Lakeshore Records will release the Infinitely Polar Bear – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack digitally on June 16 and on CD June 30, 2015. The film is a very personal, semi-autobiographical story from writer/director Maya Forbes.
Maya reached out to her sister, Pink Martini frontperson China Forbes, to contribute an original song for the soundtrack. "I wrote 'The Northern Line' in a London hotel room on my son's toy ukulele," China described. "Maya asked me to write a song about a train. I had just taken the Northern Line of the tube to see my cousin and I have always found poetry in that title. Mania is like a runaway train. Depression is a train off its track. I really understood my father and his struggles and I am so happy I could contribute this joyful and wistful song to my favorite film: Infinitely Polar Bear."
The album also features songs lovingly curated by music supervisor Randall Poster, a friend of Forbes, with songs from George Harrison, Brenton Wood, Jerry "Swamp Dogg" Williams, Elvis Perklands in Dearland, and the film's original score by Theodore Shapiro.
"Maya has a great instinct for songs. Using music to amplify and humanize the family dynamic at the core of Infinitely Polar Bear," said Poster. "We collect in the film a unique combination of songs that along with Teddy Shapiro's magical score plant us in time and place, and set a place for us at the table of these lives. Maya put so much of herself into the film and it's the songs I think that help her find that safe place from where this story comes alive."
Composer Shapiro agreed. "When Maya and I began working on Infinitely Polar Bear, she had a very clear and helpful direction: whatever form the music took, she wanted it to underline the idea of family," he described. "Although the family that this story is about has a father who has bipolar disorder, the family is defined not by mental illness but by a messy, chaotic warmth."