, "Paper Planes", which has a lilting and agreeably tipsy reggae sort of feel to it, using the sounds of cash registers and guns as rhythm in parts.

There's also a remix of the same song by DFA Records, and they do a great job with it, giving it a different groove that's at least as compelling as the original.

Rahman's "Riots" effortlessly mixes pop and dance sensibilities with the demands of dramatic underscore. Like most of the tracks on the album, it has several layers of rhythm parts played on different instruments. It's not always easy to tell what's electronic, what's acoustic and what's electronically altered acoustic.

"Mausam & Escape" brings us into heavier and more menacing territory, some virtuosic sitar playing trading off with string section and foreboding synthesizer lines.

Things lighten up with "Ringa Ringa", which has vocals and a melody similar to what you might hear in a Bollywood movie. It's a cheerful song that takes some unexpected turns into minor chords, keeping it from being too sunny.

Some crazy fast vocals, perhaps a sped-up recording, open "Liquid Dance", which I guess is maybe like house music? It sounds like it's supposed to be loud and make you dance.

After that things slow way down, with the pretty "Latika's Theme", no doubt the love theme for the movie. (I've seen it but I don't remember a lot of it.) There's a surprisingly brisk rhythm track that's light enough to be effective, as well as some tasteful guitar playing and affecting wordless vocals from Suzanne D'Mello.

"Aaj Ki Raat", which is credited to Sonu Nigam, Mahalaxmi Lyer and Alisha Chinoi, starts with a pounding backbeat before shifting gears to a sinuous and seductive mood, with an enchanting melody.

The track "Millionaire" is fairly straightforward, another solid foundation of propulsive and powerful rhythm with a melody soaring above it.

"Gangsta Blues" is more in a soul/hip-hop zone with vocals from BlaaZe and Tanvi Shah as well as some playful use of electric piano.

This is followed by the pensive and lovely "Dreams on Fire", again with Suzanne D'Mello, and another love song, this time with lyrics: "You are my waking dream / You're all that's real to me / You are the magic in the world I see".

And then finally we end with "Jai Ho", the song that brought me to this record in the first place and which I gather was a hit. It's a great song, irresistible in both rhythm and melody. The chorus really hits it out of the park.

2018 December 28 • Friday

Alas, my favorite headlines are not visible here, but it's still nice to see the familiar BALLOT AWAITED TODAY AFTER AMENDMENTS, 3 NAMED TO FIX LIABILITY COSTS, AUTO MISHAPS AND DROWNINGS TOP DEATH LIST and of course BILL AIDS OWNER ON FORECLOSURE.


A Lost Lady (1934)

2018 December 26 • Wednesday

Inspired by Jack Womack's survey of UFO-related books and their contexts and creators, I picked up a copy of Fate magazine the other day, while on my way to the smallest room in my house.

This advertisement caught my eye.

What could a Brain Wave Synchronizer be? I suspect it would make a charming addition to any home or office, regardless of its effectiveness. My Roland Space Echo is currently employed as an object of aesthetic value only and it brings me pleasure and comfort in that capacity.

But what would you get in return for sending $195 to the Old Orchard Professional Building in Skokie, Illinois? That's more money than I would spend on a mysterious and dubious whim today but it was a lot more in 1968.

This is a mystery more compelling to me than any involving possible contact with extraterrestial spaceships.

2018 December 24 • Monday

The 549th Soundtrack of the Week is the music composed by Bengt Arne Wallin for a Swedish movie called Dear John.

The movie and composer were both unknown to me. It's a great score played by a great small ensemble.

It opens with the Dear John theme, starting as solo accordion then becoming a wistful small big band waltz, slightly reminiscent of Glenn Miller maybe. The record sleeve notes that the theme is "mixed with Cottage Waltz".

Some great electric jazz guitar playing, similar in tone and feel to Kenny Burrell, and really good saxophone soloing, are "In the Cafe".

"In Zoo" starts with flute and percussion. The rest of the band enters without making a big deal about it and there’s additional impressive contributions from the electric guitar, as well as another great saxophone solo.

After that, "On the Beach" breaks with the energetic nature of the last few cues for a subtly lush and delicate atmosphere that suggests a quiet, warm night on the edge of the sand by the water.

Then "Under the Tree" creates an unexpectedly tense atmosphere while maintaining a solid and swinging jazz groove. The winds stab out unexpectedly from the band with brief, strident statements.

"Phono-Pop" is pretty much just what I’d hoped, a sophisticated primitive slice of instrumental pop/rock unpretension. A different guitar sound makes an appearance for a brief and tasty solo.

"On the Freight Tramp" is another surprising cue, starting with a shadowy and menacing lower-register pulse but turning out to be a swinging song with a melody and structure that sounds like an arrangement of a folk song. Again the guitar stands for its positive contribution.

After that we return to the theme but this time it’s very haunting with a martial snare drum throughout.

Side Two opens with the theme again, similar to what's heard on the first album side. It’s a piece of music that increases in strength and effectiveness with each iteration.

The mood changes again with "Muscles", another swinging groover for the combo, this time with great baritone sax playing.

"Anita’s Song" was co-written by Bengt Thomas and has an anthemic quality to it, with ethereal and powerful wordless female vocals.

Then comes another surprise with "Helena", which adds some kind of electronic keyboard to the combo for the first time. It’s an unusual-sounding one, whatever it is, with delicate yet persistent back up from guitar and a string section.

The record concludes with "Swedish Love Song". The female vocalist is back with an almost Yma Sumac-like presence in the very beginning of the cue. Then the music settles down into something calmer, with a pocket of Mancini-like writing here and there but definitely always retaining its own individualistic sound and personality. The Hammond organ takes a solo here and the band swings as always.
2018 December 21 • Friday

Every morning in Brooklyn I drink coffee from a souvenir mug I purchased at a UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico. And every evening for the last couple of weeks or so, I've been reading from Jack Womack's …Flying Saucers Are Real!, a superb catalog/survey/study of UFO books and their authors.

I was pleased to note that I already had a couple of the books you'll see within, as well as a couple of issues of Fate. Womack's volume presents beautiful scans of the front covers with selected photos, illustrations or other details from the inside, the occasional back cover, and fascinating sketches of the authors and their stories, contexts, etc.

Some of the images are quite beautiful.

Others are more of a curiosity.

And Womack has done a splendid job of wading through the personalities and claims you'll encounter within, as well as tracing the evolutions of various theories and assertions.

What are we to make of the similarity between Leonard Cramp's "astonishing schmeatic drawings of space ship interiors" and "similarly-detailed Japanese anatomical charts of Gamera"?

Howard Hughes was apparently interested enough in George Van Tessel's "Integratron", some kind of structure "within which alien technology would rejuvenate the cell tissues of any human who stepped inside", that he provided partial funding for it.

Then there's Gloria Lee, a flight attendant who insisted that she was channeling a being from Jupiter. According to Womack, she had a plan for world peace and to get attention went on a hunger strike, starving to death after 66 days.

Here's a whole paragraph from Womack, a good example of what you'll find throughout the book.


Gabriel Green (1924–2001), one of the last old school contactees, founded the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America Inc. in 1957. Not long earlier he'd met saucer crewmen from the planet Korender, which orbits Alpha Centauri, and maintained regular telepathic correspondence afterward, generally regarding the imminent return of Jesus in a flying saucer. Green's one book, Let's Face the Facts About Flying Saucerts (1967) is a farrago of brief saucer accounts with no direct Korendian connection. He ran for President as a write-in candidate in 1960 and 1972. He didn't win.

I bought this book at Quimby's in Brooklyn, which is exactly the kind of place where you should buy it.

2018 December 19 • Wednesday

In other words, it doesn't work.

This is perhaps a more honest note on a toaster oven:

2018 December 17 • Monday

The 548th Soundtrack of the Week is a real surprise and a treasure. It's Matt Berry's record of Television Themes.

While Berry is best known as an outrageous and often self-mocking comic actor, particularly from The IT Crowd and his starring vehicle, Toast of London, this recording is entirely serious and demonstrates not just formidable musicianship but a sincere love of the original material he and his band present here in their own versions.

Berry himself, who has already released several recordings of excellent songs that are sort of in a psych-folk zone plays, many different instruments on this album, ranging from vintage synthesizers and organs to percussion and guitar.

