The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack album to the 2018 film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs directed by the Coen brothers. The film score is composed by Carter Burwell, a frequent collaborator of the duo, featuring songs and musical score. The album released through Milan Records on November 9, 2018.
Contents
Development
In October 2017, it was reported that Carter Burwell, a frequent collaborator of the Coen brothers, would score The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. As the film consisted of six different anthologies, Burwell treated them as different films, with respect to the tone and story, but "the big question was, to what extent do we try to weave a thread through it that gives it some unity." He recalled that Joel told the single thread of the film being a non-accidental death. Burwell could not find a musical solution that would work for all of them and needed an array of strong emotional colors to work with.
As a result, Burwell decided to utilize the Cowboy song "Streets of Laredo" and use guitars, harmonica and tack piano throughout the score. However, Burwell needed "a big, traditional Western sound" for four of the six segments, that needed a "Dimitri Tiomkin sense of scale" for the segment All Gold Canyon and The Gal Who Got Rattled. He further researched old cowboy songs, recorded in the early 20th century for the Library of Congress, which were "generally lonely and sad songs" but refrained from writing new music inspired by them, and focused on the "folkier aspects of the orchestra" without relying too far on the classical Western territory.
The score was recorded with an orchestra at the Abbey Road Studios in London and Sear Sound in New York City and mixed and mastered at Burwell's The Body, New York City. He added "In this case, Netflix as a distributor is not a signatory to any of the union agreements here. So they wanted to go to London so they wouldn't be involved in that. I mention that because more and more films are being made by companies that aren't signatories. It's an issue."
Release
In October 2018, it was announced that Milan Records would distribute the album, and the track list was unveiled the following month which featured songs performed by Brendan Gleeson and Tim Blake Nelson. A musical piece from the album, "Seeking Alice" was released on October 26, 2018, while "Canyon Awake" released through IndieWire on November 7. The soundtrack was released digitally on November 9, followed by a physical release via CDs on November 30 and a vinyl LP unveiled later on December 21.
Reception
David Edelstein of Vulture wrote "Carter Burwell's score is perhaps his most achingly beautiful." Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian and Glenn Kenny of RogerEbert.com called the score as "richly plausible" and "gorgeous". Will Hodgkinson of The Times wrote "Carter Burwell's soundtrack for [The Ballad of Buster Scruggs] proves evocative enough to stand up on its own." Tim Grierson of Screen International wrote "composer Carter Burwell delivers another of his superb Coen scores — actually, several of them, as his music moves from plaintive to menacing, depending on the story." Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote "Carter Burwell's wonderfully resourceful score is abetted by no end of Western tunes that have been neatly worked into the flow of events."