The album, offering 16 tracks by the Velvets and others, has been curated by Haynes and music supervisor Randall Poster. Upon its July premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the documentary was met with acclaim and Oscar buzz. The movie secured the participation of surviving bandmates John Cale and Maureen "Mo" Tucker in chronicling the story of the groundbreaking group formed by Cale, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, and Angus MacLise (replaced in 1965 by Tucker). The same day, Republic Records/UMe will issue the film's soundtrack on 2-CD and digital formats. On October 15, The Velvet Underground: A Documentary Film by Todd Haynes will be released in theaters and to the Apple TV+ streaming service. But before Haynes tackles Peggy, he's returning to a different Velvet: The Velvet Underground. More recently, he's been attached to direct Michelle Williams in the forthcoming Peggy Lee biopic Fever. One of his first works to garner significant attention was 1987's controversial and unauthorized Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story four years later, his evocation of the glam rock era in Velvet Goldmine made more commercial waves. It's worth hearing and having, but if you want to introduce yourself to the Velvet Underground, the 1989 collection The Best of the Velvet Underground: Words and Music by Lou Reed is a much better starting point - or simply listen to their four original studio albums, all of which are in print and readily available.Director Todd Haynes has long emphasized music in his filmography. The album is an excellent companion to an excellent film, but it's probably best appreciated by folks who've seen Haynes' movie taken on its own, it's all great music, but the through-line of these songs and the occasional curiosity of the sequencing reflects Haynes' choices as a filmmaker, not those of someone assembling an archival album. Among the Velvet Underground tracks on the album, "Heroin" is presented in its monophonic mix, "Sister Ray" and "After Hours" are rare live takes that document them in front of an audience, and "Chelsea Girls" was penned by Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison for Nico's first solo album, their only co-writing credit. And "The Ostrich," by the Primitives, was one of the great hack pop tunes Lou Reed cranked out as a staff songwriter at Pickwick Records that offered glimmers of what he would create in the future. "The Wind" by Nolan Strong and the Diablos is a haunting bit of doo wop that beguiled Lou Reed as a teenager, and Bo Diddley's "Road Runner" (featured here in an especially gritty live take) is a tribute to the inspired artist who influenced everyone in the band. "17 XII 63 NYC the Fire Is a Mirror" is a piece by LaMonte Young's experimental ensemble the Theatre of Eternal Music, where John Cale learned some of the drone techniques and chaotic viola patterns he would later bring to the Velvets. As in Haynes' documentary, not all the music is by the VU. The Velvet Underground: A Documentary Film by Todd Haynes is the soundtrack album to the movie, and it reflects the trajectory of the film rather than offering a compact history of their recorded catalog. The film is not only a fine biography of the band, it's a great crash course in the intersections of various creative media that were a vital part of the New York art community in the early to mid-'60s. Filmmaker Todd Haynes has done a superb job of charting the course of how they came together and what informed their work in his 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. Their genesis had more to do with beat poetry, outlaw literature, experimental composition, avant-garde art, and the rise of multimedia installations than the usual formula of folks getting together to drink beer and play "Louie Louie" (not to say the latter isn't a noble pursuit). Arguably the most important and influential American rock band of the second half of the 1960s, the Velvet Underground weren't much like any other group of their time, and neither was the story of how they came together.
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