The Music of Martin Scorsese

Friday is fun because it's about music. So there's playlists. Today, it's about the music used by one of the great filmmakers...

It’s well known that Martin Scorsese loves music; that he uses it brilliantly in his films - and that he has a ‘side hustle’ as a music documentarian. I am writing this on the day of release of his brand new movie, Killers of The Flower Moon. I won’t have seen it by the time you read this, unless you arrive at this way down the track. But I am planning to see it during its opening weekend.

I haven’t loved every Scorsese film, and I really wasn’t taken with The Irishman at all (his most recent ahead of Flower Moon) but I think of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas and Raging Bull and Cape Fear and Wolf of Wall Street and King of Comedy and Mean Streets and Bringing Out The Dead and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore as masterpieces. And there’s a couple of others that aren’t far behind…so that is some strike rate, huh?

And in the buildup to seeing Killers on the big screen I’ve been tearing through a few of Marty’s films again. I found extra love for The Departed and Shutter Island in the process too (though I wasn’t quite brave enough to sit through The Aviator again).

But this is specifically about the music. So even if you’re not a fan of Martin Scorsese’s movies - and, surely there’s something in that filmography for everyone: Offbeat comedies, gangster violence, a kid’s movie, docos galore, and plenty of religious themes to boot - you can be a fan of the music choices.

It’s in the way that he uses it.¹

He takes songs we know and love and places them in a whole new context by making them stand in to help with plot, staging, costuming and character detail. He gives us setting, passage of time, articulation of the interior - all via the use of a key piece of music.

Example:

1989’s New York Stories is lesser Scorsese in the scheme of things. A 30-40 minute short film called “Life Lessons” is Marty’s contribution to the feature length film which features his work alongside that of two other promiment New York filmmakers (Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen). Marty made The Last Temptation of Christ and Goodfellas either side of it. But his component of New York Stories is by far the most compelling piece of that movie. And his use of the song A Whiter Shade of Pale is beautiful. Particularly since it has been used over and again in movies - and I think straight away of two really big movies in my life that have it as a feature: The Big Chill and Withnail & I (albeit a cover-version in that movie). But for me it’s Marty’s use of it that is memorable, and Life Lessons is about as ‘small’ as you can get in the Scorsese canon.

There are so many examples though. And one of the things I love is how Scorsese has favourite artists and favourite songs that he repeats. He loves The Rolling Stones. Particularly their track Gimme Shelter. He loves Muddy Waters. He loves The Ink Spots. And The Ronettes. Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Ray Charles. He really loves Eric Clapton too - and has found the best use for his music in films. And it stands. Even if being an Eric Clapton fan in 2023 seems about as cool as liking David Seymour.

There is reptition of songs and artists across some of the films, which builds a “Scorsese World”, I guess. Creates a world for the films. They don’t share characters, but just as he uses the same actors in new roles, he dresses old songs up in new song-settings, places them down different corridors, gives them a fresh haircut.

I couldn’t possibly list my favourite uses of songs - and there are probably dozens of articles doing that already. But the sandwiching of so many tunes into a few minutes near the end of Goodfellas, to heighten the drama around the paranoia as a chopper flies overhead is dizzyingly brilliant. That he then settles on Jump Into The Fire by Harry Nilsson is even more brilliant. And of course, from the same film, there’s the use of just the piano-half of Clapton’s Layla, as montage-music; take the ‘dream’ portion of the song (its outro) and use it to frame a bodies-piling-up sequence. Perfect.

In lesser films there is amazing music too. I love the soundtrack album for Gangs of New York (maybe more so than the actual film). The fife and drum music, the Peter Gabriel and Afro Celt Soundsystem. Incredible.

There are films that are score-heavy, such as Cape Fear - its brilliance being that he re-uses the original score from the original version of the film for his remake. He’d already used the great Bernard Herrmann though. Herrmann’s final ever score was his work for Scorsese on Taxi Driver, and that late-night jazz-waft gives the car headlights, and the wash on the dark streets, so much of its mood.

But sometimes, in a score-heavy film there’s a song. Just one or two. In my umpteenth rewatch of Taxi Driver I finally really focussed in on the incongruous placement of Jackson Browne:

Well, it’s an odd - but somehow perfect - choice for De Niro’s Travis Bickle to play to, or against as it were.

