The internet has a habit, usually useful, of reminding me of birthdays and anniversaries, which is usually my mom or my sister’s job, but they don’t care about the birthdays of movie stars or the anniversaries of film releases.
Today, I saw that the soundtrack to BATMAN FOREVER was released on May 30th, 1995, which was in advance of the movie, which went wide in the US on June 16th of that year.
This was a big release in my life, at the time and in retrospect. It’s also possibly interesting to people other than myself! It’s generally more rare nowadays that movies have tie-in albums. There are people who still love to listen to movie scores, the orchestral music that accompanies film scenes. But I’m talking about albums of songs that may or not appear in the movie. This used to be a big thing. It had a lot to do with the MTV era, when music videos could be used as a tool to sell a film. It still happens from time to time, though much less often. The most recent example I can think of is BARBIE: THE ALBUM, which accompanied the 2023 movie.
Sometimes it was an art. The best movie soundtracks are like mega-curated mixtapes. As anyone who’s made a mixtape knows, the sequencing is crucial. The song choices tell a story. Sometimes, in the case of the movie soundtrack, the story being told by the songs can be better than the movie itself. That’s arguably true of BATMAN FOREVER.
I have a piece in the making about BATMAN FOREVER, where it falls in the course of blockbuster summer movies and how it relates to Batman movies overall. This isn’t that. This is mainly an appreciation of a really great movie soundtrack. But I’ll touch real briefly on the other stuff too.
Batman is the story of billionaire Bruce Wayne, whose parents are killed by a mugger in front of him when he was a boy, and who takes inspiration from the creatures of the night to become someone who strikes fear into the hearts of criminals everywhere. From this basic premise has come thousands and thousands of stories, across comic books, radio, TV, theater, and film. Though Batman is by nature a dark character, the gag-filled parody TV series of the 1960s left a tremendous cultural imprint that the movies have had to contend with ever since.
It was pretty likely the success of 1978’s SUPERMAN, which treated the title character with sincerity, that made 1989’s BATMAN possible. That was a very dark movie, with the integrity of Tim Burton’s vision, though it also had plenty of humor, owing to the performances of Michael Keaton as the best of the movie Batmans and the big-screen hamminess of Jack Nicholson as the Joker. You could also dance to it, thanks to the soundtrack made up of original songs by Prince. Those songs got very little screen time in the movie itself, but the album was pretty big, considering that it came from one of the great American pop stars at the height of his powers. 1992’s BATMAN RETURNS went deeper into that vision of Tim Burton. Some of us loved it, but it was darker and weirder than its predecessor, without an accompanying pop soundtrack, and for whatever reasons, there was a changing of the guard.
Enter Joel Schumacher, a pop filmmaker with a good ear for music. At his best, he made cult classics like THE LOST BOYS. We did not come here today to debate the merits of BATMAN FOREVER, a movie that I loved when I was seventeen but which I can see much clearer now, to say the least.
Whatever you want to say about BATMAN FOREVER, it has a killer soundtrack. And Joel Schumacher, at least in part, is to thank for that.
Joel Schumacher has a production credit on the soundtrack. He directed videos for INXS and Lenny Kravitz, which explains a little some of the song choices. Let’s look (and listen):
U2 – Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me
In my opinion, the U2 song is great. Was then, and still is. This was smack in the middle of their ironic phase, right before they started riding into arenas inside a giant lemon. This song is very clearly U2’s attempt at glam-rock. Who really knows what the song is about, but it’s got a great, swaggering, epic Bowie rock n’ roll feel, which cools up the movie by association, even though this song has not one thing to do with Batman in any way.
PJ Harvey – One Time Too Many
PJ Harvey has my respect, for sure. She’s worked with artists I love, like Mark Lanegan and Nick Cave (more on him in a minute). This song works very well after the U2 lead-off, coming with the right energy, although again, there’s nothing here that fits with Batman at large or with the storyline of BATMAN FOREVER.
Brandy – Where Are You Now?
Hey, the Brandy song is good too. It was written by Lenny Kravitz and sounds like it was. Just as is the case with almost every single song on this album, it has fuck-all to do with Batman, but that’s part of the senseless fun of this enterprise. (If you’re straining really hard, you can try to imagine that “Where Are You Now?” is what Nicole Kidman’s inappropriately horny psychologist character is thinking, but you’d have to really strain for that reading.)
Seal – Kiss From A Rose
Joel Schumacher directed the video to this one, which is the most famous song from this soundtrack, easily, is this Seal song. And the song predates BATMAN FOREVER so it was definitely not written for or about the movie. Almost three decades later, I have no better idea what a “Kiss From A Rose” would entail. But like the movie itself, the song reminds me of the moment in time when it was ubiquitous, a happy time in my life, so I still have a great fondness for it.