In an interview with Shindig! magazine, Berry explains that his choices in themes to cover were guided by love and nostalgia as well as a desire to make commercially available some music that so far was not.

The theme from Are You Being Served? recreates the use of cash-register sounds as a rhythm part but add drums, which aren't in the orignal. The band really swings and the melody is irresistible.

The Good Life's theme is also really swinging and radiates positive energy. The arrangement and recording bring out a delicacy and precision in the music that might be easier to miss in the original recording.

Then there's the theme for London Weekend Television, all eight seconds of it. It's included mostly for nostalgia's sake, it seems, and Berry noted that it was a lot of fun to do.

Blankety Blank is a weird piece of music, the theme for a comedy game show that I've never seen. The original already had a Minimoog and a kettle drum, so that makes it quite suitable for Berry's group. James Sedge's drumming throughout the whole CD is fantastic and Andy Vickery's numble guitar playing is a highlight of this piece.

There's been more than one theme to Top of the Pops, but the one Berry recreates here, in all of its dramatic and moody splendor, is the one that was used on the show from 1982 to 1986 and was written by Thin Lizzy members Phil Lynott and Midge Ure. In its original incarnation it was called "Yellow Pearl". I had never heard it before and it's a tremendous song.

Picture Box is another perhaps unlikely television theme, sounding like what you might hear if there were a merry-go-round in an opium den. Berry says he "messed with quite an old transistor organ, where every note isn't exactly in tune" to get a worthy match for the unusual instrumentation of the original.

Things get pretty rocking and funky but also sweet and light with the theme from The Liver Birds, which features "la-la" vocals by Berry, as well as the band clearly enjoying some deep grooves and lovely instrumental breaks.

Then there's another eight-second tune, the ID music for Thames Television, performed by Graham Mann.

Rainbow is a theme from a kids show that has some psych-folk energy of its own and prominently features Berry's usually unmistakable voice singing the lyrics. (Sometimes in his music work his singing voice is quite different from his speaking voice, but not so here.) This might be my favorite track on the record.

Things get much more familiar with the Doctor Who theme, certainly a classic and always fun to hear. To their credit, Berry and his group are faithful to the original while adding all sorts of subtle sounds and colors with various sythesizers.

Next is a piece of music that's apparently from John Barry's score for Midnight Cowboy but was re-used as the theme for a show called Wildtrak. It's a sprightly piece of music, sunny and cheerful, and a nice bonus to have Berry meet Barry.

The theme from World in Action was, according to Berry, extracted from a half-hour jam between Shawn Phillips on guitar and Mick Weaver on Hammond. Berry's own version, heavy on the Hammond and with Berry playing at least six instruments and the redoubtable James Sedge on drums, is stunning.

Sorry!'s theme was one of a couple that Berry and his band had been playing live a lot before making this record. It's got a whole reggae sunshine thing going on and it's a great tune.

And last there's another one just for trombonist Graham Mann, who layers different trombone parts on top of each other for something called Open University. The music would apparently preceded boring programmes Matt Berry would have to watch at school.

This is a delightful record and a sincere, serious, brilliantly produced and extremely musical one as well!

2018 December 14 • Friday

The Soho record shop Rocks in Your Head, no longer with us, can always be re-visited in Maniac Cop (1988).

It must have cameos in some other movies...
2018 December 12 • Wednesday

Nick Tosches once wrote something along the lines of how trying to pinpoint the first "rock and roll" record was like trying to find the exact point on the spectrum where blue becomes azure.

Something similar goes on in trying to draw a border between "fiction" and "literature". There are some works of unpretentious genre fiction that deliver an unexpected epiphany and are so solidly crafted, intelligent and scintillating to read that when you put them down you think, there was really something in there, not just a story, not just action, but that all turned out to be about something that really got to something inside me and connected that something with the outside world and maybe humanity itself.

Eric Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios (a.k.a. A Coffin for Dimitrios) and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend are two that come to mind. (The former provided the template for Citizen Kane and several other movies.)

The experience you have with a book is important to you and it is whatever it is. Arguing about whether such and such a book rises above whatever fiction is to become whatever literature is, is a waste of time, if you ask me. And yet, it's the kind of waste of time that generates a lot of noise and a lot of heat and gives people something to talk about, which is apparently something that a lot of people need.

