"There's the soundtrack to The French Connection II'I think It's my favorite soundtrack. It hasn't been released. I actually had to go and get the film and just make a recording of it to get the music"

Jonny Greenwood’s admission about The French Connection II’s score reveals a musician’s devotion to elusive sounds and a collector’s willingness to circumvent industry limitations to reach them. Calling it his favorite while noting it never saw a proper release points to a recurring gap between cinema’s musical riches and what labels or rights holders make available. The act of sourcing the music by recording it straight from the film transforms listening into archaeology: sifting through dialogue, effects, and ambient noise to isolate what truly captivates him.

That necessity also reframes how film music is understood. Experiencing a score only inside the mix forces attention to placement, negative space, and the tug-of-war between music and sound design. Rather than a pristine album, Greenwood is studying how cues cut in and out, how dissonant brass or anxious rhythms contour scenes of pursuit and desperation, how silence heightens tension. It’s a practical lesson in film scoring: arrangement is not just the notes, but their social life with images and noise.

His preference for this specific soundtrack hints at affinities with the abrasive, experimental textures typical of 1970s urban thrillers, fractured meters, nervous brass, and jagged harmonies that mirror moral blur. Those sonorities echo in Greenwood’s own work, where string clusters, percussive jolts, and uneasy harmonics create psychological pressure rather than melodic comfort. Admiration becomes lineage: he is drawn to scores that treat dissonance as drama and rhythm as narrative propulsion.

There’s also a quiet critique of how easily major works slip into semi-obscurity when physical albums never materialize. Scarcity elevates the music’s aura but also highlights a preservation failure. Greenwood’s workaround, making his own recording, doubles as an act of informal archiving. It suggests that the canon of film music is larger than its official catalog, and that passionate listeners will keep chasing what the marketplace overlooks, valuing immediacy and impact over fidelity and convenience.