Label Threads The Official Varese Sarabande Thread

[DangerMotif 1,038]

2 hours ago, Jay said:

Clues are up

 

We're doing things a little differently this time around. A single clue that applies to both of the CD Club titles we're announcing on Friday! Let's see if you folks can crack these ones.

 

 

https://www.facebook.com/varesesarabanderecords/posts/pfbid0TxPQo21KfFFVtc3jXKqYsktg29J4hwuB2RqQhG9BxMqu4pNT3cdTCpKpe9Tfueqfl

Skyfall?

[Richard Penna 3,694]

Once again: if Varese didn't do the OST, they're probably not deluxifying it.

 

Annoyingly I won't be at home when these are announced, as it's the first batch in a little while that I'm excited for following the clues. If one is Ice Age, that's a Christmas present sorted.

 

And no, Presto music haven't got any 'clues'.

[Raiders of the SoundtrArk 2,433]

Ice Age would be really great, it's a really fun score and if it's the first step to the Powell's score (even though they're post 2005) I will buy it in a heart beep

I maintain Brainstorm is coming (one clue like this one leads to a great brainstorming)

[Yavar Moradi 2,599]

Varese has done Deluxe Editions of other post-2005 Powell scores… were those non-AFM while his Ice Age scores are all AFM? A Newman Ice Age expansion followed by three Powell Ice Age expansions would be really cool. I have leaked versions of some of the complete Powell Ice Age scores and they play fantastic in complete form. It would be nice to be able to buy an official edition.

 

Yavar

[Jay 37,369]

25 minutes ago, Yavar Moradi said:

Varese has done Deluxe Editions of other post-2005 Powell scores…

 

The How To Train Your Dragon scores were all recorded in London.

 

The other Powell Varese Deluxes were just Bourne Identity from 2002 and Paycheck from 2003

[Yavar Moradi 2,599]

Thanks; I had forgotten that. Of course we know that exceptions somehow were made for Varese DEs of the three post-2009 AFM-recorded Giacchino Star Trek scores. I wish I knew exactly how that managed to come about.

 

Yavar

[JTN 2,030]

10 hours ago, Raiders of the SoundtrArk said:

I will buy it in a heart beep

 

[Richard Penna 3,694]

I wondered if there were any clues regarding which studios they were working with lately, but every single title this year has been a different studio:

 

Time Machine: WB

City Hall: Sony/Columbia

Mouse Hunt: Dreamworks

April Fool's Day: Paramount

Blood Simple: (independent)

 

Ice Age is Fox, Pleasantville is New Line Cinema. I'm not personally convinced the latter is missing tons of music - I've seen the film and heard bits of its iso score. Hence I really hope it's the former to nicely bookend the year for me  

 

If it's not two Newmans, we're evidently in for a total surprise for the other one. But given it's 'Newman Street' it could be a clever way of indicating a street of Newmans, i.e. two Newman scores.

[Stark 316]

Wait, they released a WB score this year? How’d that happen?

[Jaaaackified 81]

7 minutes ago, Stark said:

Wait, they released a WB score this year? How’d that happen?

 

Time Machine is a co-production between Dreamworks and WB. Dreamworks holds the distribution right in US. 

[Jay 37,369]

2 hours ago, Stark said:

Wait, they released a WB score this year? How’d that happen?

 

Varese has done lots of WB scores in the past 4 years

1. 2020-03-27 U.S. Marshals (1998)
2. 2020-08-28 Wild Wild West (1999)
3. 2021-01-08 Looney Tunes: Back In Action (2003)
4. 2021-06-11 The Matrix (1999)
5. 2021-11-19 Elf (2003)
6. 2022-03-11 The Iron Giant (1999)
7. 2022-05-20 Presumed Innocent (1990)
8. 2022-11-18 L.A. Confidential (1997)
9. 2023-06-23 City Hall (1996)

The reason they are able to do so is that Varese had perpetuity rights to all these scores.  So its not them needing to get a new license signed between WB and another music label, its just Varese releasing more music that they already had the rights to release.  They might have even already had all the recording session music in-house and didn't need to get the WB Pictures archive people to transfer anything for them (I don't know if this is true or not, its just a possibility).

 

But basically all WB has to do for all these is sign off on the finished product once its done.  Which is different than the amount of work another specialty label would have to do to co-license a score from WB Pictures and a major music label.

