Music of ‘Passion’ follows film’s path

The success of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” now working near-miracles at movie box offices, has spread to the music business with a soundtrack album that has broken into the national top 20 without the kind of pop hits that usually drive hit albums from films.

How far the movie’s coattails will stretch will be tested next month with the arrival of a second album officially tied to the movie, “Songs Inspired by ... The Passion of the Christ,” this one featuring famous pop names, including Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.

“This has completely surprised me,” composer John Debney said about the Sony Music soundtrack album. “Soundtracks aren’t usually the biggest-selling things out there. And the fact that it’s not a song-driven soundtrack also makes this a rarity. It’s extremely exciting.”

In designing the score for “The Passion,” Debney, whose credits include scores for “Bruce Almighty” and two “Spy Kids” movies, employed the use of electronic music, Indian ragas and other world-music elements, unusual touches for a film set 2,000 years ago.

“At first, Mel didn’t have any specific direction for me,” he said. “I didn’t want to peg it into a given time or place, and even though it’s set in a specific time, it uses instruments from all over the world from all different time frames.... That’s why it was so rewarding to do. I got to experiment with different colors and different music.”

The experimentation goes even further with the “Songs Inspired by

“Mel was very early into the editing process when he asked me to do this record,” Lunson, now a Los Angeles resident, said in a separate interview. “He’s an old friend and had known of musical things I’d done, such as a documentary I did on Willie.... He thought it would be interesting to show me the film and see what I got from it, musically, and what I thought about putting a record together.

“He didn’t want it to be obvious,” Lunson said. “He really had a lot of input. We discussed a lot of things and bounced things off each other.”

For instance, she noted, “we’re both big Nick Cave fans and the song that’s on the album [“Darker With the Day”] was a song Mel particularly wanted.”

The album’s tone is dark but not doctrinaire, and many of the songs’ lyrics leave their meanings or relationship to the film open to each listener’s interpretation. It starts with a sparse, harrowing arrangement of Hank Williams’ “How Can You Refuse Him Now” by the country great’s granddaughter, Holly Williams. It moves on through Delores O’Riordan’s rendition of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and Leonard Cohen’s brooding “By the Rivers Dark,” and Lee Ryan, the young lead singer of British pop group Blue, brings a youthful perspective to Kris Kristofferson’s world-weary “Why Me.”

The Dylan track, “Not Dark Yet,” isn’t from his overt Christian period of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s but from his Grammy-winning 1997 album “Time Out of Mind.”

Lunson says musicians’ religious beliefs weren’t used as a litmus test for inclusion or exclusion on the project: “The movie is so powerful in itself, I didn’t think we needed to be very obvious by choosing every song with a Christian message.”

The album will be released April 6 by Universal South Records, the Nashville-based label headed by Music City veterans Tim DuBois and Tony Brown.

“They really love music,” Lunson said, “and they got this record without going through the normal questions of ‘Where do you see this record fitting into the marketplace?’ They loved the way the record played as a whole, and that was important.”

Her goal with the album, which she began working on early last year, was a collection in which “each song in its own way ties into how you feel in different parts of the film. There’s longing, great sadness, trying to understand why people do the things they do. The main thing was to put together something reflective of the human feelings that come out of the film.”

Debney, who landed the job from a field of contenders that had included Academy Award-winner James Horner and singer-songwriter-composer Lisa Gerrard, likewise said Gibson was very hands-on about what he wanted in the film’s score, though not as involved as a recent report he’d heard.

“Every week there’s a new story about this movie, and this week’s was that Mel told me exactly what notes to put in, and it was completely not that way,” Debney said. “He was more like ‘I kind of like that -- what if we try a little more emotion here, or make it a little sadder there.’ That was the nature of it.”

Debney says the album’s quick start -- it has sold more than 90,000 copies in two weeks -- is prompting talks of releasing of a single with some of the music mixed into a radio-friendly edit, as well as a concert tour in which portions of the score would be performed by an orchestra.

Gibson, too, has been on the receiving end of a wide spectrum of emotional reactions to his movie, from fans who consider it the greatest religious film ever made to critics who lambaste the extreme violence in his depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus.

“I think he’s handled it very well,” Lunson said. “Things become difficult at different times in life, and different people have different things they have to get through.... Obviously making a film is a hard process. I think he just pushed forward and did what he felt he had to do.”