Various Artists - Fallout, Season 1 - The Unreleased Complete Soundtrack (2024) (A MIKE SOLOF GUEST POST)

Here is another guest post from contributor Mike Solof. This time around, he's chosen to do a post of the complete soundtrack to season one of Netflix’s 2024 drama "Fallout," known for its extensive use of music. Normally, I would write a long introduction about the show and Mike's post of the music. But the problem is that I confess I have never watched the show, played any of the video games it was based on …and basically know nothing about it… other than I like the music. So for this post I’ll keep it short and sweet.

"Fallout," the 2024 Netflix series inspired by the popular video game franchise, plunges viewers into a post-apocalyptic world where remnants of civilization clash with mutated creatures and survivoralist factions vying for power. The show artfully blends dark humor and action, following a diverse cast of characters navigating the desolate wasteland. A standout feature is its extensive use of music from the 1940s and 1950s, which not only enhances the nostalgic atmosphere but also juxtaposes the grim setting with a sense of charm and irony, providing a captivating backdrop to the unfolding drama.

Mike’s PDF file is a "Fallout" soundtrack guide and includes details about every song and when it appears in the show. Much like its video game counterpart, each episode of the Fallout TV show features all kinds of songs that bring the franchise's 1950s aesthetic to life. Many of these songs were popular picks from the era, while other songs were lesser-known selections. 

The Fallout TV show follows the story of its three main characters, Lucy, Maximus, and Cooper Howard, as they each race across the wasteland in an attempt to chase down a valuable head. Fallout's cast of characters have their stories interweave throughout the show, with each of their various adventures being scored by these popular songs. Since there's no official soundtrack album with all the songs, Mike decided to make one. He realized on a Fallout fan wiki that had details about all the songs on the show.

One problem Mike and I faced is how to divide the music up into something listenable. All in all, this makes up two hours and 15 minutes of music. That's way too much for an album. But there were eight episodes, and if you break this up into one album per episode, some of those are too short. For instance, one episode only had two songs in it that weren't in previous episodes. So we decided to split this into four albums, each containing the music from two episodes. 

Thus, this ends up being either one really big album, or four smallish albums, depending on how you look at it. To cover all bases, we made one album cover for the whole thing, then individual album covers for each of the four sub-sections.

The show has been a big hit and already has been renewed for a second season. So let's hope Mike will be game to make a sequel to this if the next season has lots of interesting music like the first one.

By the way, a real technical note here. I used the fan wiki mentioned above to track down the years each song was first recorded (which get mentioned in the mp3 tags, as well as Mike's PDF file). But three songs were so obscure that the wiki didn't know when they were released, and I couldn't figure those out either. So, for those three songs, I just put in the year 2024.

EPISODES 1 & 2:

01 Orange Colored Sky (Nat King Cole)
02 Journey into Melody (Sam Fonteyn)
03 Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes (Perry Como)
04 Who Do You Suppose (Connie Conway)
05 Some Enchanted Evening (Castells)
06 Keep That Coffee Hot (Scatman Crothers)
07 A Nervous Kiss (Carl Coccomo)
08 So Doggone Lonesome (Johnny Cash)
09 All Over Again (Johnny Cash)
10 Brighter Side (Connie Conway)
11 Mariachi de Amigos (Donald Quan)
12 Crawl Out Through the Fallout (Sheldon Allman)
13 Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall (Ink Spots)
14 Don't Fence Me In (Bing Crosby & The Andrew Sisters)
15 It's a Man (Betty Hutton)
16 I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire (Ink Spots)

EPISODES 3 & 4:

01 Maybe (Ink Spots)
02 We'll Meet Again (Ink Spots)
03 Tweedle Dee (LaVern Baker)
04 In the Mood (Glenn Miller Orchestra)
05 Act Naturally (Buck Owens)
06 Let's Go Sunning (Jack Shaindlin)
07 Just Fine (Michael Brown & Company)
08 What to Do (Buddy Holly)
09 It Ain't the Meat, It's the Motion (Swallows)
10 I Can Dream, Can't I (Andrews Sisters)

EPISODES 5 & 6:

