Sound Tracker

[September 29th, 2004] While local label entrepreneur and Tracker leadman John Askew was busy running his FILMGuerrero label in Portland in February 2003, his group's music pulsed through the speakers of Brett Warnock's Subaru Outback. Warnock, the Top Shelf Productions publisher, was cruising through the Shasta National Forest with award-winning writer Craig Thompson, when he popped in a Tracker CD. The two were toying with the idea of commissioning a soundtrack to Thompson's illustrated novel, Blankets, and when they heard Askew's music, the two agreed they had found their soundtrack.

Although he hadn't read Blankets, Askew signed on. In the next few months he would read the book, conceptualize and then record Blankets the album, a collection of intricately crafted soundscapes meant to play as readers followed Thompson's lucid tale of growing up in a religious family in small-town Wisconsin. Now, a year-and-a-half after Thompson first heard Tracker, that album is being released.

"I've also always believed that a great untapped audience for indie comics are indie-music fans," writes Warnock via email, "and with the success of Blankets, this seemed like a neat idea."

Faced with the daunting task of soundtracking a 582-page illustrated novel, Askew chose to avoid following a narrative path with his songs. Instead, he picked out a number of the novel's recurring themes and composed songs that capture them.

"It's definitely not supposed to be like Peter and the Wolf, where you hear a beep and then turn the page," says Askew. "Craig just told me to do what I want. So I picked a few different scenes and built the song off of those."

Askew also avoided creating a soundtrack that follows the musical cues in the novel. Within Thompson's panels, church groups sing and the young lovers send grunge-era mix tapes to each other, but Blankets the album is ambient music loosely tied to the novel through its album art (drawn by Thompson) and its song titles. Readers of the novel might pick up a few references to the book in the music, but the beauty of Tracker's album is that it can stand alone, as the soundtrack to countless other books, or the cathartic accompaniment to a quiet night.

"I didn't want to make an album that would challenge this epic book," says Askew of the novel, which has sold 30,000 copies to date. "I just wanted to make an album that, whether they knew the book or not, people could sit back, listen and think."