Various Artists - Grace of My Heart - Extended Edition (1996)

Here's something different than the stray tracks collections or concerts I usually post here. This is the soundtrack to the 1996 movie "Grace of My Heart." Normally, I wouldn't post something like this, because I assume the soundtrack is still in print. But, for various reasons, some really good performances were left off the official album. I've found about 20 more minutes of music not on the soundtrack that should have been, which I think is enough to justify posting this here.

"Grace of My Heart" is a very good movie, in my opinion. It currently gets 75 percent at Rotten Tomatoes. But I think that number would be higher for you if you're a big music fan. The story is closely based on the life of singer-songwriter Carole King, though there's a section where she gets involved with a Brian Wilson figure that never happened in reality.

None of the songs were actually written by King, but a bunch of very talented songwriters wrote songs in her style for the movie, including Burt Bacharach, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, Jill Sobule, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and Gerry Goffin (who was King's main songwriting partner for most of her 1960s hits). Normally, I'm not big on movie soundtracks, which are usually instrumental mood music or a random collection of  hit songs, but I make an exception for this one. The songs do a great job of recreating the sounds of the 1960s and 1970s, and they stand as good songs of their own.

Unfortunately, there were a bunch of songs that were featured in the movie that didn't make it onto the soundtrack. Most of these have never been made public in full, so the only way to listen to them is by getting the audio from the movie. I did exactly that for five of them. One more, "How Can I Get through to You," appeared in full as a bonus feature on the movie DVD. For the five I took from the audio, there was nothing I could do to fix things if there was movie dialogue over the songs. Luckily, there was very little of that for those. But the downside is that each of those songs are relatively short, sometimes just a minute or so, because things have to move quickly in a movie. In the case of "Heartbreak Kid," I had to piece together a song out of two separate snippets. I then repeated the chorus, to make a song that's still only a minute long.

On top of that, there's a couple of other extra songs from other sources. One weird thing is that Joni Mitchell wrote the song "Man from Mars" for the soundtrack, and her version of it appeared on it for the first week the album was on sale. But the soundtrack was produced by Larry Klein, Mitchell's husband, and they were going through a divorce right when the soundtrack came out. I guess some dispute between them led to her version being yanked and replaced by a version sung by Kristen Vigard, an actress who also is a really good singer, and who did the vocals for all the parts sung by the Carole King-esque main actress. Mitchell put "Man from Mars" on her next album, but that was a totally different version. I've included her original version here, as well as the Vigard version.

I also have two versions of "God Give Me Strength." This song was co-written by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, and led to the two of them making an entire album together two years later. The soundtrack featured the version performed by Bacharach and Costello, but in the actual move it was sung by Vigard, who did a great version of this excellent song. So I've included both versions of that as well.

Costello also wrote the song "Unwanted Number," but a version by the retro soul group "For Real" was used on the soundtrack instead. Costello didn't put his own version on a studio album until 2018. He did play the song in concert in 1996, in a solo acoustic format, the same year the movie came out However, the sound quality isn't great on that one. So I've included the 2018 version as part of the album, and the 1996 version as a bonus track.

Thus there are three songs with two versions (including three versions of "Unwanted Number," if you could the bonus track). But those are all especially good songs, and the different versions are done by different performers, and they're all worth hearing.

Hopefully, a deluxe version of this soundtrack will be released someday, with complete versions of all the songs. Most of the songs I grabbed from the movie audio should have more complete versions without any talking over them. But also, there are another four or five songs that I couldn't include because there was so much talking and other noise over them. In particular, there were three more songs by "For Real" that I couldn't salvage. So an official version of everything would have a lot more to offer than what I'm presenting here.

Oh, one other thing I did that seems like a no-brainer to me is that I ordered all the songs, released and unreleased, in the order that they appeared in the movie. The official soundtrack had them in no logical order that I could see. The only exceptions to this ordering are the songs with two versions. I put the versions that didn't appear in the film at the end.

01 Hey There (Kristen Vigard)
02 In Another World (Kristen Vigard)
03 Blues Ain't Nothin' but a Woman Crying for Her Man (For Real)
04 In Another World (Portrait)
05 Born to Love that Boy (For Real)
06 Unwanted Number (For Real)
07 I Do (For Real)
08 Heartbreak Kid (Williams Brothers)
09 My Secret Love (Miss Lily Banquette)
10 Love Doesn't Ever Fail Us (Williams Brothers)
11 Truth Is You Lied (Jill Sobule)
12 God Give Me Strength (Kristen Vigard)
13 Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (Boyd Rice & Tiffany Anders)
14 Groovin' on You (Juned)
15 Take a Run at the Sun (J Mascis)
16 Don't You Think It's Time (J Mascis)
17 How Can I Get Through to You (Juned)
18 Man from Mars (Kristen Vigard)
19 Between Two Worlds (Shawn Colvin)
20 A Boat on the Sea (Kristen Vigard)
21 God Give Me Strength (Burt Bacharach & Elvis Costello)
22 Unwanted Number (Elvis Costello)
23 Man from Mars [Piano Version] (Joni Mitchell)

Unwanted Number (Elvis Costello)

https://www.imagenetz.de/aGsFR

Since I changed this album so significantly, I decided it needed a different album cover. I used the cover of the DVD as the basis. But that was rectangular, so I made some changes to get it to fit into a square space. Also, I removed a list of the actors in the film. That left a big black space. I filled that by adding in a photo of Kristen Vigard, since she had such a prominent role as vocalist.