Music Album Review: 'A.I. Artificial Intelligence - Music from the Motion Picture'

Album cover from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence - Music from the Motion Picture. (C) 2001, 2018 Warner Sunset/Amazon LLC. 

In 2001, Warner Sunset, the now-defunct record label that produced soundtrack albums for Warner Bros. movies, released A.I. Artificial Intelligence – Music from the Motion Picture. This was a 13-track collection of themes and cues composed and conducted by John Williams for Steven Spielberg’s eponymous science-fiction film.

Performed by a Los Angeles-based studio orchestra and recorded at Sony Pictures Studios Royce Hall near Hollywood, the score features some of the orchestral themes, action cues, and two versions of the song For Always, which features lyrics by Cynthia Weil and a haunting melody by Maestro Williams.

As is often the case with “original motion picture soundtrack albums,” the 2001 commercial release of A.I. Artificial Intelligence – Music from the Motion Picture does not present Williams’ complete score, which is almost two and a half hours in length. Instead, Warner Sunset’s album only gives listeners 11 tracks that feature music performed the studio orchestra and – in three of those orchestral tracks – soprano Barbara Bonney under the baton of Maestro Williams. 

For purely commercial reasons, the label asked Williams (who is listed here as the album producer) to conduct Canadian singer Lara Fabian in a solo rendition of “For Always,” which is a song that weds lyrics by Cynthia Weil (the co-writer of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”) and Williams’ A.I. Artificial Intelligence theme “Where Dreams Are Born.” The song, which is not heard in the film with Weil’s lyrics, is reprised at the end of the album as a duet with Josh Groban, who was just starting out his career when A.I. was released in theaters. 

Track Listing:

1.         "The Mecha World"    6:23

2.         "Abandoned in the Woods"    3:07

3.         "Replicas"        5:57

4.         "Hide and Seek"          3:08

5.         "For Always (Performed by Lara Fabian)"     4:41

6.         "Cybertronics" 3:31

7.         "The Moon Rising"     4:26

8.         "Stored Memories and Monica's Theme (featuring Barbara Bonney)"          10:56

9.         "Where Dreams Are Born (Vocals by Barbara Bonney)"      4:23

10.       "Rouge City"   4:57

11.       "The Search for the Blue Fairy (featuring Barbara Bonney)"           6:11

12.       "The Reunion"            7:45

13.       "For Always (Duet performed by Lara Fabian and Josh Groban)"    4:43

 

My Take

Although John Williams, along with Ms. Bonney, Ms. Fabian, and Mr. Groban and the L.A. studio orchestra, recorded a complete soundtrack album for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for consideration at the 2001 Academy Awards, Warner Sunset decided to release the abridged, more commercial album instead. 

I'm not sure why most record labels do this to soundtrack recordings, especially of scores that are almost purely symphonic in style and content. Do they think listeners will get bored listening to orchestral music? Or do they believe that most modern audiences hate "classical music" and will just listen to the pop songs in the album? 

Well, for whatever reason, A.I. Artificial Intelligence - Music from the Motion Picture is pretty much a standard-issue soundtrack album in the vein of James Horner’s Titanic. The structure is nearly identical, in fact. It’s almost as though Warner Sunset handed executive producer Danny Bramson, mixer-recorder Shawn Murphy, and album administrator David Altschul a copy of the Titanic soundtrack CD (the top-selling soundtrack of all time) and said, “Guys, we love John Williams’ as much as Steve Spielberg does, but we want you to make the A.I. soundtrack like this”.

Why do I say this?

Because just like the 1997 soundtrack album from Titanic, the A.I. Artificial Intelligence – Music from the Motion Picture takes a handful of cues from the film, pretty much in a random fashion, adds a song written solely for pop consumption, and Voila! We have a soundtrack album.

That’s not to say that there’s no pleasure to derived from the commercial-release edition of A.I. Artificial Intelligence – Music from the Motion Picture. Quite the contrary. John Williams the composer will always trump John Williams the producer, even when the album is bereft of much of the score.

As Steven Spielberg notes in the album’s “Note from the Director”:

The music underlines and then transports David on his journey from his inception to his transcendence and John does this with wit, majesty, and soul. John’s music is of our world and theirs and finally of a world shared by both orga and mecha. And like so many of John’s scores for my movies, you really don’t need the images to have the story told to you. He is the greatest musical storyteller of all time.

This CD of A.I. Artificial Intelligence - Music from the Motion Picture is not bad. It has tracks that are so full of emotion that the music will make your eyes well up with tears. 

I just wish that Warner Bros. would release the complete score in an album. La-La Land Records, a label that specializes in soundtracks, did that in 2015. However, it only made 3000 copies, and as of this writing (June 11, 2018), the 3-disc set is not in stock.