The Home Alone Soundtrack: A Miracle that Almost Didn’t Happen (twice)
John Williams — 1990
I’m a child of the early 90s. Like a lot of people in my demographic who started developing memories in the latter half of the decade, a lot of those memories are tied to media.
Without a doubt the best time of year for TV was December. Snowy weather and an early nightfall provided the perfect ambiance for hours of holiday specials, colourful toy commercials, and the occasional Christmas movie. We had a few of the classics on VHS but we’d have to be lucky and patient to catch something else, and on a really good night that something would be Home Alone.
I grew up with Home Alone. As a kid sitting around the TV with my brothers, I identified with Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister; I was around his age, the youngest child in a sizable family, living in a sleepy neighbourhood. I was basically the target market for a power fantasy about a kid fighting off burglars with a combination of his wits, toys, and household tools. I laughed along to the jokes. I shuttered when the furnace came to life. I physically recoiled at the many tortures Daniel Stern endured over the course of the film.
As I got a little older, my relationship with the holiday got more complicated. My brothers started moving out and it was the time of year that my whole family was around, and Home Alone was something that got us out of our individual corners of the house. I still found it funny, but I started to identify more with Kevin as he is in the second half of the film, realizing the loneliness of a quiet house. I notice the genuine warmth of the movie, and it was around this time that I also started noticing one of the most powerful elements of the film: the score.
Home Alone is good, don’t get me wrong, but it does not need a score this good. It’s John Williams, in his prime, composing a score for a movie where Joe Pesci gets covered in chicken feathers and falls down the stairs. How did that happen?
1989 — I Had a Few Hits a Few Years Ago
A new decade is about to begin and the hairspray-stink of the late 1980s hangs in the air. Since the 70s, the definition of what a “Christmas movie” can be had started to change. In 1974 Black Christmas brough a deranged stalker/murderer into the mix, Gremlins (1984) and Die Hard (1988) used Christmas as a backdrop to tell a mostly unrelated story, and Scrooged (1988) took a fresh new take on A Christmas Carol by setting it in gritty 80s New York. The genre had evolved and like the rest of the industry, got bigger, louder, grittier, and extravagant.
Writer and Producer John Hughes is at the top of his game. He’s basically invented is own subgenre of heartfelt teen comedy with films like The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). He’s living large, having written and produced both Uncle Buck and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation that year. He’s preparing for a family vacation and Christmas is likely on his mind.
He’s packing his own suitcase when an odd thought crosses his mind. “I’ve gotta remember to bring my kids. Imagine what kind of crazy shenanigans they might get up to if I left them home, alone?” Visions of giant bowls of ice cream and cheese pizzas paid for with lousy tips run through his head alongside airsoft rifles and firecrackers. He gets to work. It’s unclear if this ruins his family’s vacation.
He brings the script to Warner Bros with a proposed budget of $10 million. Warner likes that because Warner likes profit margins. However, the budget starts growing, which Warner doesn’t like. Like a desperate business owner seeking mob protection, Hughes quietly meets with 20th Century Fox before production to see if he could get more money from them if Warner decides to drop. Hughes is right; the budget is leaning closer to $14.7 million. Warner comes back to Hughes saying something along the lines of “Cut 1.2 million before I pump your guts full of lead.” Hughes says no. This, combined with the shifty move with Fox, majorly pisses off Warner and they put the kibosh on the production. Fox however, isn’t so easily perturbed and gives him the green light.
Hughes reaches out to Chris Columbus to direct. Columbus has some cred as a director and a writer, having worked on movies like Gremlins (1984), the Goonies (1985), and Adventures in Babysitting (1987). On Hughes’ recommendation Columbus hires Culkin, made some rewrites to include the old man Marley story line, and begins principal photography in February 1990. Before too long it’s time to find a composer.
1990 — The Silver Tuna
Columbus has his mind set on American orchestral composer Bruce Harold Broughton. Broughton is an accomplished guy; he’s produced scores for a variety of TV shows like Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-O, and Dallas, but he cancels last minute due to his work on The Rescuers Down Under. Columbus is in trouble, so he does what any reasonable filmmaker in the 1980s would do: he calls Steven Spielberg. The two had collaborated before on the Goonies and Spielberg is connected. He has a suggestion: “hey, why not get the guy who composed the scores for Star Wars, Superman, and Indiana Jones to score your movie about a child throwing paint cans at Joe Pesci?” Columbus agrees that this is a good idea and they get Williams on the phone.
