A few years ago, Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O was dating filmmaker Spike Jonze, director of the upcoming Where The Wild Things Are film. According to the annals of indie rock folklore, Karen was writing the soundtrack for the immensely-anticipated remake of Maurice Sendak classic, but then all news fell off, the couple broke up and most thought that was the end of what could've been a very cool record.
As it turns out, the project stayed in motion, evolving into a pretty badass collection of artists, with miss O as the ringleader and chief songwriter. For the September 29 release, credited to "Karen O and the Kids," friends and peers were brought in to "bolster her intent to marry sound to vision," according to an advance statement. Bradford Cox (Deerhunter), Brian Chase and Nick Zinner (YYYs), Dean Fertita (QOTSA, the Dead Weather, the Raconteurs), Aaron Hemphill (Liars), Greg Kurstin (the Bird and the Bee), Jack Lawrence (the Dead Weather, the Raconteurs), Oscar Michel (Gris Gris), and Imaad Wasif (New Folk Implosion, Alaska) all share songwriting credits on the soundtrack. For the icing, O invited an untrained children's choir to sing along.
"I didn't want to make music that was hammering you over the head or go for some kind of pushbutton emotion," O said in the statement. "What I initially wanted to do was close to Cat Stevens in Harold & Maude: really simple, but memorably and seamlessly woven into the movie. Working with all these highly-empathetic musicians over of a couple of years on this soundtrack was a lesson in the power of collaboration."
The album's first single, "All is Love," drops digitally August 25 in advance of the film's release October 16.
Talking to MTV News, Karen said the involvement of director and ex-boyfriend Jonze was the main reason she signed up to produce the music for the film.
"I got involved because of Spike," she said. "I guess there is a childlike innocence about my music or my persona that he always just kind of dialled into. So I guess he thought I should make music for 'Where the Wild Things Are', and I assembled a group of mostly rock musicians to make the music."
She added: "To play on it and it was a really amazing experience and I think what he has accomplished with the film is basically the impossible. There's a lot of stuff that they told me Spike couldn't do that he did it anyway, and it was a really inspiring and exciting thing to be a part of."
Where The Wild Things Are is set for release on October 16. Watch the official trailer:
