Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a book that has defied film adaptation time and time again, going now four decades without ever seeing its story taken to the big screen. It is assumed that the film’s score would be just as epic as the film itself, and some music artists have gone ahead and written their own take on what the soundtrack could be. Murder By Death’s “Red of Tooth and Claw” is usually mentioned, but there are others that are some real Heavy Western soundtracks.
Every song on Earth’s 2005 album Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method was named after a phrase from Blood Meridian (“That’s the one that’s the most violent or occult, but all of his books deal with that theme of the West and the frontier and its violence and effects,” Dylan Carlson told Terroriser. “It’s more about capturing that sense of place. As someone born in America, I definitely consider myself a product of the frontier and the history of it has influenced me.”)
Ben Nichols of alt country band Lucero recorded a solo album called The Last Pale Light In The West, with each song based on characters from Blood Meridian. “You’ve got these two opposing forces,” he told NPR. “The innocence of the kid – who’s, I think, 14, 15, 16 through most of the book – and then this character, the Judge, who is brilliant but also very evil. It’s basically a Western, but these two characters in this particular setting really caught my imagination.”
The title track from The Last Pale Light In The West was used as “The Governor’s Theme” in TV show The Walking Dead. “The whole song is originally based on a line out of the Blood Meridian novel by Cormac McCarthy, which is a very apocalyptic western written in the 80s,” Nichols explained. “One of my favorite novels – probably my favorite. The Last Pale Light In The West is written in this voice where you don’t know if the narrator really cares if he lives or dies. But there’s a glimmer of hope still, which comes from Cormac’s novels. I think he leaves that little bit of hope in a lot of his stories like No Country For Old Men.”
Here’s to hoping the film begins shooting soon!