All of which is just my way of saying that I read Elliott Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel.

I really like these New York Review Books editions. They're handsomely made and a pleasure to read. That is, the physical experience of holding the book and looking at the text on the pages is pleasurable.

Black Wings Has My Angel was originally a Gold Medal paperback back in 1953 and I also like to read Gold Medal books. They generally have sensationalistic and beautifully painted covers and deliver on their promises of sex and violence.

In its original Gold Medal incarnation, Black Wings Has My Angel looked like this:

It's a fairly wild ride and one of the strongest such books that I've read. But I can't agree with Barry Gifford's assertion that it's "an astonishingly well-written literary novel that just happened to be about (or roundabout) a crime".

This is making a claim for the book that the book itself doesn't support. It could have been a book like that. It starts out as a heist story but instead of the usual male crew, the conspirators are a man and a woman locked in a fatalistic crazy sadomasochistic love sex fever.

About halfway through, though, you might get the impression that Chaze didn't know where this thing was going to go when he started it.

And so what began as a solid coherent narrative starts to fragment and go in different directions. Even while reading the first half of the book you might have noticed how the main character occasionally gets injections of "character" and back story, perhaps as the author realized that his people weren't particularly real or more than surface.

In the second half there's a contrived return home for "Tim Sunblade" (not his real name), and it's brutal in at least a couple of ways and for more people than just him.

This is also where Chaze takes a turn to ultra-violence. While there was already plenty of violence, the reader is taken to unexpected extremes, still disturbing today and who knows how shocking to readers sixty years ago.

"When he came back to me he broke the fingers of my left hand, one by one, neatly and with no wasted action, the way you'd snap celery at the table, almost politely."

The celery comparison is horrifyingly apt. Earlier the same people, police officers, have him tied naked and supine to the hood of their police car. "And they had a game. It seems all three of them smoked cigars and in this game they tried to figure out every possible way to use me for an ash tray. Sometimes the cigars went out. But they lighted them again and kept inventing new ways and places to stub out the cigars. They had plenty of matches."

The "It seems" at the beginning of the second sentence might be the most gut-wrenching touch here, almost an over-understatement of violence.

Violence is inevitably partnered with sex in crime stories, and Tim's partner Virginia can keep pace with him and easily take the lead in both departments. She's often too much like a nympho Lady Macbeth and doesn't seem to interest the author as much as the book's narrator does. Often her actions seem to derive from the necessity of driving the plot than from the realistic motivations of an actual person. She's the classic femme fatale, the bad girl, however you want to put it. Like the violence in the novel, she's more extreme than what you're used to, and I suppose it's this over-the-top quality that most distinguishes the story.

In an absurd scene apparently played straight, she passes on huge chunks of information to Tim while they're locked in separate cells of the same jail, by singing hymns along with the other prisoners, just changing the words to tell him what she needs him to know. It's not clear to me how this would work and I think that's because it wouldn't.

Given enough of a shove in one direction or another, this could have been some kind of surrealist or absurdist risky masterpiece, or possibly one of the greatest smash and grab, sex and violence paperback originals of all time. It might have also been just a great, solid "literary" novel. But it just doesn't have the qualities I associate with such books.

It's certainly worth reading if you're interested in this kind of thing, but it didn't convince me as some kind of lost literary classic. It is a wild ride, though, and definitely a classic of mid-century sex and violence and drinking and crime and corruption and despair and betrayal and much that is both uplifting and dismaying about the so-called "human condition".

The first line is "I'd been roughnecking on a drilling rig in the Atchafayala River for better than sixteen weeks, racking the big silver stems of pipe, lugging the sacks of drilling mud from barge to shore, working with my back and guts and letting my mind coast".

2018 December 10 • Monday

Sometimes only ELO will do. And that's why the 547th Soundtrack of the Week is their score for Joyride.

It isn't 100% ELO. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote a theme song, "The Best That I Know How", which Barry Mann sings. It's the first track on Side A. I guess you could describe it as '70s gold. It has strings backing up a session combo that uses mostly drums and electric piano, though with some very minimal and tasty guitar embellishments. It's a tender song and you'll hear it again as the last song on Side B.

