Texas Paris Paris, Texas Soundtrack CD

Personnel: Nastassja Kinski, Harry Dean Stanton (vocals).
Audio Remixer: Mark Ettel.
Recording information: Ocean Way Recording, Hollywood, CA.
Photographer: Susan Titelman.
Unknown Contributor Roles: David Lindley; Jim Dickinson.
Arranger: Ry Cooder.
Suggestive of both the imagery of Win Wenders' movie Paris, Texas and the desert itself, Ry Cooder's score is a peaceful, poetic journey into the soul of an acoustic guitar. "Paris, Texas," "Brothers," and "Nothing Out There" open the album as meditative blends of guitar twang and scratching ambient effects. The songs move at a pretty, slow place, and the opening track sees Cooder plucking his guitar's strings and letting that sound vibrate into thin air; it's a motif that he returns to repeatedly throughout the score. There's a bit of both humor and mystery to the stillness and the echoing, edgy sound effects that crop up. "Cancion Mixteca" includes a memorable turn on vocals by Harry Dean Stanton, singing in Spanish. "No Safety Zone" is almost completely ambient in its ethics, with fleeting experimental guitar playing, as the song works more as a mood-setter than a traditional song. "I Knew These People" begins with an extended segment of dialogue from the film before Cooder's somber guitar creeps in. The effect of the dialogue makes the track a fine, artistic statement, but the moment works better in the context of the movie than as a track on an album. The dialogue comes from a scene where the characters played by Stanton and Nastassja Kinski have a particularly emotional meeting. The majority of the score is delicate and stunningly pretty. The overall sense is that Cooder was reaching for spare, emotional movements. The score is stark, quiet, and as uplifting as it is sad. Cooder makes the music sound as modern and stylish as acoustic music can sound. The album is at once alien and organic. Since "I Knew These People" includes dialogue from Paris, Texas, the score works best for people who have seen the movie, but it's still a powerful and immensely evocative journey for those whose experience with the material is the album alone. ~ Tim DiGravina
Ry Cooder is one of the great American film composers of his generation. The guitarist's work is always distinctive and insightful, and his score to Wim Wender's acclaimed PARIS, TEXAS is one of his finest. Here Cooder's music adds greatly to the movie by perfectly complementing the spare, gorgeous cinematography on the screen.
All 10 tracks on this soundtrack are beautiful yet eerie, capturing the lonely scenario of wandering lost through small Texas towns and along desert highways. Made up of mostly virtuosic, yet understated, slide-guitar improvisations, this disc is a pensive and solemn journey into the Big Sky Country of the American West. The album's opening title track and its closer, "Dark Was the Night," are prime examples of its plaintive, haunting sound. This is ghostly, atmospheric film music of the highest order.

Ry Cooder

Q (8/01, p.147) - 5 stars out of 5 - "...Marvellous..."
Mojo (Publisher) (6/02, p.67) - Included in Mojo's "100 Coolest Movie Soundtracks" - "...The sound of sagebrush, as evocatively created by Ry Cooder, the outstanding guitarist who made rock musician's transition to film-scoring look easy..."