By Dan Moren
January 16, 2018 11:41 AM PT
Stream The Last Jedi’s For Your Consideration album online
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
It’s probably not too much of a surprise to reveal that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool fan of John Williams, the man behind many of the most iconic movie scores of the late 20th century (and more than a few of the early 21st)–chief among them his scores for the entire Star Wars saga. Even in the lackluster prequel installments Williams managed to imbue the stories with depth and grandeur well beyond their measure.
If I have one complaint about the more recent Star Wars scores, it’s that they’ve only been released in partial form. The album cuts of both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi clock in at 78 minutes each, despite films that are more than two hours in length. That means there’s a lot of material that hasn’t made its way out into the wild.
However, there are every once in a while legit opportunities to catch material that’s not been previously released. As Academy Awards time approaches, movie studios often put out packets for those who will be voting on said awards. Disney actually has a pretty extensive site with extras for a lot of its films, including The Last Jedi.
And among those offerings is a For Your Consideration cut of The Last Jedi score. Though it’s mostly pretty similar to the official album that was released, it does feature a few unreleased tracks and some alternate versions of existing cues. And you can stream it via your browser from Disney’s site. (There have also been FYC versions of The Force Awakens‘s score and Michael Giacchino’s Rogue One score released in 2015 and 2016, respectively.)
If you’re curious about exactly what’s different in this release from The Last Jedi‘s album, well, this is the internet, friend, and the folks over at the John Williams Fan Network forums have already done the heavy lifting for you.
Personally, I’m hoping that Disney gets around to releasing complete scores for all the movies, as Lucasfilm did with the double-disc sets of the original trilogy. But the last Star Wars film to get the deluxe treatment was The Phantom Menace, for reasons that are probably pretty apparent. But I’d be certainly be first in line to bolster my Star Wars score collection.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
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