Long before Francis Ford Coppola would get all the praise in the world for casting The Doors’ song The End in his movie Apocalypse Now (I say ‘casting’ because the song has a featured role really), Scorsese used it to frame a sex scene.

And the soundtrack to the movie Casino is like an incredible jukebox. From Roxy Music’s Love Is The Drug, to Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way via Cream and The Stones and The Staple Singers…

How do you pick a favourite?

I own several of the soundtrack albums on CD, a few on vinyl, and I have a wishlist for the others. When I was a teenager, one of my favourite cassette tapes was Bernard Herrmann’s Cape Fear score. I truly believe this was the start of me listening to classical music. And there is a lot of great classical (and opera) in Marty’s films too. Shutter Island, The Age of Innocence, Raging Bull…

He has used some of the great composers to craft scores too. Howard Shore (After Hours), Phillip Glass (Kundun) and perhaps my favourite, Peter Gabriel. Seriously, his Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack gets played in my house about once a week on average. That album is its own religious experience. And I’m grateful for the discovery.

But Marty’s greatest musical collaborator was Robbie Robertson. R.I.P.

They bonded when Scorsese shot and created one of the greatest concert films of all time (The Last Waltz). Marty was on a pile of coke and circling towards a breakdown, editing the film at night after spending his days shooting New York, New York. By the time he made Raging Bull, he was close to death. Casual fans won’t know how close.

Robbie became his best bud, a great hang, and the Musical Supervisor across most of the rest of his films, occassionally the score-composer, but almost always the soundtrack compiler.

As I finish writing this I’m sneaking my first listen to the score for Killers of The Flower Moon, which is the final film work Robertson gave to the world. I’m just a few tracks in and it’s wonderful, making me even more excited to see the film - and giving me flashbacks to some of the music vibes from Gangs of New York and from Robertson’s fine work on his album for the TV documentary, Music For The Native Americans.

I couldn’t help but share a few key moments and memories - but what I intended for today’s newsletter was a series of “complete” soundtracks to some of my favourite Scorsese films, in terms of the musical element.

By that, I mean I’ve made playlists that go beyond the official, released soundtrack albums. Playlists that give you every song that’s used in the film. Take Goodfellas for instance. The album that was released is great - I have it on vinyl and I love that it plays through like its own little film or story. (A good soundtrack album should be able to do that). But it’s not the complete picture. It’s a little snapshot.

I wanted to go deep and give you all the songs.

From my recent re-watching, the music used in Raging Bull really, erm, struck me (lol - sorry - planned that pun, as you can see, but still know I need to apologise for it). The film’s black and white photography is usually its great art and talking point. The other obvious talking point being its performance from De Niro, one of several great ones he’s given to Marty. But in this one there was that dangerous and potentially damaging weight gain. But as I watched it this time, so many of the jazz and opera pieces hit as hard as the domestic violence, helped to frame those terrible - but beautifully filmed and acted - scenes.

The music in Mean Streets and Who’s That Knocking At My Door is where Scorsese got his reputation for cool, classy needle-drops. He has never lost that skill. And he takes more and more risks as he goes on. In The Departed (Roger Waters’ version of Comfortably Numb with Van Morrison singing) and Wolf of Wall Street (Cannonball Adderley’s Mercy Mercy Mercy) he uses live-concert versions instead of studio recordings; in both cases the music gets a callback too. In Bringing Out The Dead he goes from then du-jour artists (R.E.M., Marc Anthony) to Sinatra via Stravinsky and then to Jane’s Addiction and, um, UB40.

But the masterstroke is including Van The Man’s TB Sheets, eh!

Okay, I’m off and running again, I need to nip this in the bud. And just leave you to enjoy all of these amazing songs. So you’ll see here some playlists where I have made complete songtracks of the movies. And a couple more below. In some cases, only a snippet of the song is used in the film so you’ll get the whole song on the playlist obviously.

I’d love to know what you think. But, hey, if not, no loss. I made all these for myself, as much as I did for you.

And if none of this is your, um, ‘scene’ and yet you found yourself reading right to the end, your reward, as always on a Friday, is a different kind of playlist. The regular weekly weekend one. In New Zealand, it’s a long weekend - we have Monday off. But I’ll still be back with Monday’s newsletter. Which may or may not be about Killers of The Flower Moon. Thanks for reading. And happy listening.

1. I’m paraphrasing a song from a Martin Scorsese film I’ve yet to mention by name - chocolate fish if you can pick it.