Massive Attack with Tracey Thorn – The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game
Here’s where things start getting interesting. No way does a teenaged me grow up in suburban New York, in the era of gangsta and grunge, and well before college, learn about Massive Attack… unless some hip producer puts one of their songs on a summer-movie promotional product. Massive Attack are an important, influential, badass group. And this is such a suave drop for a soundtrack album. Really just classy and urbane and unique-sounding. So much different than the old song it remade, which is also well worth a listen.
Eddi Reader – Nobody Lives Without Love
I’m pretty deep into music, and I have tried to develop a very broad knowledge, if not appreciation, of a lot of different genres. Yet still, to this day, I do not know who Eddi Reader is. Please don’t take offense. This is an extremely pleasant song, one of the better, night-time-sounding, more evocative and atmospheric tracks on the album though. A soundtrack “inspired by” Batman should at the very least sound like night time, and this one fits the bill.
Mazzy Star – Tell Me Now
Again, how in 1995 do I, me, ever hear Mazzy Star without buying this album? I like that. And again, the timing was perfect. The summer of ’95 is when I was gearing up to go to college. Very useful to know bands like Mazzy Star before getting there. Mazzy Star makes music that definitely plays better during the nocturnal hours. Play it for bats, it chills them out.
The Offspring – Smash It Up
“Smash It Up” is a song by The Damned that is covered here by The Offspring. Punk purists or whoever else can knock The Offspring all they want, but they were the pop-radio gateway for me, to The Damned and from there to many other awesome punk groups.
(The original version, just because it’s fantastic.)
Nick Cave – There Is A Light
I love this Nick Cave song. I love so many Nick Cave songs, but this is definitely the first one I heard. Way back when, I heard this song, how weird and cool and weirdly cool it sounds, and I wondered, who is this dude? Nick Cave, that’s who! Nick Cave is always great, and this right here is the first song I ever heard by Nick Cave. And maybe the last artist I’d expect to affiliate with Batman, but strangely, it makes perfect sense. What kind of music does Batman listen to? Nick Cave? Why not?
Method Man – The Riddler
Leave it to Method Man to present the only directly-Batman-influenced track on the album. He raps about The Riddler, and about himself, over a slowed-down rondolet version of the 1960s Batman TV show theme by Neal Hefti. By this point on my personal timeline, I was already well into hip-hop, so I wasn’t being introduced to anything new here, but even then, I appreciated that Staten Island made it onto such an eclectic mix.
Michael Hutchence – The Passenger
Michael Hutchence was the lead singer of INXS and this is a cover of an Iggy Pop song. Again, the song choice has nothing to do with anything, but the vibe kind of fits the sequencing.
If you follow me on any social media, you probably know what Iggy means to me, so please enjoy the original!
The Devlins – Crossing The River
The Devlins, I hadn’t heard of before this album, and I haven’t since. It’s a filler song, but a good enough filler song. Sounds kind of like Unforgettable Fire-era U2 but with less weight or urgency or shimmery electric guitar sound. I liked it enough to listen to it along with the rest of the album, but didn’t inspire me to seek out more of their stuff like some of the other artists on this album did. Sometimes a mixtape needs that filler.
Sunny Day Real Estate – 8
Love this one. Though it was always hard to understand their lyrics (maybe they’re meant to be played in reverse like certain Led Zeppelin songs?), Sunny Day Real Estate went on to become one of my very favorite bands in college. I think I saw them three times live, which is a lot for me. And, not to keep repeating myself, but where did I first hear them…? Aqui!
The Flaming Lips – Bad Days
On the flip side, I had already heard The Flaming Lips many times by 1995, because they had that song “She Don’t Use Jelly” on Z-100 [!] around that time and they were on 90210 playing that same tune. This song is one of the few that’s actually in the movie: Jim Carrey’s character is listening to it, or just imagining it, who knows. Sounds about right to me! And what an excellently eccentric choice to end the album.
So what’s the moral of this story?
Hell if I know.
Capitalism is good?
Merchandising doesn’t always have to suck?
That it’s not too late to get Ghostface to do a rap for an Iron Man movie?
Maybe it’s just that a movie doesn’t always have to be serious high art, as long as you can dance to it.
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Tags: Batman, Brandy, Chris O'Donnell, Eddi Reader, Elliot Goldenthal, INXS, Jim Carrey, Joel Schumacher, Jolene Cherry, Lenny Kravitz, Massive Attack, Mazzy Star, Method Man, Michael Gough, music, Neal Hefti, Nick Cave, Nicole Kidman, Pat Hingle, PJ Harvey, Seal, Sunny Day Real Estate, The 1990s, The Devlins, The Flaming Lips, The Offspring, The Wu-Tang Clan, tommy lee jones, Tracy Thorn, Val Kilmer
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