01 Jet Tones (Henry)
02 Robin in the Pine (Bonnie Guitar)
03 Battle Hymn of the Republic (Rick Rhodes & Danny Pelfrey)
04 National Pride (Cedric King Palmer)
05 Ladyfingers (Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass)
06 What a Difference a Day Makes (Dinah Washington)
07 It's Just a Matter of Time (Brook Benton)
08 Texas and Beyond (John Scott)
09 Improvisation on Tchaikowsky's Pathetique Andante (Django Reinhardt)
10 Dardanella (Alvino Rey)
11 The Theme from a Summer Place (Percy Faith & His Orchestra)
12 Lonely Hours (Gene Armstrong)
13 Summer in Love (Romolo Grano)
14 Give Me the Simple Life (June Christy)
15 Skitter Skatter (Metrotones)
16 I'm Tickled Pink (Jack Shaindlin)

EPISODES 7 & 8:

01 Sixteen Tons (Tennessee Ernie Ford)
02 Only You [And You Alone] (Platters)
03 Bossa Angela (Roland Kovac Rhythm & Strings)
04 Annie's Song (John Denver)
05 Yeah Yeah Baby (William 'Cool Papa' Jarvis)
06 You're Everything (Danleers)
07 From the First Hello, to the Last Goodbye (Jane Morgan)
08 Oktoberfest (Douglas Wood)
09 I Don't Want to See Tomorrow (Nat King Cole)
10 We Three [My Echo, My Shadow and Me] (Ink Spots)

https://www.imagenetz.de/gYtxA

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/5WhqrY3f

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/gDalFJYahfb6har/file

The cover art comes from a promotional poster for the show. Don't look at what the dog has in its mouth!

Various Artists - Covered: Fats Domino & Dave Bartholomew, Volume 1: 1949-1989

It's been a long time since the last time I posted something new for my long-standing "Covered" series. But never fear. This series will never die, not as long as I can help it. ;) I enjoy writing songs myself, so I really appreciate talented songwriters. And that's what this series is about, highlighting the songs of the best songwriters through cover versions others have done of their songs.

In most cases in the Covered series so far, the songwriters had most of their hits done by others, such as the team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. But in the case of the songwriting team of Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino had a couple dozen big hits with these songs. Bartholomew also had a solo career, but he just dabbled in that with a small number of records compared to Domino, and didn't have any big hits. However, I wanted to post something from this team, because I get the impression that Domino's songwriting talent isn't well known, compared to say, Chuck Berry from the same era, and Bartholomew's contribution is even less known. I've found enough material for two volumes.

Domino had most of his hits in the 1950s and early 1960s. They were such big hits that I think it took a while before many people decided to make their own versions. So even though this volume begins way early, in 1949, with the songs in chronological order, it quickly moves to the 1970s and after. I didn't include any of Domino's own versions, since the whole point is to highlight these songs through cover versions. However, I did include one song recorded by Bartholomew, since few people have heard his stuff. 

If you want to know more about these two, here are their Wikipedia pages:

Fats Domino - Wikipedia

Dave Bartholomew - Wikipedia 

Domino and Bartholomew had a long and fruitful songwriting collaboration, from Domino's first hit in the late 1940s until 1963, when Domino finally switched record companies. That put him in a different company than Bartholomew and effectively ended their partnership, although it seems they stayed on good terms. That probably was a bad move on Domino's part, since that's when his hits stopped, although the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion coming the next year probably was a big factor as well. Generally speaking, the songs co-written by both of them were recorded by Domino. But Bartholomew was a producer as well, and he had a number of hits done by others, such as "I Hear You Knocking" and "One Night." Domino died in 2017, and Bartholomew died in 2019.

I'll have more to say in Volume Two. This volume is 44 minutes long.

01 3 x 7 = 21 (Jewel King)
02 Toy Bell (Bees)
03 I'm in Love Again (Fontane Sisters)
04 Shrimp and Gumbo (Dave Bartholomew)
05 I'm Walkin' (Ricky Nelson)
06 The Big Beat (Del Vikings)
07 Witchcraft (Elvis Presley)
08 Let the Four Winds Blow (Searchers)
09 The Land of a Thousand Dances (Wilson Pickett)
10 I Hear You Knocking (Dave Edmunds)
11 Grow Too Old (Bobby Charles)
12 I'm Ready (Band)
13 Sick and Tired [Return of Django] (Neville Grant)
14 Ain't That a Shame (John Lennon)
15 Blue Monday (Cat Stevens)
16 The Fat Man (Robbie Robertson)
17 One Night (Joe Cocker)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17301673/COVRDDOMINBARTH1949-1989Volum1_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Fo5fETaQ

