La lettre de Ben I love this guitar theme from Gustavo Santaolalla. His music for the French crime thriller, Tout nous sépare (All That Divides Us), recently won ‘best score’ at the La Baule Film Festival. Gustavo Santaolalla’s creativity on a single guitar is off […]

Brokeback Mountain 1 Gustavo Santaolalla’s Brokeback Mountain 1 is my favorite piece of music ever. It informs, literally, all of my guitar playing. It’s the sole reason for this blog, and serves as a grounding principle for my musicality: minimalism. When in doubt, play less. […]

Amores Perros Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amores Perros (2001) is an ambitious story of lives that collide in a Mexico City car crash. Inventively structured as overlapping and intersecting narratives. Gustavo Santaolalla initially said no to this project, because he was too busy producing […]

Things We Lost in the Fire This is the second musical theme from, Things We Lost in the Fire: a (2007) drama starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro. The story follows (Berry) a recent widow and her husband’s drug addicted best friend (Del Toro). […]

Intrusion | Ma Mère Although composer, Gustavo Santaolalla is mostly known for Brokeback Mountain, and Babel (for which he won back-to-back Oscars) he has a ton of work out there from lesser known films. Les yeux de sa mère (His Mother’s Eyes) is a 2011 […]

Pajaros I have wanted to play Gustavo Santaolalla’s Pajaros for years, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t figure it out adequately until now. Pajaros (birds) is a one off song from the soundtrack of My Blueberry Nights. If you’ve never heard of that movie, it’s […]

[Updated 6/19/2020] This piece was revealed a few years ago for a potential Last of Us Part II menu screen. We now know it’s titled, Beyond Desolation. At the time of this writing, I’m pouring over the brand new Last of Us Part II score […]

21 Grams is a 2003 American drama film directed by director Alejandro González Iñárritu, also the director of: The Revenant, Babel, Birdman. 21 Grams is groundbreaking, in that the storytelling is non-linear. You’re presented with three people, with three seemingly unrelated stories — until they’re […]

As a purely Santaolalla performance, I’m actually a bigger fan of Thin Ice — also from the Before the Flood soundtrack. The title theme of from Before the Flood is clearly a Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross inception. It has those chord progressions that can only be […]

Before the Flood is a documentary film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Fisher Stevens. The soundtrack is a collaboration between Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Gustavo Santaolalla, and Mogwai. As a huge fan of Gustavo Santaolalla’s avant-garde instrumentation, I’m in my glory with this week’s […]

There’s a reason why Gustavo Santaolalla is at the musical helm of the most compelling film scores of the past 16 years. He has remained very discerning about who he works with — and what he works on. I’ve read dozens of interviews with Gustavo Santaolalla […]

Snow Snow (Brokeback Mountain) is emblematic of Gustavo Santaolalla’s minimalist, and egoless songwriting. There’s an unusual dissonant chord position at the end of each cycle. It catches you off guard. While Santaolalla is probably following his ear when writing music, he has a proclivity for […]