Lakeshore Records will release the Seven Psychopaths - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack digitally on October 23rd and in stores on November 20th, 2012. The album features original music by Carter Burwell (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 1 and 2, Burn After Reading).
"The score to Seven Psychopaths tries to accomplish two things, primarily," said Burwell. "One is to make the characters as human and sympathetic as possible—or as one can make characters in a film titled Seven Psychopaths. Because the reality of the story and of the characters is so often subverted and reframed, it seemed a worthy challenge to draw the audience into the characters' own hearts and minds and emphasize their emotional reality."
Carter Burwell graduated from Harvard College. While at Harvard, he studied animation with Mary Beams and George Griffin, electronic music with Ivan Tcherepnin and pursued a course of independent study at the MIT Media Lab (then known as the Architecture Machine Group). In the early 80s, he worked at the New York Institute of Technology where he began as a computer modeler and animator, but ended up as Director of Digital Sound Research. During this time, he worked on many computer-animated television spots and films, ultimately contributing models and animation to the Japanese anime Lensman.
At the same time, Burwell pursued a parallel career in music, playing with a number of bands in New York City, particularly The Same, Thick Pigeon, and Radiante. He was also writing music for dance, theatre and film. His first film works included the Coen Brothers first feature, Blood Simple. This lead to a twenty year collaboration on such films as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men. Burwell's credits also include Being John Malkovich, Before Night Falls, Velvet Goldmine, The Spanish Prisoner, Three Kings, The Kids Are All Right, True Grit, the HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce, and several films in the Twilight series.
"The other important goal for the score was to make the ending of the story redemptive," Burwell explained. "Thus the musical theme that is used for The Quaker and The Vietnamese Priest does evolve in the end into the theme I called Redemption. And hopefully the audience perceives this redemption as real and truly felt."
Written and directed by Oscar-winner Martin McDonagh, the comedy Seven Psychopaths follows a struggling screenwriter (Colin Farrell) who inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends (Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell) kidnap a gangster's (Woody Harrelson) beloved Shih Tzu. Co-starring Abbie Cornish, Tom Waits, Olga Kurylenko and Zeljko Ivanek.