Crate Digging is a recurring feature in which we take a deep dive into a genre and turn up several albums all music fans should know about. In this edition, composer Bear McCreary shares some very personal picks.
Bear McCreary has become one of the industry’s most prolific composers since his critically acclaimed breakthrough work on Battlestar Galactica, scoring such projects as The Walking Dead, the God of War games, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. This is what makes his newest project, The Singularity, so unique: A 25-track original concept album (with an accompanying graphic novel).
“I’ve spent the last 25 years of my life professionally writing music to fit other people’s stories,” McCreary tells Consequence. “So The Singularity, as it exists today, really began as a purely musical expression — I had other things to say musically that I wasn’t able to say through the films and television and video games that I was fortunate enough to be scoring.”
McCreary feels very passionately about the art of composing music for the screen — so passionately, in fact, that when Consequence asked him to select the movie (and TV) scores that represent his personal favorites, we allowed him to expand his list of picks from ten to twelve: A list that includes some iconic pillars of science fiction, fantasy, and horror… as well as one of the 20th century’s wildest sequels of all time, and the movie that made him first realize the power of music in film.
Conan the Barbarian (1982), composed by Basil Poledouris
The most significant fantasy film score of all time, which is also an easy contender for the best film score of all time for me. You listen to this score, it has everything. It has power and beauty, might and majesty. It’s a masterclass in orchestration. It wasn’t his first score, but it was very close. If you go back and listen to some of his other highlights — Lonesome Dove, Starship Troopers, Robocop — there are all these huge anthems.
But Conan the Barbarian is maybe one of the only scores that can make me feel absolutely invigorated and then, in the same cue, can almost make me want to weep and takes me to another another realm. I just can’t say enough good things about it. Basil [Poledouris] is often, I think, overlooked from the list of the greats. And he shouldn’t be, he was one of them.
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