We Need To Talk About How I Was Right About That Editors Song From The New Moon Soundtrack

I don’t have a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road anymore—I read my brother’s copy and for once actually returned it. In my family we have a pretty flexible relationship with “borrowing.” Sometime in the middle of last year my sister loaned my wife her copy of Twilight and she read it and told me I should read it, and then I decided I should blog about it too, and then it obviously took me until March of this year to finish it. And I still have it. I’ve bought at least 3 copies of Sam Harris’s book Letter To A Christian Nation, because I keep loaning my copy to people and never trying to get them back.

So it’s weird that I didn’t just keep my brother’s copy of The Road, but not really. Who wants to think about that book after you’ve read it? It’s like, get away from me The Road! It wasn’t so gruesome that I couldn’t finish it—(although Johnny Got His Gun was! After a while I just couldn’t pick that book up anymore)—but it was clearly gruesome enough that I didn’t want to ever think about it again.

But obviously I thought about it when I heard that Editors song “No Sound But The Wind,” because it is basically “The Road: The Song,” carrying the fire being an especially important part of The Road, rhetorically speaking. (That’s kind of McCarthy’s thing, isn’t it? Bell’s dream at the end of No Country For Old Men is a weird thematic echo of this.) So it’s weird on the face of it that this song, so clearly about another book-to-film adaptation that was also released in 2009, is on the New Moon soundtrack. But the plot, as it turns out, thickens!

There’s an article on some kind of British website called Gigwise.com, in which the Editors defend themselves against charges of “selling out” by putting a song on the New Moon soundtrack.

Let me say, by the way, that I am glad hipsterdom has progressed in America to the point where we don’t just get mad and yell “sell out!” when someone does something like put a song on a soundtrack to a franchise popular among the tweens. When I heard that Grizzly Bear was going to be on the New Moon soundtrack, my first thought was: Awesome, I hope they make a lot of money from this! And I sort of felt like everyone else felt the same way. Or maybe I am just getting old, and I don’t hear hipster backlash anymore? Is it like a dog whistle? Have I aged out of the frequency?

Anyway, putting a song on the New Moon soundtrack doesn’t make you a sell out. And yet:

But the singer [Tom Smith] said he was initially unsure about the project because the director [Chris Weitz] asked him to change some of the lyrics in the song, which was originally inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road.

I was right! Wait a second—he changed some of the lyrics? That kind of does make you a sell out, doesn’t it?

“But I went back and I thought about the lyrics and I recorded it slightly differently and I actually think the lyrics flow better now than they ever did and it will now be on the film.”

Keep fucking that chicken, buddy.