Paris, Texas as a hybrid stereo SACD from Analogue Productions’ Acoustic Sounds 40th Anniversary Series, mastered to DSD from the original master tape. Ry Cooder’s soundtrack plays in one sequence – from the title piece to “Dark Was The Night”.
What lives between two notes
Nobody needs to fill the room here. A string is struck, a note slides away – and then it is allowed to fade. For Paris, Texas, Ry Cooder found a language that says so much precisely because it explains so little.
Wim Wenders’ 1984 film is about distance – between places, but also between people – and Cooder needs no large orchestra to express it. His slide guitar can sound like a voice still searching for words, and even without the pictures a landscape of intimacy, unease and silence takes shape.
When landscape becomes memory
The title piece sets up that world with just a few gestures. Later, “Cancion Mixteca”, sung by Harry Dean Stanton, gives it a human voice – feelings the guitar had only suggested now emerge as a song.
“I Knew These People” asks for a different kind of attention: Stanton’s spoken account is as much part of the album as Cooder’s instrument. This soundtrack lets the film’s language and memories in, too – and that is part of its magic.
A blues starting point
One crucial connection is Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground”, which Wenders named as a musical starting point for his work with Cooder. The seemingly empty landscape has a human history behind it: the guitar draws on the expressive world of the blues, not just on images of dusty roads and open skies.
The 1984 film brings together Wenders’ direction, Sam Shepard’s screenplay and Robby Müller’s camera, with Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski on screen – and its music isn’t a solitary performance either: the film credits list David Lindley and Jim Dickinson next to Cooder. Short instrumental scenes stand beside the longer “I Knew These People” and the closing “Dark Was The Night”, and that movement between music and spoken memory gives the album its unique shape.
The hybrid stereo SACD from Analogue Productions
CAPR 022 SA is a hybrid stereo SACD from Analogue Productions’ Acoustic Sounds 40th Anniversary Series. According to the publisher, it was mastered to DSD from the original master tape. The publisher also recalls that Cooder’s music, recorded over three days, won the BAFTA for Best Film Music. The SACD layer plays on SACD-capable players, the CD layer on any conventional CD player. The disc contains the ten tracks of the original soundtrack album.
You order from Michael 45 in Germany. We arrange the US import and ship from Hilden.
More from the series: Acoustic Sounds 40th Anniversary Series
Also in another edition: Paris, Texas
More SACDs by Ry Cooder: Chicken Skin Music · Paradise And Lunch
Customer question: Buying Analogue Productions records in Europe
Musicians
Documented selection of participating musicians. Personnel may vary by track; this list does not claim to be complete.
- Ry CooderSlide guitar
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