[Stark 316]

That makes sense. Do other labels that release WB OSTs have a similar situation with those scores?

[Yavar Moradi 2,599]

I don’t think any other film music specialty label arranged to regularly get perpetuity rights from *any* studio. Silva Screen has Legend in perpetuity and I think Intrada has a few scores in perp like Tombstone and maybe Inchon… but it’s rare. With Varese it was rare for them to NOT get perpetuity rights on something in the 90s. They had a lot more clout. So I think they are in a fairly unique position with WB now which is why they’ve been able to keep expanding WB scores when the last WB expansion from LLL or Intrada was over three years ago, back in 2020.

 

Yavar

[Jay 37,369]

The only catalog releases from Warner pictures that weren't from Varese in the past 4 years are

1. 2020-03-03 The Swarm (1978) - Jerry Goldsmith - La-La Land Records
2. 2020-09-22 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) - Michael Kamen - Intrada
3. 2021-06-22 A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) - John Williams - La-La Land Records

 

And Lukas Kendall explained the WB situation on his blog

 

In recent years, Warner Bros. has pivoted away from doing soundtrack album licenses at all, for a bunch of reasons that have to do with corporate ownership and directives, which I’m not really qualified to analyze—and even if I was, I’d probably keep my mouth shut.

Warner Bros. is a magnificent studio with a ton of film and TV music that they could monetize—and at the moment they don’t want to invest the resources into the legal clearances and research to do it. 

 

from https://www.lukaskendall.com/post/the-dumbest-thing-i-hated-producing-cds-warner-bros-art-licenses

 

I don’t want to chronicle how we got from there to here, but at the moment, the studio is so hollowed out, there’s just no way they can research titles for music licensing. So that’s why so many of those great old unreleased scores aren’t coming out on CD. And, in fact, why even the CDs that were already released, not only by FSM but other labels, aren’t being distributed digitally.

 

from https://www.lukaskendall.com/post/warner-bros-layoffs

[JTN 2,030]

I'm starting to believe Jay isn't a living person, but an AI search engine, better than Google. 

[Yavar Moradi 2,599]

Nah, he's just good at keeping track of a lot of things.

 

Yavar

[Jay 37,369]

I just copy/pasted all that from here.

[Tydirium 1,167]

5 minutes ago, JTW said:

I'm starting to believe Jay isn't a living person, but an AI search engine, better than Google. 

 

I mean, his location is “The Internet” after all...

[Jay 37,369]

[Edmilson 7,466]

Chat JayPT 

[Stark 316]

Officially predicting one of the releases with be Randy Newman’s Air Force One.

[JTN 2,030]

2 hours ago, Jay said:

I just copy/pasted all that from here.

Don’t be so modest, Siri. 

[Richard Penna 3,694]

 

(if anyone's never seen the IT Crowd, please watch this clip and all will make sense)

[MrJosh 892]

1 hour ago, Richard Penna said:

 

(if anyone's never seen the IT Crowd, please watch this clip and all will make sense)

I keep meaning to watch this show. 

[TSMefford 1,509]

On 29/11/2023 at 12:26 PM, Edmilson said:

I'd love expansions for Lemony Snicket

 

On 29/11/2023 at 12:28 PM, Jay said:

Lemony Snicket is a Paramount film with Sony Music music rights, so any label could expand it

 

 

Oh my god. PLEASE. This would make my year. 

[DangerMotif 1,038]

On 29/11/2023 at 1:00 PM, Jay said:

Clues are up

 

We're doing things a little differently this time around. A single clue that applies to both of the CD Club titles we're announcing on Friday! Let's see if you folks can crack these ones.

 

 

https://www.facebook.com/varesesarabanderecords/posts/pfbid0TxPQo21KfFFVtc3jXKqYsktg29J4hwuB2RqQhG9BxMqu4pNT3cdTCpKpe9Tfueqfl

I know it won’t be Spectre but this being a title of a track from a Thomas Newman score is pretty ironic 

[Yavar Moradi 2,599]

On 29/11/2023 at 11:16 AM, Jay said:

Alfred Newman scores released by Varese:

1. The Snake Pit (1948)
2. The President's Lady (1953)

Randy Newman scores released by Varese:

1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. Meet The Fockers (2004)
3. Leatherheads (2008)

David Newman scores released by Varese:

