Dead Man (soundtrack)

Dead Man is the soundtrack to the 1995 Jim Jarmusch western-themed film of the same name starring Gary Farmer, and Johnny Depp as William Blake. Both the soundtrack and the film's score are written and performed by Neil Young.

Young recorded the soundtrack by improvising (mostly on Old Black, his famously customized electric guitar, with some acoustic guitar, piano and organ) as he watched the newly edited film alone in a recording studio. The soundtrack album consists of seven instrumental tracks by Young, with dialog excerpts from the film and Johnny Depp reading the poetry of William Blake interspersed between the music. The soundtrack differs from the film score in that it uses background noises of a driving car while the film is set in a time before automobiles were widely available.

Pitchfork ranked the soundtrack at 15 on their 50 Best Movie Scores of All Time list, saying that "Old Black is featured in its purest form on the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s hallucinatory western Dead Man. Young’s low, ominous notes are inseparable from Robby Müller’s striking black-and-white cinematography, lending an elemental pull to the increasingly strange odyssey of William Blake (Johnny Depp) and Nobody (Gary Farmer), Blake’s sardonic Native American guide."