Happy Halloween! While I’m not dressing up in costume for an office party, I do feel the mood for spooky fun. I’ve got the house to myself while I work, so it’s time to crank some tunes!
First off is Skatune Network‘s Skalloween album, released in 2021. For those of you who don’t know who Skatune Network is, they are an incredible one person Ska band who arranges and performs Ska covers of our favorite video game, cartoon, and pop music. This 8 track album features music from Beetlejuice, appropriate with the sequel that just came out, to Scooby Doo, a cartoon which pretty much celebrated Halloween all the time. Skatune does an amazing job with all of their tracks, and they collaborate with other great artists on this album as well. I’ve made a YouTube playlist of the album below, but you can also find the album on Bandcamp (link) and on other streaming media platforms.
It’s a Halloween movie! It’s a Christmas movie!! IT’S BOTH!!! The Nightmare Before Christmas, released over 30 years ago, has one of the most iconic movie soundtracks which Danny Elfman ever wrote. As I observed when I wrote about this soundtrack for it’s 30th anniversary, it was the combination of Elfman’s amazing score with the voices of the actors which makes this soundtrack so successful. Elfman even provides the singing voice of Jack Skellington (speaking voice provided by Chris Sarandon, who also played Prince Humperdink in The Princess Bride)! I’ll admit, I’ll stop and listen to any song from this soundtrack whenever it comes up in my Plex, but I’ll always try to watch this movie on Halloween. This year, with the recent passing of Ken Page, the voice of Oogie Boogie, I’ll also be sure to raise a glass when his song comes up.
Of course, we can’t have a Halloween playlist without some drum corps, so here’s the 1994 Bushwackers performing music from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
On the twenty-third day of the month of September
In an early year of a decade not too long before our own
The human race suddenly encountered a deadly threat to its very existence
And this terrifying enemy surfaced, as such enemies often do
In the seemingly most innocent and unlikely of places
So began Alan Menken‘s and Howard Ashman‘s musical adaptation of the Roger Corman B movie classic, Little Shop of Horrors. The stage version made its way to the silver screen in 1986, and the gems from this soundtrack are plentiful. Steve Martin absolutely drills “You’ll Be A Dentist”, while Ellen Greene goes from tender wistfulness in “Somewhere That’s Green” to full out Broadway belting in the show stopping “Suddenly Semour”. Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops sets the standard as Audrey II, while Rick Moranis cemented his status as a comedy horror schlep as Seymour after his turn in Ghostbusters as Louis Tully. The movie is a joy to watch and the soundtrack is a joy to listen to.
There’s one musical which has a special place in my heart that also fits with the season. That is The Phantom of the Opera, a mystery never quite fully explained. This was a musical I remember listening to multiple times while in high school along with all the theater kids I shared classes with. It was also one of the first drum corps shows I remember seeing live as the Santa Clara Vanguard performed it in 1988 at the Parma, Ohio, show. I would eventually go on to perform music from Phantom with the Empire Statesmen in 2000. This was also the first musical I would see performed live at the Palace Theater in Playhouse Square. It’s the 25th anniversary concert performance of Phantom which I listen to more than the original cast soundtrack, though, as I find the audio mix is much clearer and the performances of Sierra Boggess as Christine Daaé and Ramin Karimloo as, in my opinion, The Phantom are as powerful, if not more so, than Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford, plus there’s less of the campiness that the original version of Phantom had.
Here is the 1988 Santa Clara Vanguard performance of Phantom of the Opera:
And here is me with the 2000 Empire Statesmen performing Phantom:
