I’ve always been attuned to movie scores. The way a piece of music can deepen a moment, shift an atmosphere, or quietly break your heart without a single word of dialogue. So I decided to do something a little different. I put together a special radio edition of Curiously, recorded live at the Dale Dorman Radio Studio at Massasoit Community College, dedicated entirely to movies scores. Not the obvious ones. Not Jurassic Park. Not Forrest Gump. I wanted to play the pieces that deserve more air time.

The playlist spans nearly 90 minutes and 18 tracks. You’ll hear Hans Zimmer’s thunderous submarine theme from Crimson Tide alongside Max Richter’s quietly devastating “On the Nature of Daylight,” which has appeared in more films than almost any other contemporary piece of music. You’ll hear Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score an afterlife waiting room for Soul, a Pixar film about a jazz musician. You’ll hear a horror movie that has absolutely no right being as overwhelming as it is. And you’ll hear a piece from the movie Tracks, the story of a woman who walked 2,000 miles alone across the Australian Outback, that helped inspire me to take my own solo journey across the United States by motorcycle, which you can watch at Outside Magazine.

In this special episode, you’ll hear scores from:

• Good Will Hunting, Her, Interstellar, and Arrival: films that use music to access what words can’t reach

• Oppenheimer and The Social Network, where the score captures the texture of a complicated mind at work

• Up, and dialogue-free opening sequence that quietly destroys you before the movie has really begun

• The Revenant and Blade Runner 2049, vast and hauntingly atmospheric

• Rudy, Crimson Tide, and Scent of a Woman: propulsive, elegant, and timelessly cinematic

• Hereditary: yes, a horror film made the list, and yes, it earns it

• Moneyball: the post-rock piece that plays us all the way out

💡 About Curiously: https://www.podpage.com/curiously/about/

📖 My books: https://www.dustingrinnell.com/bio