Request: Howard Shore Hobbit Highlights

The road may not actually go ever on and on but the movies and the soundtracks sure do. Shore wrote some great music for LOTR and The Hobbit but he also wrote many hours of filler and repeated a lot of the same stuff again and again. It almost sounds like The Hobbit films bored him silly too and he was just trying to fill the considerable hours of cinematic bloat.

There are now 6 disks of Hobbit music out there. That should be enough to make a one, perhaps two, disk edit of the really good stuff. But exactly what is the good stuff? I don’t want to/ don’t think I could listen to the entire Hobbit soundtrack collection with the due attention required to sort the wheat from the chaff. Has anyone made a list of their favourites from the various Hobbit soundtracks? As an act of mercy, would you share your recommendations?

(What has happened to Peter Jackson?? Perhaps some day we’ll get "director’s"’ cut torrents from some from some brilliant young hacker of Kong and Hobbit that are a proper, watchable two hours each. Fingers crossed.)

im sorry is that a request or another attempt to start a shitty peter jackson’s hobbit adaptation trashing thread?

Setting aside the snark of the OP, I’ve been thinking about doing for the same thing for the Hobbit scores that I did for LOTR (Thread 83363). I genuinely love the scores, but for me (being very much a novice at this kind of work), putting together a mix like this ends up being a fairly long, tedious process and I don’t have the same amount of time and energy to devote to the Hobbit that I had to devote to LOTR. If I ever do complete it, though, I’ll definitely announce it.

Sorry, didn’t mean to sound snarky. You should hear me when I do. No, this is a genuine request. I’ve been a Howard Shore fan since his early Cronenberg days. I think he can be brilliant. And I did hugely enjoy Jackson’s expanded LOTR, much more so than the truncated original releases. I bought the 2 disk first Hobbit soundtrack but I just can’t listen to it. It repeats some of LOTR and it has some new material but mostly (to me) it just repeats. Over and over. No one liked the soundtrack to the 2nd Hobbit, it seems, so I’ve not even considered getting it, but people do seem to like the 3d Hobbit soundtrack, almost as good as the first, the consensus seems to be. So there has to be some good stuff there. And it is Shore.

There are times when expanded soundtracks are just overkill. One of my favorite scores of all time is Barry’s Body Heat. But I really don’t like the expanded version. It’s the same music repeated just too many times. I much prefer the original release. Same goes for a couple Goldsmith releases. Very often average sounding Goldsmith does become a truly brilliant soundtrack in an expanded form. But sometimes the expansion works against the music.

I honestly don’t want to listen to 6 disks of Hobbit the number of times it would take to pick out the best tracks. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to listen to it critically enough before a critical shutdown would thwart that anyway. But surely people here have their favorite cuts. What would you choose for a one disk compilation of the best of Shore’s Hobbit? Suggestions would be sincerely appreciated.

Samuel Waters: just noticed that the LOTR in your message is a link. That’s it!! That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m hoping for. (Which, I have to shame-facedly admit, is for someone else to do all that hard stuff and for me just to coast in afterwards and download it all without breaking a sweat. Seriously, I truly do bow my head in appreciation of all that hard work and all the skill and love of subject that goes with it. I will definitely check out your LOTR. There is true genius in Shore’s music and I do believe it still hasn’t been properly captured in official releases the way it could have been. Thanks!)

If you really take some time and listen to the scores, especially DoS, I think you might be surprised. True, The Hobbit scores aren’t quite as immediately visceral as LOTR, but there’s quite a bit of depth, variation, and thematic material in them. As for specific tracks, I tend to have the scores running in the background and I rarely check to see what track is on when I hear something I particularly enjoy, so I honestly don’t know which specific ones are better than others (though "Erebor" from AUJ and "The Forest River" from DoS come immediately to mind). Once I begin my own critical and analytical study of them, I’ll know more … but I’m waiting until after Monday, when I’ll see all three films in a marathon and receive my copy of the Deluxe BoFA Soundtrack from Amazon. If I have the time, I’ll take the best cues from, say, Smaug’s Theme (or Tauriel’s or Laketown or Bilbo, etc) and edit them together. It’s a long-term project, though. And, quite honestly, there is a lot of really good material to go through (IMO, of course).