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Wow. Just a completely amazing soundtrack helmed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Includes tracks with Lanegan singing a Nick Cave song (backed by Cave, Ellis, and Dave Sardy (BARKMARKET), and covering the Velvet Underground. EmmyLou appears, Ralph Stanley (!) singing WhiteLight/White Heat, Willie Nelson -- just an amazing spin. Great covers. UK import.

Listening to 85-year-old bluegrass legend sing Captain Beefheart and Velvet Underground songs on the soundtrack to is certainly disorienting – which is the effect wanted for his film. 

Cave wrote the screenplay and worked with his Bad Seeds and Grinderman collaborator Warren Ellis to score the movie, which is based on a novel by Matthew Bondurant about a family of bootleggers living in Virginia during the Depression. Cave and Ellis sought a sound that evoked the Thirties era of the movie while also transcending it.

“We wanted to use the score as a way of kind of stretching time, so we would do songs that were not of the period in a way that, at least at the heart of what we were playing, was of the period, even though we weren’t really playing bluegrass,” Cave tells Rolling Stone of the soundtrack, which is released today. Lawless opens in theaters on August 29th. “We wanted to do a relatively contemporary song about drug taking, say ‘White Light/White Heat,’ and have it sung by Ralph Stanley, who has at least one foot set in the period we’re dealing with.”

Hoping to achieve a consistency of tone throughout the movie, Cave and Ellis dubbed themselves the Bootleggers and recorded punk-bluegrass versions of songs, including Link Wray’s “Fire and Brimstone,” Townes Van Zandt’s “Fire in the Blood,” Captain Beefheart’s “Sure ‘Nuff Yes I Do” and the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat.” Because Cave wasn’t interested in singing the whole soundtrack – “The last thing I wanted was to listen to my fucking voice the whole time we were working on it,” he says – the idea was to recruit vocalists to accompany them. and the Duke Spirit’s Liela Moss signed on without reservation. Stanley wasn’t such an easy sell.

“We’d already recorded a version of ‘White Light/White Heat,’ and we wanted him to sing over the top of that, and he listened to our tracks and said there was no way in the world he was going to sing over that shit, basically,” Cave says with a laugh. “He’s used to not only a different style, but singing with bluegrass players, and we’re not, and that’s not what we’re trying to do.”

Stanley offered to sing the songs a cappella, though even that didn’t go the way the filmmakers had hoped. “We were still trying to get Ralph to sing in the same time signature and key so we could lay it on top of the tracks we had already recorded,” Cave says, which led to a debate on Skype with Stanley’s guitarist serving as an intermediary. “I can’t even begin to tell you the disdain on the face of the guitarist who works with him, having these Australians telling Ralph what we wanted him to sing,” Cave continues. “We’re like, ‘Do you reckon you could do this in C?’ And he says, ‘Ralph don’t do C.'”

Cave and director John Hillcoat discussed the soundtrack before Cave began the screenplay, so he wrote it with particular songs paired to scenes. The a cappella versions that Stanley turned in necessitated revisions to the script. “We had to make room for these songs of his because they were so special,” Cave says. “There’s something really beautiful about those versions that he did. There’s a kind of adventuring feel about it – he’s stepping into something that he’s not fully acquainted with.”

That Nick Cave is master of all things is pretty general knowledge these days. True, we have never seen Cave try his hand at any of  the sciences, but if the Krent Able's Stool Pigeon comic 'Doctor Cave, M.D.' is to be believed, the man can amputate like no other. Musically, Cave is known for nailing endeavors that lesser musicians could only dream of accomplishing. Take, for example, the The Bad Seeds mini-offshoot Grinderman producing two albums of material stronger than recent Bad Seeds releases. Now, along with his MVP Warren Ellis, Cave has upped the ante on the pair's soundtrack work with Lawless, the latest release from director John Hillcoat.

Unlike Cave and Ellis' scores for Hillcoat's The Proposition, The Road, and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Lawless – about a trio of brothers embroiled in the bootlegging business – consists primarily of covers sung by the likes of Emmylou Harris, Mark Lanegan, and bluegrass great Ralph Stanley. Although the Stanley inclusion may be lost on a lot of moviegoers and even Cave fans, coercing this living legend – who rarely performs songs outside of his chosen genre – to cover such anachronistic choices as Captain Beefheart and The Velvet Underground was a major coup.

A number of films have gone for integrating contemporary tunes into period pieces, but few do it in a way that makes adequate sense. This, though, is a triumph. Grandaddy's 'So You'll Aim For the Sky' (delivered beautifully by Emmylou Harris) becomes a gauzy elegy and The Velvet Underground's 'White Light/White Heat' morphs into an ode to moonshine. The latter song gets interpreted twice, once by Stanley accompanied by acoustic guitar, then again by Lanegan and The Bootleggers, a makeshift band comprised of Cave, Ellis, Bad Seeds and Grinderman bassist Martyn P. Casey, composer David Sardy, and Groove Armada's George Vjestica. Although Stanley's turn is a novel one, the Lanegan et. al. version is a triumph by achieving the incalculable coolness factor promised just by learning of its inclusion on the album's tracklisting.

As with song selections, the voices called upon for Lawless were picked with care. When Lanegan sings Captain Beefheart's 'Sure 'Nuff  'N Yes I Do', he sounds like Beezlebub luring innocent girls into his tricked out Cadillac; Harris' lovesickness on the Cave and Ellis original, 'Cosmonaut' is almost palpable; and Stanley's turns are authentically weathered enough to keep this soundtrack from venturing into O Brother, Where Art Thou? territory. Cave assumes vocal duties once, on a scungy version of John Lee Hooker's 'Burnin' Hell', and Willie Nelson gets the last word with the heretofore unreleased 'Midnight Run'.