Enjoy This Epic Trailer Playlist
I love overly dramatic covers, like the ones you hear in movie trailers, where a woman whispers on stage, “He made a mess, he made a Monster Mash,” while the sound of Inception overlaps with the tornado of a wizard robot. I play them in two moods: very dramatic and excited or silly. I took dozens of these songs and put together an impressive, embarrassing Spotify playlist.
Some of them are taken from trailers, some are featured in real movies, and some just wish it were. Some of them are brooding, and some may not even seem stupid to you. Some of them don’t even seem stupid to me, but to my wife they seem very stupid. But my wife listens to Hamilton, so she lives in a glass house.
Some (“Beat It”) are parodies, some (“Hit the Road Jack”) are actually good, and some are both – for example, the silly and beautiful Auralnauts cover of the song You Spin Me Round from their YouTube Parodies of Drama Movie Trailers:
Some of them are only half ironic: the artist for Hidden Citizens has made an entire album of “epic trailer versions” of pop songs, and I can’t tell you how joking they are. Kyte’s Sigur-Rós style “Solsbury Hill” has managed to create the world’s most famous movie trailer song and make it even more like a movie trailer song while still being good.
Some are better than the original, like Gary Jules’s Mad World (by Donnie Darko ) or Johnny Cash’s Insult, and ten others that you’ll defend in the comments.
All of these songs are redundant because they use wacky source material, or because they hit all the clichés of a dramatic cover, or because they are not a jazz version of “Nature Boy,” or because they play a dark version of a fun song. inherently melodramatic.
If you’ve watched The Leftovers , you remember how you went berserk in the middle of a tragic scene when you heard: “I have chills … they are multiplying …” and realized that Damon Lindelof chose the soundtrack for divorce with the cover of “You are who I want”. From grease .
But these songs can still thrill you, give you goosebumps and tighten your throat, because the human brain is easily controlled by certain sounds, keys and voice styles. Give in. Cry to stupid music.
Not every dramatic cover hits Spotify. Below are some of them that are only available on YouTube but still deserve your attention.
This latest version is edited from the Netflix Death Note trailer. The commentator claims that this is acover of E ^ ST from Like a Version , but it sounds much more trailer-like.
You can see more YouTube covers on the ScreenCrush Blog and their many collections of Drama Trailer Music , as well as the Entertainment Weekly Collection .
Thanks to the members of our parent company Slack music channel, Tom Lei of Deadspin, who shares my love for these cheese festivals , and to every film studio that should have been both tense and nostalgic at the same time.