Days of Our Lives

This is the third soundtrack album culled from music written for the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives, following a disc released by Rough Rider in 1998 and a "Love Songs" collection issued by Varèse Sarabande in 2005, and it is by far the most ambitious, with 61 cues spreading over two CDs with a running time of more than 100 minutes. But then, says co-composer D. Brent Nelson, he and partner Ken Corday (also the show's executive producer and the son of the couple who launched the show in 1965) had 3,500 "pieces of music" to choose from, presumably dating back through the last decade -- plus for a show running an hour a day, five days a week. Rick Kohlbeck, who sequenced the chosen material, took a simple approach after the decision was made to have two discs. They might have been subtitled "love" and "death" because the first one consists of music written to accompany romantic situations, while the second takes in the more eventful aspects of the multiple plots. In practice, naturally, this means that Disc One contains more melodic string (or string-like synthesizer) passages, as well as gently plucked acoustic guitars and wordless choral vocals, while Disc Two has more overtly synthesized, percussive, minor-key stuff. But in both cases, the key word here is versatility. In cues rarely running much over two minutes each, if that, the composer/performers, never tied to any particular style, tend to get in, make a musical impression, and get out again, no doubt just in time for one of those soap commercials. Their music may have classical leanings, though pop/rock tends to be the most frequent touchstone. There are even some world music elements here and there. Although Kohlbeck has blended together some of the Disc Two material into suites reflecting certain plot developments on the show, nothing develops much musically here. The scoring seems meant to punctuate the emotional and dramatic action on the show, not accompany it at any length.