The Soundtrack For God Help The Girl Unveiled

God Help the Girl is being billed as "a story set to music" and was written by Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian (ie. my favorite still-together band, to this day, even though many other folk seem to have forgotten them). Things on this project aren't progressing in the typical order, however. While Stuart is still working on the movie script, he he's not only recruited many of  the cast but has also taken them into the studio to record the soundtrack album.

Matador will be releasing the album on June 23rd in the US, whereas Rough Trade will be giving it a UK bow a day earlier. Prior to this, the song Come Monday Night will be released as a single in May. Stuart Murdoch's video introduction to the project is embedded in the second half of this post.

If you'd rather, you can get a free, legal MP3 of Come Monday Night by registering at the official website. You won't find any reference to the film on there, however. That's been pretty much restricted to Stuart's diary at the Belle and Sebastian site. He first announced the project back in August 2007, and was still working on the screenplay at the time of his last entry in March.

Come Monday Night has vocals by Catherine Ireton, who you can see in the record sleeve artwork at the top of this post. She will take lead on ten of the fourteen tracks on the album, so we can also probably assume she'll be the star of the eventual movie. A handful of the tracks have been previously released as Belle and Sebastian recordings, though they've been done-over for the soundtrack.

Belle and Sebastian's previous soundtracking (besides when their tunes were pulled up for use in High Fidelity, Juno and so on) was for Todd Solondz' Storytelling. That album included the wonderful Big John Shaft, a muscular heartbreaker not included in the film but written for and dedicated to the actor Robert Wisdom (who, as it happens, is a muscular heartbreaker himself).

In fact, only 6 minutes of the band's music ended up in the film, which may just give a clue to how and why God Help the Girl was conceived.

I'm hoping for something between That Sinking Feeling and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The only thing I've had between That Sinking Feeling and The Umbrellas of Cheroburg before has been a quick bathroom break and a soft smile at the beauty of it all.