Keeping Score: The Oscar-winning music of ‘Sinners’
Fans of Keeping Score will know that we usually focus on one particular piece of music that has gone down in movie history, but not this time.
This time, we’re casting the spotlight on an entire movie score, one that was recently honoured at the Academy Awards, which saw Ludwig Göransson pick up his third Oscar for ‘Best Original Score’ for his work on a movie that holds music at its very core: Sinners.
Sinners is steeped in African-American history, not just in its themes of racism and oppression, but through its use of blues music. On the surface, Göransson, a white Swedish man who looks like he plays bass in a pub band on the weekends, doesn’t seem like the right man for the job, but he’s actually incredibly qualified.
He’d previously worked with director Ryan Coogler on Black Panther, which earned him his first Oscar, and got his start producing tracks for Childish Gambino. His dedication to understanding cultures that he isn’t a part of is obvious, and that was very much the case with Sinners.
At Coogler’s request, he tracked down a special guitar from the 1930s to give the movie an authentic sound, while his wife, Serena, who executive-produced the soundtrack, also deserves her flowers, especially for renting a house in New Orleans for three months to be closer to a Black music hub.
As well as drawing on the rich cultural and sociological history of African-American music, Göransson also looked within his own family for inspiration. His father, Tomas, was a guitar teacher who gets full credit from his son for getting him into music.
“I grew up with a dad who is a blues aficionado,” he told the British Film Institute, “He’s a blues guitar player, so he was my guitar teacher. And he bought his first blues album in 1965, John Lee Hooker.
Göransson contributed a number of original songs to the film’s soundtrack, collaborating with musicians like Brittany Howard, James Blake, and Jerry Cantrell, and took a similarly star-studded approach to composing his award-winning score. Guitarists Eric Gales and Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram contribute guitar solos to a number of tracks, while famous producer Lawrence ‘Boo’ Mitchell served as a ‘music consultant’, but weirdly, another slice of inspiration came from one of the best-selling metal bands of all time.
“When I was eight or nine, I heard ‘Enter Sandman’ for the first time by Metallica,” Göransson told Classic FM, “That’s when I got really passionate about music, and it was my own thing. My dad was into the blues, and I was into heavy metal”, and it is this passion that extended to the composer recruiting Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich to play on the track ‘Bury That Guitar’.
The Sinners score is utterly magnificent, as not only does it add so much depth to the film, but it directly contributes to its core philosophy of celebrating Black excellence and preserving cultures through music, and while the Oscars don’t always get it right, it’s hard to argue that this award wasn’t thoroughly deserved.
