I've been sitting on this news for 2 months and it's been torture to have to keep it under wraps, but the official announcement is finally here:
Greetings, Wire Fans...
After years of anticipation, The Wire Soundtrack will finally be
released on January 8th, 2008, on Nonesuch Records. We are currently
in the very final stages of production of the record, and I can say
without reservation that the project is everything I always hoped it
would be. It turns out David Bither and Bob Hurwitz at Nonesuch are
huge Wire fans, and they have given us incredible support and creative
freedom to do the record the right way. It includes many of the
show's most important musical signatures, including several versions
of Way Down In The Hole, all of the season-end montage songs, a great
selection of Baltimore club and hip-hop, The Pogues, Stelios
Kazantzidis, a selection of dialog scenes from the show, and the theme
music "The Fall" which I composed and so many have asked for over the
years. It also includes a gigantic deluxe booklet stuffed with
photographs, and liner notes by David Simon, George Pelecanos and Jeff
Chang.
I will post more details and a full track list in the near future on
my blog, The Ten Thousand Things. Until then there's a bit more info
at the Nonesuch blog here:
http://journal.nonesuch.com/journal/2007/11/nonesuch-to-rel.html
I wanted to send this out directly, as so many people have asked me
for information about the music over the last few years. And in case
you were wondering, Season 5 is finished and continues the tradition
we have all come to expect from The Wire; the season premiere will be
Sunday January 6th.
Here's looking forward to January!
Cheers,
Blake Leyh
Music Supervisor, The Wire
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
bl✧✧✧@blakel✧✧✧.c✧✧
www.blakeleyh.com
www.tenthousand.org
And here is the announcement on the Nonesuch site:
Nonesuch to Release Music from Five Years of "The Wire"
Nonesuch is pleased to announce the January 8, 2008, release of the first soundtrack from the critically acclaimed, Peabody Award–winning HBO series The Wire. That's two days after the series kicks off its fifth season. It also marks the first time music from the David Simon–created show has ever been collected and released as an album.
The Wire: " ... and all the pieces matter" will include several versions of the show’s opening theme song—Tom Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole”—as performed by The Blind Boys of Alabama, The Neville Brothers, and DoMaJe, a group of Baltimore teenagers. To listen to DoMaJe's take on the song, click here.
The disc will also feature a number of tracks from the Baltimore club and hip-hop scene that have never appeared on a major label release, including Rod Lee’s “Dance My Pain Away,” Tyree Colion’s “Projects,” Diablo’s “Jail Flick,” Mullyman’s “The Life, the Hood, the Streetz,” and “What You Know About Baltimore?” by Ogun featuring Phathead.
Other songs include “Oh My God” by Michael Franti, “I Walk on Gilded Splinters” by Paul Weller, “The Body of an American” by The Pogues, “I Feel Alright” by Steve Earle (who also has an acting role on the series), Solomon Burke’s “Fast Train,” and the show’s closing theme, “The Fall,” composed by The Wire music supervisor Blake Leyh.
Some of the most memorable dialog from the program’s five years will also be included on the record. The CD booklet will feature essays by the author and series writer George Pelecanos and the noted hip-hop journalist Jeff Chang.
Over the course of four seasons, The Wire has developed a portrait of Baltimore through the themes of education, the war on drugs, the decline of the working class, and the role of political leadership in addressing urban problems. The Wire will use its fifth and final season to examine mass media’s impact on the city.
Slate has had this to say about the series:
... surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America ... No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.
The first three seasons of The Wire are currently available on DVD; the fourth season will be available beginning December 4, 2007—a month before the fifth and final season’s premiere on HBO. You can pre-order Season Four now at the Shop at HBO.com.
For more information on the series, visit HBO.com.
― Alex in Baltimore, Tuesday, 13 November 2007 14:05 (sixteen years ago) link