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: Doc Pomus & Mort Shuman, Volume 1: 1950-1962

A few days ago, I posted my first "Covered" series, which is made of three albums of songs written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. I plan to post a bunch more of these to highlight the works of great songwriters. Here's the next one.

I don't think the songwriting team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman is as famous as Leiber and Stoller. But I'd argue they were just as commercially successful and just as talented. I don't want to go into great detail about their personal histories, since these write-ups I write are probably too wordy already. Here are the relevant Wikipedia entries:

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

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

But I will say they were unusually colorful characters, especially Pomus. There's a fascinating documentary film about his life called "A.k.a. Doc Pomus," which I recommend you watch. He had an extremely eventful and interesting life. *By the way, both he and Shuman died in 1991.)

Pomus was hit with polio when a child, and it afflicted him the rest of his life to the point that he spent most of his life in a wheelchair. He also was a white Jewish guy. Yet as soon as he became an adult, he started a career as a blues singer. He wasn't that good a singer, to be honest, but he was able to make a modest living out of it doing concerts, probably due to the novelty factor of being a white Jewish guy singing the blues, and handicapped to boot. I have two songs here from his solo career, which petered out after a few years.

By about 1956, he switched his musical efforts to songwriting. He'd had some success with that already, especially the song "Chains of Love," which was a hit for Big Joe Turner. (Note that he's not credited for writing it through, because he sold his songwriting share for a small amount of money.) Starting around 1957, he began having a lot more success.

Around 1958, Pomus met Shuman through a family connection. Pomus was in his thirties and Shuman was only 18 and had no songwriting experience at all. But Pomus saw something in him, and figured it would be good to get a teenager's perspective since his songs were mainly aimed at teenagers. Shuman quickly learned the art of songwriting and they became a very successful team. Typically, Pomus wrote the lyrics and Shuman wrote the melody. But this wasn't always the case. This can be seen by the fact that both had hits writing songs all by themselves as well.

I've chosen the songs for this series mainly because I like listening to them. But I also have tried to include all the significant hits. Luckily, the hits are usually the best songs, so it's typically easy to include them.

For this album, the only major hit I'm missing is "Young Blood," a hit for the Coasters in 1957. The reason I didn't include it is because Pomus wrote it with none other than Leiber and Stoller, before he began working with Shuman, and I've included the Coasters version in my Leiber and Stoller collection. Instead, I'm including a different version of "Young Blood" here, but it goes on a later album. (Bad Company had a hit with the song in 1976.)

I've made three albums of Pomus and/or Shuman songs. Each one of them is about 45 to 50 minutes long.

01 Send for the Doctor (Doc Pomus)
02 Chains of Love (Big Joe Turner)
03 Heartlessly (Doc Pomus)
04 Lonely Avenue (Ray Charles)
05 Boogie Woogie Country Girl (Big Joe Turner)
06 Love Roller Coaster (Big Joe Turner)
07 A Teenager in Love (Dion & the Belmonts)
08 Hushabye (Mystics)
09 Turn Me Loose (Fabian)
10 A Mess of Blues (Elvis Presley)
11 Save the Last Dance for Me (Drifters)
12 This Magic Moment (Drifters)
13 Surrender (Elvis Presley)
14 I Count the Tears (Drifters)
15 [Marie's The Name] His Latest Flame (Elvis Presley)
16 Young Boy Blues (Ben E. King)
17 Little Sister (Elvis Presley)
18 First Taste of Love (Ben E. King)
19 Gonna Get Back Home Somehow (Elvis Presley)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17181041/COVRDPomsShumn1950-1962Volum1_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/xvouYk3A

I suspect the reason more people don't know about Pomus and Shuman is because they kept a very low public profile. One result of that is that I had a hard time finding any photos of them together. All the photos I could find are black in white. So I've colorized them to help distinguish them from each other. I'm not sure what year this photo was taken, but I'd guess it's from around 1960, give or take a couple of years.

UPDATE: On September 30, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.