There's also an instrumental version arranged by Jimmie Haskell. It opens the B side of the record and uses what sounds like a Fender Rhodes to great effect.

Haskell also contributes four original tracks to the Joyride soundtrack.

"Dancin' in Alaska" is a country honky-tonk tune that’s brasher than most and with a sharp edge, some of the electric guitar playing giving it a pleasantly nasty sound.

Harmonica takes the melody for "Eatin' Dog Food", a subdued country instrumental that sounds haunted and lonesome.

“The Getaway" is a late-night piece with an eerie elctronic instrument creating an instant atmosphere of shadows and intrigue, floating over a percolating disco-ish foundation. It’s short and resolves quickly.

And then the last one from Haskell is "Train Stuff", a savage disco instrumental that has a tense and aggressive energy with relentless drums amd rhythm guitar as well as some acid rock electric lead guitar work. Easy to imagine this as being for a car chase or similar action scene.

The rest is ELO.

First up from them is "Tightrope", which has a big rich sound with different voices playing lines of different speed and mood before swinging into a straight rock groove with vocals about having more losing days than winning days. There are “classical music” influences and elements that increase the drama.

"Can't Get It Out of My Head" is a moody and atmospheric love song. Was this a hit or does it just sound a lot like some other song that was a hit? It’s a really nice song with a somewhat daring keyboard solo.

After that is "Boy Blue", an upbeat, relatively normal rock/pop song with an interesting mix of triumph and melancholy and an unexpected mixture of breaks from acoustic instruments playing “classical” influenced lines and electric instruments delivering the 1970s sounds.

“So Fine" opens with a chorus of angelic voices and then the band bursts in with a bright and fast energy and a mixture of rock, pop and soul that would probably go over okay with the disco crowd. As usual, ELO does interesting and unexpected things with instrumentation and arrangement. This song has a startling cut to a totally different soundscape with percussion up front and then effortlessly slides back into the song we started with.

Computery bleeps and bloops introduce "Telephone Line", which is actually a piano ballad enhanced by ELO's strings and electronic sounds.

"Rockeria!" starts with an opera singer presenting what sounds like a fragment if a delicate and lovely aria before the band smashed down the door with pounding drums and slide electric guitar. Of course the band plays hide and seek, disappearing and being replaced by the opera singer and strings, only to come crashing back in again. Just when you think you’ve heard it all, there’s a surf drums break.

And that's it! Probably there's music in the movie that isn't on the record. Maybe someday there'll be a complete release of Joyride!

2018 December 07 • Friday

First things first.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

John Le May's book of lost Japanese giant monster films inspired me to get my own copy of one of his sources, a handsome volume that's called something like Godzilla Toho Tokusatsu Unpublished Material Archive: The Era of Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka.

It's all in Japanese, of course, but there are a few neat photographs.

Most impressive is how they printed an image of Godzilla on the edges of the pages!

2018 December 05 • Wednesday

After two books that explore sixty years of Japanese giant monster movies, what do you do? If you're John Le May, the author of those books, you turn your attention from films that were made to films that were never made—or might have been made but were lost or banned or never commercially screened except maybe one time at a convention or something. That kind of thing! It's The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies: The Lost Films.

The most interesting reading in this book is in the first part, "Unproduced Scripts", where you can try to imagine what a Toho-Hammer Loch Ness monster co-production might have looked like, or Batman Meets Godzilla...

That last title gets a very detailed synopsis in the bok's first appendix, "Short Treatments for Unmade Films". There are nine appendices in total, each one narrower in range than the one before.

Part Two of the book is "Proto-versions of Finished Films", which is less of a revelation but still has interesting information for the fans.

Part Three, "Banned, Unreleased & Lost Films" is all over the place, with tantalizing glimpses of two Japanese King Kong movies made in the 1930s (probably lost forever) as well as exciting titles such as Legendary Giant Beast Wolfman vs. Godzilla.

One of the most intriguing pieces of information was that the first Gamera movie started out as Giant Horde Beast Nezura, a movie about giant rats invading Tokyo. The miniature city built for them would end up being given to Gamera.