1. Kindred, The (1987)
2. My Demon Lover (1987)
3. Heathers (1989)
4. War Of The Roses, The (1989)
5. Mr. Destiny (1990)
6. Hoffa (1992) - expanded by LLL
7. Sandlot, The (1993) - expanded by LLL
8. I Love Trouble (1994)
9. Matilda (1996)
10. Bowfinger (1999)
11. Affair Of The Necklace, The (2001)
12. Ice Age (2002)
13. Serenity (2005)

Thomas Newman scores released by Varese:

1. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990)
2. Linguini Incident, The (1991)
3. Player, The (1992)
4. American Buffalo (1996)
5. Mad City (1998)
6. Pay It Forward (2000)
7. In The Bedroom (2001)
8. Salton Sea, The (2002)
9. White Oleander (2002)
10. Good German, The (2006)
11. Help, The (2011)
12. Side Effects (2013)

 

Thanks for removing Phenomenon! Actually I've got some more corrections/additions for your generally excellent list, Jay, starting with all the many other Varese Alfred Newman releases in their Club and otherwise, besides the two you mentioned:

 

1. The Song of Bernadette (1943) -- they actually did a 2CD set of the complete score as a wide release in the 90s, and therefore probably control the score in perpetuity, unlike most of their limited Club releases such as The Snake Pit and The President's Lady, which I suspect they didn't bother with a perpetuity license on

2. The Robe (album recording) (1953) -- this was also a regular wide release on CD back in the early 90s I think, long before their 2003 Deluxe Edition of the film recording which LLL subsequently bettered. It's a shame that neither Varese on their DE or LLL in their subsequent edition opted to include a remaster of the original album recording so all we have is the multi-decade old original Varese CD.

3. The Robe (1953) -- only if you want to follow your pattern with Hoffa and The Sandlot, this should be included because of the Varese Deluxe Edition, which LLL later made obsolete.

4. The Egyptian (album recording) (1954) -- similarly to The Robe, Varese reissued the original Decca album in 1990 (as with The Robe a unique/different recording from the film, I am pretty sure). Again I was disappointed this didn't accompany the later releases of the film recording.

5. The Egyptian (1954) -- before LLL revisited it and made some further improvement tweaks, the Varese 2CD Deluxe Edition of this score was a godsend.

6. Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) -- similarly Varese put out the premiere commercial release of this score in their CD Club, but Kritzerland reissued it some years later.

6. Anastasia (1956) -- as with The Robe, Varese reissued the original (Decca?) album on CD in the early 90s. I actually don't know if it was a unique recording different from the film in this case, but there has never been an expanded release of the score unless the Twilight Time Blu-ray isolated score track counts.

7. The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) -- I think the complete film score presentation might be improved upon to modern standards, but Varese actually put out a deluxe three disc set as a wide release in the 90s (the third disc was the original album program, like I wish they had preserved with their Club DEs of The Robe and The Egyptian)

8. Airport (1970) -- Varese sublicensed the LP recording from Universal Music and premiered it on CD in 1993. The film recording has never been released.

 

Oh, and they also put out this cool Alfred Newman compilation (I think these are compiled old album recordings from the 40s & 50s? like 78s?) near the end of their original Club line:

https://www.discogs.com/release/5056721-Alfred-Newman-The-Film-Music-Of-Alfred-Newman

 

Okay, with Thomas and David there are just a couple notes I think...

For Thomas you left off Flesh and Bone (1993), maybe because LLL later expanded it (but you included David's The Sandlot and Hoffa even though LLL later expanded, just with strikethroughs). And for David, it's worth noting maybe that Varese reissued Heathers already as an Encore Edition (in 2018 I think?), which might indicate there isn't really anything more to add?

 

Last but not least, Varese might control some rejected scores due to getting perpetuity soundtrack rights to a film... that would include Randy Newman's Air Force One and maybe Thomas Newman's Nanny McPhee Returns if he recorded anything.

 

Yavar

[Stark 316]

Official predictions: Airport and Air Force One (rejected).

[Richard Penna 3,694]

My predictions: one of Alfred's older scores, and Ice Age. One old, one newer.

 

We find out in just over 3 hours! I think AF1 and Pleasantville are equally plausible alternatives, but that's what I'm going with.

[Jay 37,369]

What if its one Newman score, and JNH's Signs?  The image clue would be appropriate.

[Yavar Moradi 2,599]

8 minutes ago, Jay said:

What if its one Newman score, and JNH's Signs?  The image clue would be appropriate.