So how does one score a Christmas movie? The music needs to evoke the feeling and atmosphere of the season, but ideally also communicate its deeper meanings. Since the 40s there have been a few ways composers have approached this. You can take a massive hit song and make it a key centrepiece in the film (Rudolph), make a pop song for the film and watch a classic spring forth (Holiday Inn, White Christmas), or just combine established songs and put them into a new context (Charlie Brown Christmas).
John Williams is a bit of a different case, however, so like most of his projects, he started by drawing inspiration from what had been done before. Christmas has a sound. Sleighbells evoke the more secular traditions, and choirs the more traditional religious elements. Williams incorporates both these sounds throughout the score. At times Williams dips into different pallets, like when he leans on horns and clarinets as Harry and Marv creep around the neighbourhood or the heavy, gated drums while Kevin prepares the house, but these are the exceptions.
There’s a lot of music packed into Home Alone, but when Williams is establishing atmosphere and heightening the emotional core of the film, he sticks with “Somewhere in my Memory.”
“Somewhere in My Memory” is the hook of the score, the crown jewel of the soundtrack, and it’s used to highlight many of the film’s most emotionally resonant moments. Williams had a handful of legendary scores under his belt by 1990 and knew how to maximize the impact of a tune, so he decided to use the core melody of “Somewhere in My Memory” as a motif throughout the rest of the film. The first thing you hear in the film is the core melody in a music-box style, before dipping into a more foreboding theme highlighted by sleigh bells. The melody continues to creep into the score to highlight Kevin’s actions, like just after he shoplifts the toothbrush and duped Herb and Jimmy. A more complete version with a choir plays as Kevin looks in on a holiday party, thinking of the family he’s “wished away,” and when Kevin’s mom arrives home, the complete, fully arranged theme swells as the McCallisters are reunited.
It’s already a bold choice to write an original carol in 1990, but the fact that it so accurately emulates many of the staples of the genre without resorting to cliché is kinda crazy. “Somewhere in my Memory” doesn’t directly copy any established carols, but it fits in perfectly with the canon of holiday music, evoking the same warm, comforting feeling a piece like “The Christmas Song” can.
1991- The Little Jerk is Armed!
Home Alone debuts on November 10th in Chicago, one week before its wide release. It hits theatres the same day as the aforementioned Rescuers Down Under and one week before WWF Survivor Series 1990. Just days before the on-screen WWF debut of the Undertaker, Kevin tombstoned the bejeezus out of every other movie at the box office. Home Alone is a massive commercial success, pulling in $476.7 million at the box office on its $18 million budget. At the time of its release Home Alone was the third highest grossing film in history. Given the franchise-saturated movie market we’re in today, it’s insane to think a holiday comedy could come out of nowhere and completely take over without any established IP.
Critically, the film received mixed reviews upon release, but Williams’ score was almost universally praised. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score and Best Original Song, as well as a Grammy for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television. Williams also took home the BMI Film and TV Awards Film Music Award for his work.
2022 — All the Great Ones Leave Their Mark
32 years later Home Alone is a classic. Aside from some antiquated technology here and there (like I genuinely still have no idea what that blowtorch thing is), the film is timeless, and the score pulls a lot of that weight. It draws you in and perfectly accentuates the heartwarming feeling people seek in the season. “Somewhere in My Memory” has earned its place among the Christmas classics, and today is performed in concerts across the world from the United States to Slovakia to Indonesia.
It isn’t easy to love something that’s been in your life since you were a child. Your impressions change as you get older, but media is static; it doesn’t grow with us and sometimes things we loved at one point age really poorly (*cough cough* Holiday Inn *cough*). I’m pretty picky with Christmas movies for that reason, but Home Alone still works for me. The scenes with Catherine O’Hara and John Candy still kill me year after year, I’m still touched by the scenes with Marley, and “Somewhere in My Memory” still sticks with me throughout the season.
This post ended up being a lot different from my usual blogs, and it’s because as I went back and listened more thoroughly through the score, I just found more and more to love. It would transport me back to the couch at my family’s old house, parked in front of the TV with only the glow of the screen and the nearby tree to light the space, surrounded by my family. I go in and out of liking Christmas as a season, but to me, “Somewhere in My Memory” sounds like everything that’s right about the season, and I’d be willing to bet I’m not the only one that feels that way.
