Soundtrack albums to television shows make very little sense to me. I’m totally fine with film soundtracks — after all, a movie is only slightly longer than the length of an album, and the songs generally run together to tell the story of the movie, or at least evoke the different moods contained within it. If you listen to the album that accompanies Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, you’ve pretty much seen the movie (especially with those helpful dialogue snippets included therein). In the case of Garden State, you’re better off listening to the soundtrack than sitting through the film, as the album ends with Bonnie Summerville’s beautiful “Winding Road” and not with those three douchebags shouting into the void.
In the case of TV shows, though, the idiom is entirely different. Television unfolds over the course of a season, over weeks and months, so there is no possible way to encapsulate the feeling of dozens of hours of television over the course of a CD. Plus, television soundtracks usually represent several seasons of a particular show, which further increases the burden of scope. I don’t learn much of anything about The Sopranos by listening to either soundtrack album that is associated with the show, and I’ve seen every episode of the series. While the various soundtracks to Six Feet Under do a pretty excellent job of evoking the tone of that series, it still comes across as slapdash and unnecessary.
But the soundtracks to Dawson’s Creek are a different animal entirely, in the sense that they are unbelievably awesome. I know saying something like this could possibly get me fired here at Spin, but I made a list of my top five favorite albums of all time, Songs from Dawson’s Creek, Volume 1 would most likely come in at number four (just behind Radiohead’s Kid A, Weezer’s Pinkerton, and Deftones’ White Pony, and just barely beating out Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die). The second entry, Songs from Dawson’s Creek, Volume 2, would probably be at number eleven, barely edged out by Nada Surf’s Let Go, in case you were curious.
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What separates these soundtracks from other television soundtracks? It’s their profound sense of universality. I count Dawson’s Creek as my favorite television show of all time (just a hair in front of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) because it seemed to speak directly to me on a personal level and to my demographic on a general level simultaneously, something I have rarely experienced with television shows.
Allow me to explain: For anybody who grew up as an emotional kid who was something of an outcast (and this describes about 80% of high school kids, I’ve found), Dawson’s Creek was speaking directly to you. The sad truth about high school is that it’s profoundly uninteresting for most people. The kids on Dawson’s Creek led uninteresting lives: They lived in a Massachusetts suburb, they watched movies for fun, and none of them played sports or engaged in any sort of school clubs (for the most part, at least — I know Jen was a cheerleader for a while, but that was out of spite, and Pacey was involved in the drama club, but that was mostly to impress a girl). In reality, there’s a lot of time spent in high school sitting in your room contemplating your navel or talking to your best friend about how you worry about dying a virgin. Now, it’s possible that I could be normalizing my own personal high school experience, but everybody I know seems to have similar stories. Where Beverly Hills 90210, the other major teen zeitgeist show from the ’90s, was full of drug addictions, gambling debts, and sexual harassment of all forms, Dawson’s Creek was mostly about knowing that something has to happen after high school and not knowing exactly what the was going to be.
So the songs on the soundtrack, just like the show, speak to that portion of the population that didn’t spend all of high school being the big man on campus. In fact, few of the songs on Songs from Dawson’s Creek ,Volume 1 evoke any moments from the show, even for a guy who has seen every episode multiple times (the one exception is Chantal Kreviazuk’s cover of Randy Newman’s “Feels Like Home,” which will forever represent the reuniting of Dawson and Joey in the second season). Basically, they are the soundtrack to not knowing what you want, but definitely knowing you want something. They are all thematically and sonically different, but they all have a profound (and typically over-dramatic) sense of longing. Though it sounds like the soundtrack to a tampon commercial, Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” feels exactly like those tense moments before you kiss someone new. There’s a song by Wood called “Stay You” that perfectly distills the struggle between wanting things to be different but still wanting everything to remain the same (if you follow my meaning). And even though the lyrics are actually about some 1940s housewife whose husband goes off to war, Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want To Wait” evokes that feeling of wanting to move on to the next stage of your life (college, work, world travel, joining the circus, or whatever) but being completely afraid of making mistakes and ending up in a gutter somewhere.
It should be duly noted that because the show was a ratings hit (at least in the first three seasons) that it was often used as a launching pad for bands to gain exposure to a coveted teenage audience, so perhaps the songs that appeared on these soundtracks were simply about marketing (this seems especially likely of Songs from Dawson’s Creek, Volume 2 simply because the tone is slightly more disjointed and the participants involved had slightly bigger profiles). But even if you’re cynical enough to believe that, it’s still a pretty brilliant marketing ploy, because it tapped into what the target audience was probably feeling. I can only speak for myself, but I do know these songs helped me deal with my high school navel-gazing, and since I don’t consider myself to have had that atypical an experience, I’m probably not the only one. It’s true that I have almost no personal relationship to any of these songs that doesn’t involve simple nostalgia anymore, but just because you might not be able to relate to them anymore doesn’t mean they’re less important. If anything, they’re more important, because now I’ve got the perspective of a couple of years behind me, and I’ve learned one thing that I imagine a lot of people have learned: When I was fifteen, I didn’t know shit.
The one thing I did have right? Dawson’s Creek was a friggin’ great show.
