Twenty years ago, a little movie about the early 1990’s music scene in Seattle helped spawn an entire movement. Cameron Crowe’s “Singles” wasn’t the film director’s most famous flick, but it boasted one of the best soundtracks of the ’90s — and some iconic rock star cameos.
Here are ten things to know about the “Singles” soundtrack.
1. The “Singles” soundtrack was actually released three months before the September 1992 movie premiere. By the time the movie came out, the soundtrack was already on its way to platinum status.
2. In addition to being featured on the soundtrack, members of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains appeared in the film. Although Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder even had a small speaking part in the movie, he told the Los Angeles Times, “I warned Cameron Crowe that if anyone at Warner Bros. made too much of the Seattle scene, that I would, like, go buy a gun and become the martyr of the whole scene.” The band’s true feelings may have come out in the form of a drunken debacle at MTV’s “Singles” promotional party in 1992. Guitarist Stone Gossard later said, “It was a total disaster.”
3. Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament were originally in the band Mother Love Bone, but the band split after the sudden death of lead singer Andrew Wood in 1990. Mother Love Bone’s “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” was not only featured in “Singles,” but also in Crowe’s earlier film, “Say Anything.”
4. The soundtrack features The Lovemongers doing a remake of the Led Zeppelin classic, “The Battle of Evermore.” In case you’re not familiar with The Lovemongers, the band is the acoustic alter ego of Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson. Crowe was married to Nancy Wilson for 25 years.
5. The most glaring omission on the “Singles” soundtrack is the absence of Kurt Cobain’s Seattle band, Nirvana. According to a 1992 USA Today article, the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was tapped to be in the film, but producers dropped Nirvana music from the soundtrack when it became too difficult to get approvals. In an interview on the subject, Cobain slammed the film and informed his band mates that he had nixed the deal without even telling them about it.
6. The music was ahead of its time. In an interview with Filmcomment, Crowe revealed: “‘Singles’ was meant to capture the passion of what was going on in Seattle in ’88… And the irony, and still occasional pain of it, is that the movie was held from release for a long time and was only released after Nirvana and Pearl Jam [made it big], so it still looks on paper like we made this movie to seize upon the Seattle scene, and nothing could be further from the truth.”
7. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell actually wrote a rough version of the band’s later hit, “Spoonman,” during filming of “Singles.” You can hear a brief piece of the demo version in the movie.
8. A homage to retro Seattle music was made with the soundtrack’s inclusion of the Jimi Hendrix song “May This Be Love,” from the 1967 album “Are You Experienced.” Hendrix was born in Seattle in 1942.
9. A last minute addition to the soundtrack was the Screaming Trees song “Nearly Lost You.” According to Spin magazine, the song became an MTV Buzz Clip and peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard charts. Of the song’s music video, director Eric Zimmerman said, “There was one requirement we were given, which was we had to put the ‘Singles’ poster in the video. This was at the grunge time, which wasn’t about product placement.” After a shot of the poster being burned was nixed, he decided to run the footage backwards. “In today’s world, they would have made me take it out,” he said. Check out the video here.
10. In an interview with Creem magazine, Crowe said the film’s closing song – Paul Westerberg’s “Dyslexic Heart”– is his favorite. “The end of the movie used to be this shot over the city…basically hundreds of people, all obsessing about love and different aspects of it, ” Crowe said. I wanted all their voices to just be a din…we got all these people who were just a little too good at their voice-overs and it just sounded like a bad radio ad. And then Westerberg played us this song called ‘Dyslexic Heart’ and it said everything that I wanted to say.”
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