Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack to the 2022 film of the same name released on July 15, 2022 by Mercury Classics. It features the original score composed by Canadian composer Mychael Danna, and an original song "Carolina" written and performed by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. According to Danna, the score's "unique instrumentation creates haunting melodies that are directly inspired by the North Carolina marshlands, and meticulously crafted to foster an almost fable-like sense of time and place". Development The original score is composed by Mychael Danna, who used sea shells and conchs for creating the music, a technique earlier used in ancient times. The musician, Don Chilton, whom Danna previously worked with had collected those shells and played it as a French horn, which Danna shared in his Instagram account. Danna said, "He uses his fist to kind of pitch it and so he can play pretty accurate melodies, which I’ve never seen a shell player do before. Usually, they just blow in it and [they] make a broad noise and that’s kind of all you get. But he does this and it’s just got this primordial, deep, haunting sound to it that." The sound created a "mysterious, deep marsh and ancient sound" which is a "setting of life and death and endless cycle". Much of the film is set in North Carolina, which led Danna to create a "sonic soundscape" for the film. Excluding the shell sounds, he had used Americana folk-based music with the local musicians, which use, banjo, fiddle and autoharp, and an orchestral music. The film had "sonic textures" that are "natural, acoustic sounds but they sometimes sound electronic". These sounds were manipulated to get the "swamp sound, which is dark, mysterious, and intimidating". These manipulated sounds are literally like "a double bass being played in an unusual way, like playing up above the fretboard or below the bridge and then slowing it down and so on like that. Those dark tones are a little hard to identify what they are, but they just sound kind of organic, but also a little frightening, mysterious, and dark." Release The soundtrack featured an original song, "Carolina" written and performed by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. The song was used as snippets in the promotional trailers for the film, and was released as a single on June 24, 2022 by Republic Records.