 

Someone guessed Signs for a past Varese batch clue too, because a sign was involved. I think that's maybe just too generic... and Varese also didn't release the original album (yeah yeah I know about HTTYD2 &3, but Varese released the album for the original HTTYD so there is at least a franchise connection there). Hollywood Records released the original album because the film was produced by Disney, so I think any expansion of Signs would be Intrada territory. The only two JNH/Shyamalan collaborations released by Varese (and likely controlled by them in perpetuity) are The Sixth Sense and The Happening. I would of course buy expansions of either, but especially the latter which I think it brilliant and rather underrated/overlooked.

 

Yavar

[Bellosh 3,419]

7 minutes ago, Jay said:

JNH's Signs? 

 

MY GOODNESS PLEASE 

[Stark 316]

It’s Pleasantville and Serenity.

[Richard Penna 3,694]

Well, I am not doing well for end of year releases. Oh well, roll on 2024.

[TSMefford 1,509]

I'll go for Serenity. It'll be nice to finally have Haven Guitar free of SFX.

[Tallguy 3,398]

On 06/05/2020 at 2:33 PM, Jay said:

There was two hot young ladies there he was trying to impress, he told us all that he was the one who found the missing tapes to make the release happen

 

I'm not sure where to start. I mean... Has it ever been a successful line with ANY woman "I found the missing music tapes to a 1970's movie"? Although since they were at a Harry Potter concert, maybe...?

[Edmilson 7,466]

10 minutes ago, Tallguy said:

I found the missing music tapes to a 1970's movie"?

Not any 1970s movie, a 1970s movie forgotten by pretty much anyone who isn't a John Williams completist or a Gothic horror diehard - i.e. as far from being something "cool" that you could use as a pick up line.

 

Harry Potter is still "cool" with the ladies, especially those born after 1990, lots of them grew up with the series. 

 

But trying to use their HP fandom to impress them by connecting it with a forgotten 70s Dracula seems so desperate 

[Tallguy 3,398]

11 hours ago, Edmilson said:

Not any 1970s movie, a 1970s movie forgotten by pretty much anyone who isn't a John Williams completist or a Gothic horror diehard - i.e. as far from being something "cool" that you could use as a pick up line.

 

Harry Potter is still "cool" with the ladies, especially those born after 1990, lots of them grew up with the series. 

 

But trying to use their HP fandom to impress them by connecting it with a forgotten 70s Dracula seems so desperate 

 

I know a few women / girls who are huge Harry Potter fans. And none of them know why I keep going about about this 90 year old film composer.

[Faleel 5,355]

So apparently Varese uploaded a bunch of Powell scores OST's to YouTube yesterday.

 

Vinyl?

[Raiders of the SoundtrArk 2,433]

Which ones are new?

[Faleel 5,355]

7 hours ago, Raiders of the SoundtrArk said:

Which ones are new?

Horton and Itialian Job apparently

 

And Knight and Day I guess...

[Raiders of the SoundtrArk 2,433]

Those were there since a while I think

But I would be happy to be wrong

[Faleel 5,355]

2 minutes ago, Raiders of the SoundtrArk said:

Those were there since a while I think

But I would be happy to be wrong

It says 13 hours ago with no views here:

 

 

[Raiders of the SoundtrArk 2,433]

Nice. All were already available digitally but it's nice that Varèse release them themselves

[Richard Penna 3,694]

Surprising amount they've uploaded considering they'd probably prefer people bought them. But they know best which albums are their primary revenue sources now, so they can put up what they want in the name of PR.

[mstrox 6,651]

Record labels put music on YouTube all the time - it’s functionally the same as putting them on Spotify or whatever.  They can generate revenue.

[Richard Penna 3,694]

I know but I thought it was largely the bigger labels that did it. For some reason I wouldn't have expected a relatively small label like Varese to do it. At least they haven't put anything recent and still in print up (i.e. key current revenue generators).

[Yavar Moradi 2,599]

It’s not about how many releases they currently put out, compared with Intrada or LLL.

 

Varese has been Universal Music-distributed for decades, and a sub-label of Concord Music for over a decade now.

 

Yavar

[JTN 2,030]

3 hours ago, Presto said:

It says 13 hours ago with no views here:

 

 

Who’s Morton?

 

Seth Rogen, got it.

[mstrox 6,651]

Morton hears a moo