Since I can't walk much until my broken ankle heals, I've been listening to a lot of music. Some old favorites include Pink Floyd "Comfortably Numb," and The Who "See Me, Feel Me," from their Tommy album. This got me to thinking about when I tried to create a CD of rock and roll music as a soundtrack to one of Lucasfilm's Computer Games. My idea of expanding the Star Wars universe with books that told new stories had worked out better than I could have imagined, and I thought maybe I could do something similar with music.
In the mid 1990s, the Publishing dept. had coordinated with the Games group and the Toy group on a "movie without the movie" called Shadows of the Empire. I licensed, and worked on, the novel and an original music soundtrack. Around the same time, I was looking for other ways to create new music products that might be associated with the Star Wars expanded universe. So, Virgin Records in the UK put together a compilation as a possible soundtrack for the Dark Forces Game. This idea didn't make it much further. Although George Lucas was OK with my dept. developing new stories, it soon became clear that any new Star Wars music would have to be originated by John Williams.
The best result of this failed effort is the great CD compilation soundtrack Virgin Records put together for me, which I've posted above. The individual tunes can be found on YouTube.
