In Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 drama Old Joy, a shot of a small town’s lights disappearing into the black cloak of the Cascadian forest says as much as anything that comes from the lips of its two protagonists, played by Daniel London and Will Oldham. They’re old friends who haven’t seen each other in years, one settling into domestic life and the other still on the hippie trail, and Reichardt doesn’t ask the men to fuss and fight to show them drifting away from each other and into their respective corners of middle age. Instead, she allows the seemingly limitless expanse of the Oregon landscape to stand in for the distance between the men as they drive deep into the Cascades on a camping trip. If there’s anything explicitly underlining the loneliness of the two men’s situation, it’s the soundtrack, recorded by Yo La Tengo with veteran session guitarist Smokey Hormel.
That score was previously available in truncated form on the compilation They Shoot, We Score, buried among material from the band’s other recent soundtracks. A new reissue from Mississippi Records expands those same six themes into a 26-minute EP. This isn’t a complete record of the music in the film—Hormel’s diegetic honky-tonk pastiche “Memories of Abilene” is absent, and the alternate version of “Leaving Home” on They Shoot, We Score has been swapped for one with a more deeply swung beat—but the curation holds together as a lovely little driving album.
The music is a sort of countrified krautrock, somewhere between the seductively lugubrious style of the band’s early-2000s releases and the ambient guitar music of the contemporaneous Kranky Records act Labradford. It’s road music, but paced for a short drive with a lot to think about rather than the exhilaration of the freeway. (“Daphnia,” released on I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass the same year as Reichardt’s film, is an exclave of this specific style.) Hormel and YLT guitarist Ira Kaplan affect a slight Western twang, the same kind established in cinematic grammar to imply the wide-open spaces of the American interior, with each note seeming to bleed and dissipate into the vastness of the world like smoke from one of the Oldham character’s endless joint puffs.
The music was recorded loosely and quickly in Yo La Tengo’s famed Hoboken studio, but what sounds like ambient rumination at first has a real melodic grace. Piano and guitar find spooky overtones on “Getting Lost,” and Hubley’s drums drop out to mirror the characters’ confusion as they try vainly to interpret their road map in the dimming forest light. “End Credits” is a motorik that never gets out of first gear. Most striking is “Driving Home,” with an uncommonly elegant chord progression that hints at a resolution without containing much of one at all. Even in such an improvisational environment, the lessons in popcraft Yo La Tengo have learned from decades of writing pop songs and covering the artists who inspire them shine through effortlessly.
As longtime touring musicians, YLT are familiar with the magisterial doldrums of the American road trip, and their best music hints at some truth hidden in the country’s endless expanses of intractable and unknowable land. In Reichardt’s film, that truth can be interpreted as our inability to know or control everything that happens in the world around us, the sad knowledge that some mysteries will always remain mysteries, and the knowledge that these two men will soon disappear into the same unknowing. “There’s something between us,” says Oldham’s character at one point in the film, “and I want it to go away.” He has no clue how big that something really is, but the music does.
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