I couldn't find any good photos of Domino and Bartholomew together when they were young (although I did find a good one for Volume 2), so I had to make one from scratch. I took a photo of Domino and another of Bartholomew and put them together. The one of Domino was in color, but it clearly was colorized by someone before I got my hands on it. I adjusted the colors somewhat to hopefully make the colorization less obvious. I took a black and white photo of Bartholomew and colorized it. He's in a grey jacket and Domino is in a blue one.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Various Artists - Covered: Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, Volume 1: 1952-1958

So far with this blog, I'm been prioritizing posting stray tracks compilation albums for individual artists, since those usually can't be found elsewhere. But there are other things I want to post, and one major category is various artists compilations. So far, I've posted a little bit of that, especially my series of "Nuggets" compilations sorted by country. I still plan on posting the US and Britain compilations in that series, but I have to figure out how to organize it into manageable pieces. In the meantime, I'm going to start this new series, which I call "Covered."

In my opinion, songwriters are drastically underappreciated. I believe that, in the long run, the quality of the song matters more than the performance. But of course the performer gets nearly all the fame and glory, in the same way that movie stars are usually much better known than directors, producers, or screenwriters. In this series, I want to highlight some of the greatest songwriters, or songwriting teams, of all time. Some in this series, such as Carole King or Smokey Robinson, have been major performing stars as well, but I plan on looking exclusively at songs performed by others.

Sometimes, there have been various artists collections along these lines. For instance, there have been a couple of pretty good box sets dealing with the music of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. But even with the best official efforts, there are licensing problems that mean key songs are left out. On the flip side, there usually are many songs included that aren't that good. I'm making exactly what pleases me. I'm trying to include all the big hits, but if there's one I don't like, I'll probably resort to using a version of that song by someone else, or maybe not include it at all. And there usually are rarities that I do like and weren't hits at all.

The first in this series is the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, because their success goes way back to the early 1950s. I'm not going to recount their story. If you don't know who they are, check out their Wikipedia entry as a starting point to learn more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Leiber_and_Mike_Stoller

In short, they wrote over 70 hits, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, and are undoubtedly one of the best songwriting teams of all time. They produced a great number of hits as well, and ran their own record company. They especially fed a lot of hits to the Coasters and to Elvis Presley. I've usually selected the original hit, but sometimes I went with an alternate, especially because I didn't want to overload this with Coasters and Elvis performances. So, for instance, I went with Big Mama Thornton's version of "Hound Dog" instead of Presley's. Also, my rule is to only include one version of a particular song, even if two or more artists had big hits with it.

As I mentioned above, I try to include the hits, but not if I don't like them. For this album, probably the only controversial choice is that I don't like "Loving You" by Presley. I find it slow, it a boring and overdone manner. But it was a huge hit. So I found a rare fast version that I like much better, and I've included that instead.

I've broken up this collection into three albums of about 50 minutes of music each. This is the first. For all albums in this "Covered" series, the songs are ordered chronologically by year. But I don't go into enough detail to figure out the release order within each year.

01 Hard Times (Charles Brown)
02 Nosey Joe (Bull Moose Jackson)
03 Hound Dog (Big Mama Thornton)
04 Riot in Cell Block No. 9 (Robins)
05 I Smell a Rat (Big Mama Thornton)
06 Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots (Cheers)
07 Down in Mexico (Coasters)
08 Love Me (Elvis Presley)
09 Jailhouse Rock (Elvis Presley)
10 Fools Fall in Love (Drifters)
11 [You're So Square] Baby I Don't Care (Elvis Presley)
12 Lucky Lips (Ruth Brown)
13 Loving You [Fast Version] (Elvis Presley)
14 Santa Claus Is Back in Town (Elvis Presley)
15 Young Blood (Coasters)
16 Treat Me Nice (Elvis Presley)
17 Framed (Ritchie Valens)
18 Trouble (Elvis Presley)
19 King Creole (Elvis Presley)
20 Yakety Yak (Coasters)
21 Don't (Elvis Presley)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17180184/COVRDLeibStllr1952-1958Volum1_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/kVpYpkqc

As usual, I don't like using black and white photos for the cover art. But I couldn't find any color photos of Leiber and Stoller from the 1950s, so I colorized this one. I believe it dates from 1959. Leiber is on the left.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.