One From The Heart - The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Of Francis Coppola's Movie

Francis Coppola conceived One from the Heart as an intimate, stylized romance following Apocalypse Now, and commissioned Tom Waits to write a song cycle charting a couple's breakup and reconciliation in a neon-lit Las Vegas. Waits spent nearly two years on the project, writing every song and recording with longtime producer Bones Howe and arranger Bob Alcivar, whose lush, string-and-brass orchestrations gave the material a Nelson Riddle-era romanticism unlike anything else in Waits's catalog. Crystal Gayle was brought in to voice the female half of the story - reportedly at the suggestion of Waits's wife Kathleen Brennan - and the pairing of her polished country-pop voice with Waits's ragged, whiskey-soaked delivery became the record's defining device, most vividly on the duets. The film was a lavish, expensive flop that helped sink Coppola's Zoetrope Studios, and the soundtrack's release was delayed by the ensuing turmoil before finally appearing in 1982. Waits earned an Academy Award nomination for the score, and critics came to regard the album as the most sophisticated, orchestrated statement of his early songwriting period. It effectively closed out his Asylum-era lounge-jazz balladeer persona; within a year he had reinvented his sound entirely on Swordfishtrombones, making this soundtrack a singular, beloved outlier in his body of work.