Exploring the Music of Paris, Texas
Exploring Ry Cooder's score to Wim Wenders' 1984 film Paris, Texas.
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It’s an unforgettable opening to a film: the title shows and the camera sweeps across the beige expanse of the Trans-Pecos in Western Texas. It’s pure Western: the desert, the lonely wanderer, the eagle. The red of the cap, the white of the clouds, and the blue of the sky. Underscoring this is the now-iconic main theme to Paris, Texas composed and performed by Ry Cooder.
By the time Paris, Texas was being produced in the early 1980s, Cooder was recognised as one of the world’s best guitarists in general, and probably the era’s best slide guitarist overall. He’d worked with a laundry list of the world’s highest-profile musicians: Eric Clapton, Captain Beefheart, Neil Young, The Monkees, Randy Newman, The Rolling Stones, The Doobie Brothers, and many more, and had a couple of film scores already under his belt. Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders, the director of Paris, Texas, met for the first time to talk about Wenders’ 1982 film Hammett, wanting a kind of bluesy soundtrack. The studio, apprehensive about hiring somebody known best as a ‘guitarist’, not a ‘composer’, rejected Wenders’ suggestion and went with the ‘safer’ choice of John Barry. Wenders was not going to let that happen again, and so, just two years later, he enlisted Cooder to make the soundtrack to his new film: Paris, Texas.
Music Theory, Film Music, Music and Cinema, Albert Genower, Video Essay, Paris Texas, Ry Cooder, Wim Wenders, Slide Guitar
Paris, Texas Analysis
Paris, Texas Video Essay
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