Today is Black Friday, and La-La Land Records has announced their “final four” releases of the year. It’s quite a grand-slam: Jade (James Horner), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Jerry Goldsmith), Batman Returns (Danny Elfman) and Home Alone (John Williams). I produced Jade and co-produced Batman Returns, and both were fun projects to work on.
The tricky thing with Jade was that at any time, supposedly Horner could have pulled the plug or taken over the project – thankfully, liner notes author Daniel Schweiger approached Horner about it – he was quite gracious and wished us the best. We did have a bit of an issue with regards to some of the credits on the album, but in the end I’m comfortable with how it ended up. Whew!
Batman Returns was so much easier than our release earlier this summer of Batman. First off, the elements were in pristine condition, and sounded perfect. Shawn Murphy’s mix has never sounded so good. Secondly, the album just fell together pretty obviously, and the sign-off process was pretty simple. While we did keep the instrumental band version of “Super Freak”, sadly Mark McKenzie’s brilliant arrangements of classic Christmas carols were ultimately dropped from the album. Sorry Mark! Still, this is a great release, and the second disc starts out with one of my favorite Elfman tracks of all time: “Umbrella Source/The Children’s Hour/War”. Such great stuff.