Varèse Sarabande will release the Ray Donovan – Original Television Soundtrack both digitally and on CD on June 24, 2016. The album features original music from the first two seasons of the hit Showtime series composed by Marcelo Zarvos. The album also includes songs performed by The Chieftains (featuring Bon Iver), Kendra Morris, Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics, and Flash Lightnin.
"The music for the first 2 Seasons of Ray Donovan works on two levels simultaneously. First we have a crime/family drama, with a score that leans towards the emotional and orchestral. And second we have the 'fixer' element of the show which tends to be more propulsive and electronic," said Zarvos. "It was great fun to put on the two different musical hats needed for the show!"
"We tried very hard to show through the music the internal world of Ray Donovan," Zarvos explained. "Behind Liev Shreiber's masterfully stoic performance of Ray lies a deep and incredibly dark world which the score tends to emphasize even when it's not apparent on the screen. Liev can say more with a silent look than most actors will do while yelling at the top of their lungs and it was incredibly important to match that quiet intensity with the music."
"We got to be quite big in the sound palette, particularly for the first season where there was an almost gothic quality to the music and some pieces were recorded with a large orchestra in Prague," described Zarvos. "As the show progressed the two different strands of music became more unified and so the electronic and orchestral kind of meld together in the later seasons of the show (seasons 3 and 4)."
Ray Donovan returns to Showtime on June 24, 2016.