The production began to fall apart once the real rats arrived on set and containing them proved to be a nightmare. Soon, the set was plagued with fleas, ticks, and lice. Ironically, another of the problems with the rats was cannibalism, an element ironically scripted for the film's climax. As pesticides were sprayed across the studio, the crew had to begin wearing gas masks. Eventually the neighboring businesses began to complain about the runaway rats.

You might have noticed that the author uses the word "ironically" twice in the same sentence there. It's one of his favorite words and is rarely used to indicate something actually ironic. While this book is a terrific achievement and labor of love that should be on every Godzilla fan's bookshelf, it would have been improved by editing, copy editing and proofreading.

2018 December 03 • Monday

Sonia Rutstein's music for Igor and the Lunatics is the 546th Soundtrack of the Week. And it's on groovy lunatic vinyl!

You can see this whole movie on YouTube. It's extremely low budget and was apparently a production fraught with conflict and difficulty. It was also filmed in "Dementovision"!

In addition to composing the music, Sonia Rutstein also contributed rhythm guitar, synthesizers, keyboards and vocals, and was aided by Bill Monroe on electric lead guitar, Donna Bowman on electric bass and Janet Guerra on drums and percussion.

The first track is a country song called "All Across the Cornfields of My Heart". It's a nice tune with relaxed vocals from Rutstein and catchy melody and lyrics.

Synth arpeggios are a foundation for other soaring and stinging electronic sounds in the sci-fi sounding "Bedroom Scene".

Electric bass guitar belts out a rhythmically inviting but menacing line for "Sucker Punch". Guitar, synth and drums come in gradually, building up the song from its foundation. Sounds like there could be some Gobin influence here.

“More Murder and Mayhem” returns to the same idea as "Bedroom Scene" but with a different keyboard sound and a more active electric guitar part.

And it's only after all this that we get to the "(Opening) Theme for Igor and the Lunatics". It's a prettier number than you might expect, kind of ethereal and poppy at the same time, even though it's just a simple repeated keboard phrase.

Things get more intense with "Paul's Theme", a driving rock instrumental with a snarlingly primitive bass part and some exhilarating wailing from other instruments on top.

"Murder Theme" uses musical blocks and lines to create a strange atmosphere, somewhat reminiscent of Doctor Who scores from the 1970s and also deranged calliope music.

Then comes "Heroic Feat", which does sound heroic, with a martial snare drum pushing everything forward and bright synth horns playing various motives that suggest strength and energy.

“Marianne Finds Hawk" begins with lush keyboard pads creating a rich sonic atmosphere. It could lend itself to a few different moods but the occasional minor chord does suggest danger or at least unease.

Feelings of suspense and peril are, unsurprisingly, immediately up front in "Running in the Night Woods — Paul's Been Shot" There are some startlingly low rumbling keyboard sounds and some plaintive and vulnerable higher frequency voicings also. It's a short cue but covers a lot of ground.

The B side opens with "Cops Beat Up Scene", a groovy number that owes a lot of its success to the drummer in this combo. The music is well written but the drums give it a great feel.

“Just When You Think It's Safe — Marianne's Back Home” is somewhat similar to "Bedroom Scene" and "More Murder and Mayhem". There's wailing electric guitar soloing here, as there was in the previous cue and several others.

One keyboard plays a stabbing motif in "Barn Scare Massacre — Marianne Fights Back", while another keyboard part jumps all over the place doing different things.

"Old Friends Gone Astray" is a really nice song form, a nice set of chords played by the cool band on this session.

Moody synth swells are the setting for "Hank Saves Marianne".

Another nice set of chords, similar to "Old Friends Gone Astray", make up "Hope for the Innocent".

Then things get creepy and unsettling, with some low, solo synth voicings for "Worse Than Your Imagination". The low synth is soon joined by rough and jagged synth parts in a higher register.

"Derangement" doesn't sound particularly deranged. It's a short cue, actually sounds kind of hopeful.

Then we get to what might be the best track on the record, "Leave Me Alone", a straight-up rock song with vocals by Rutstein and echoes of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". It's just too short, though!

It segues into another great rock/pop number, again with Rutstein singing, "Now Is the Time". Both of these last two songs are great and if they had been a little longer and the movie had been a lot better, they could have been a nice single to release as a tie-in to the picture.