The Wire: And All the Pieces Matter -- Five Years of Music from The Wire

Artist	Original Soundtrack
Producer	Ivan Neville, Milton Davis, Michael Franti, Louis Tineo, Loren Hill, Blake Leyh, Doreen Vail, Rod Lee, Richard Shelton, James Mbah, Nina K. Noble, Karen L. Thorson
Label Name	Nonesuch
Song List	1: "This America, Man." (0:25) 2: Way Down in the Hole (2:56) 3: "Why Sould Anyone Ever Wanna Leave Baltimore?" (0:24) 4: Oh My God (5:06) 5: Dance My Pain Away (2:07) 6: My Life Extra (1:17) 7: "The King Stay the King." (0:47) 8: Way Down in the Hole (1:34) 9: "We Used to Make S*** in This Country." (0:14) 10: Sixteen Tons (3:33) 11: Assume the Position (3:40) 12: "What the F*** Did I Do?" (0:13) 13: Step by Step (2:53) 14: I Walk on Gilded Splinters (4:58) 15: Fast Train (5:38) 16: The Body of an American (4:44) 17: "All the Pieces Matter." (0:08) 18: Efuge Efuge (3:33) 19: "Omar Comin'! " (0:40) 20: Way Down in the Hole (1:43) 21: "If It's a Lie, Then We Fight on That Lie." (0:21) 22: Projects (3:28) 23: "Later for That Gangsta Bulls***." (0:38) 24: Ayo (3:19) 25: Analyze (2:44) 26: "Wars End." (0:14) 27: Unfriendly Game (3:52) 28: What You Know About Baltimore (3:17) 29: Jail Flick (3:38) 30: The Life, the Hood, the Streetz (3:49) 31: "An Act of Daily Journalism." (0:13) 32: I Feel Alright (2:56) 33: Way Down in the Hole (1:44) 34: "You Remember the One Day Summer Past?" (0:41) 35: The Fall (1:50)
Format	CD
Release Date	2008 01 08
Genre	Soundtrack
Style.Categories	Television Music, Soundtracks, TV Soundtracks

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It's about time -- way down in 2008 -- that HBO's series The Wire, set in the hardcore real-life world of Baltimore, finally got around to putting a soundtrack disc together from all of its seasons. The bottom line is that this David Simon-created show, like everything he did before it, isn't like anything else on television. Thank the gods. One of the most captivating, taut, and sometimes near vein-busting frustrating things they do involves the music in a particular episode, during a particular season, etc., and the space surrounding that music. It's also what they don't do: there isn't any incidental music playing in an episode, no serial music or score composed for the series. The music you hear is what's playing as the particular characters are encountering it: through a car radio, in a bar, in a restaurant, or at a party. When somebody gets locked up, or dies, there isn't any crap coming out of your TV to make you feel the obvious. As brilliant as Simon and his music supervisor, Blake Leyh (who also composed the closing credits music), are, is it possible to make this arresting and captivating manner of using music in the montage be equally powerful on a CD -- especially one where the music from four previous seasons is represented on a single disc? The answer is "no." That said, it's a good thing. While listening to this disc one will no doubt be reminded of The Wire, simply because there are snippets of dialogue used for context between tunes, but that's not the actual experience that comes from taking it in. Indeed, there are four versions of Tom Waits' "Down in the Hole" (the show's theme song) -- it is recorded by a different artist for each season, so here are the Blind Boys of Alabama from season one, Waits' original for the second, the Neville Brothers' taut stomper for season three, and Baltimore homegrown act DoMaJe's reading for the fourth season. Along the way are visits to DJ Technics' "My Life Extra," jazz piano and composition great Lafayette Gilchrist's "Assume the Position" (which is angular, funky, and tense as hell -- like the J.B.'s playing a chart by Allen Toussaint and arranged by Oliver Nelson), the Pogues' "The Body of an American," and Paul Weller's rockist cover of Dr. John's "I Walk on Gilded Splinters" (while it's not as great as the original or even as fine as Humble Pie's drunken rout of it, it is more likely to be on the radio or CD box for a character to hear than either of those).
Real is where it's at with this show. The dialogue snippets are woven seamlessly into the mix, and they feel like something completely alien and strange -- not to the music, but to your ears, as if someone is checking this on your own CD or MP3 player. There's the hip-hop of "What You Know About Baltimore" by Ogun with Phathead, along with Diablo's "Jail Flick"; Solomon Burke's deep, lonesome, and bittersweet groan "Fast Train"; the low-down woozy Southern funk and soul that is Jesse Winchester's "Step by Step"; and raucous blues in the cover of "Sixteen Tons" by the Nighthawks. Other characters play a role in this wily mess like Michael Franti and Spearhead, Bossman, Rod Lee, Steve Earle, Tyree Colion, and Mullyman, to name another few. But they are all transients: every single track in this 35-track maze is ephemeral in that it quickly passes away, but in a blink there's another one passing you on the street, like the inhabitants of a city, each with his or her own story, tales of woe, anger, disappointments, and bits of wisdom, braggadocio, and tears. So while it doesn't carry the same wallop that The Wire does, that's fine.