David Mansfield

If David Mansfield even tried to resist the offer to score director Amy Redford's film The Guitar, he can't have tried very hard. After all, in addition to being a noted screen composer, Mansfield is also a multi-instrumentalist with a focus on stringed instruments, and by its very title the picture offered him the opportunity to break out his favorite axes. The plot of the movie is not well suggested by its title, however. The Guitar is part of that favorite Hollywood genre, the one-month-to-live film. In this case, the lead character, who, of course reacts to her fatal diagnosis by going on a spree, also returns to her childhood desire to learn to play the electric guitar. That gives Mansfield the excuse to lay out his effects pedals and perform a master's class in the sounds it's possible to wring out of a guitar. After a handful of pop tunes, including Jonny Savarino's easy listening number "Glancing Lovers," and some glam rock from David Bowie/Iggy Pop sound-alikes the Everyothers, Mansfield sets to work on a series of short cues that find him making ambient sounds à la Robert Fripp and Brian Eno ("Thoughts of Suicide"), fingerpicking lightly and making harmonics ("Shopping"), hitting dirty power chords ("Flashback 3"), turning to country-folk ("Nice Dress" and "Hard Way," the latter featuring Peter Case in a Woody Guthrie impersonation), playing alternative rock ("Alt. Shopping"), and evoking the sound of Neil Young & Crazy Horse ("Phantom Band"), among other things. He also contributes some rudimentary learning-to-play-guitar cues to substitute for actress Saffron Burrows' onscreen efforts. This is not the most complicated or subtle film score, but it does demonstrate some of the wide range of sounds a guitar can produce. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide