A Tale of Two Soundtracks: "Drive" vs "Themes For An Imaginary Film"

Here are the three immediate courses of action I took after watching Ryan Gosling's performance as a stuntman/mechanic/getaway driver in director Nicolas Refn's recent film, Drive:

1. Got in my car. Put on my leather driving gloves. Drove an intense ten minutes to the nearest Dick's Drive-In. Ordered a Deluxe with extra tartar sauce.
2. Googled "white scorpion jacket from Drive." Started planning my next Halloween costume.
3. Downloaded and listened to the movie's amazing soundtrack for the rest of the night.

To me, Drive's music is the most important aspect of the film.  The movie had a significantly small amount of dialogue, dependent mostly on cinematography and Cliff Martinez's "kind of retro, 80ish, synthesizer europop" score to convey it's emotions and themes. Feel free to preview and purchase the album on iTunes or wait to pick it up on vinyl in May. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is it's opening credits:

A few weeks after downloading the soundtrack, I discovered that another person had originally been tapped to handle the score; Johnny Jewel. Jewel is an Italo-disco producer from Italians Do It Better who had been given the same directions as Martinez, yet the bulk of his work ended up going unused.   Taking what began as his score for the film, Jewel created a stand-alone album titled Themes For An Imaginary Film. He had this to say about the situation in an interview with Pitchfork,

"We got the same temporary cues from [Drive director] Nic [Winding Refn] as [Drive composer] Cliff [Martinez] did: Brian Eno, Angelo Badalamenti, a little bit of Atticus Ross. So the stuff I did for Drive was very similar to the stuff that's actually in Drive because we had the same cues. There's like four tracks on the Symmetry record that were specifically written for Drive, but I reworked them. I don't think I'm ever going to release the stuff I did for Drive because it seems disrespectful to the movie." 

Themes For An Imaginary Film was created for people who wish their life had a soundtrack. On his soundcloud, Jewel describes it as "two hours of claustrophobic cinematic bliss compiled for Painters, Writers, Photographers, Designers, Cruisers, Night Walkers, & Dreamers." Listen to it below: