http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-09/20.shtml#story3

Texas quartet Explosions in the Sky have realized every underground musician's ultimate fantasy: Providing the score to a Billy Bob Thornton film. Evidently combining the emotional thrust of Remember the Titans with the god-only-knows-what of Bad Santa, Friday Night Lights (out October 5th via Universal Studios) stars BBT as an inspirational high school football coach in a roughneck Texas town.

What they did was combine small snippets of old tunes (from Those Who Tell the Truth and 2003's The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place) with entirely new material. Smith said soundtrack producer Brian Reitzell (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation) allowed the band to play "basically whatever we wanted. He would show us some scenes from the movie and we would try and match a mood. We came up with lots and lots of two-to-three-minute pieces that we liked very well, and then the music editors would try to place what we played into the scenes they had." Before the band even started scoring the film, however, the editors had used older Explosions tracks as place-holders for the movie's rough cut, and the film's director, Peter Berg, had become attached to some of those. "So they wound up wanting to license a number of our old songs for use in the movie, in addition to the original stuff we wrote," Smith explained.

The flick, set in 1988, also features era-appropriate pop fare-- Public Enemy, Bad Company, the mighty Poison-- in addition to soundtrack work from David Torn and Daniel Lanois. But the bulk of Friday Night's musical weight belongs to Explosions in the Sky. Not that Poison isn't completely tits. "The main difference from our other stuff is that there are a few songs with strings done by [Beck's father] David Campbell," Smith says. "There is an unfortunate lack of drums on our soundtrack songs-- it's mostly guitars. There's a very atmospheric song and an uplifting waltz and a song that sounds like the site of a dusty, smoking train wreck in the middle of a West Texas oilfield at dusk. It's kind of scary-sounding."

So after all that, the end result is an almost new, almost Explosions in the Sky album. Which is still pretty damn cool. The Friday Night Lights soundtrack is due out October 15th on the Universal tentacle Hip-O Records; the tracklisting is tracklisted below. Everything courtesy of EITS unless otherwise noted:

01 From West Texas
02 Your Hand in Mine (with strings)
03 Our Last Days as Children
04 An Ugly Fact of Life
05 Home
06 Sonho Dourado [Daniel Lanois]
07 To West Texas
08 Your Hand in Mine (Goodbye)
09 Inside It All Feels the Same
10 Do You Ever Feel Cursed? [David Torn]
11 Lonely Train
12 Seagull [Bad Company... Till the Day I Die]
13 The Sky Above, The Field Below
14 A Slow Dance