The Crow‘s chart-topping soundtrack was just as influential as the movie itself

The soundtrack to The Crow showed up in stores two months before the actual movie played in multiplexes. That should give you an idea of how popular soundtracks were back in the day.

During the ‘90s, soundtracks were usually vital to whatever big-screen attraction was hitting theaters at the time. The year before The Crow’s release, the soundtrack to The Bodyguard was the year’s biggest-selling album, hitting the number-one spot on the Billboard albums chart multiple times and winning the Album of the Year Grammy. In the summer of ‘94, shortly after The Crow hit theaters, the Elton John-fueled soundtrack to The Lion King was number one for most of that season. MCA and Sony Music had their own soundtrack wings, ready to drop collections full of radio-ready tunes that may or may not actually appear in the movie.

The Crow’s soundtrack would also hit the top of the Billboard 200, eventually going triple platinum. The Crow producer/soundtrack co-executive producer Jeff Most wanted the soundtrack to be filled with tunes that fit perfectly into director Alex Proyas’ adaptation of James O’Barr’s comic. It almost seems like Most watched the long-gone MTV show Alternative Nation to come up with the proper candidates. (Of course, Alternative Nation would spotlight the movie and the soundtrack when both came out.)

The Crow and its soundtrack are dark-and-dreary compendiums of different genres. The movie, starring Bruce Lee’s son Brandon Lee in his final role as Eric Draven, a slain musician who crawls out of his grave to avenge his death and the death of his fiance, is a combo of fantasy, film noir, Gothic horror/romance and good ol’ grindhouse vengeance. As for the soundtrack, it’s a ‘90s alt-rock extravaganza: punk, metal, industrial rock, and the most powerful genre of the era, grunge. Basically, every young, angry, pale-faced demographic is properly targeted on-screen and in the soundtrack.

Most assembled an impressively curated playlist of covers, re-recorded tunes and original songs written explicitly for the film. Most showed footage of the movie to Robert Smith of The Cure, a band that was often quoted in the comic book. Smith and then-drummer Boris Williams came up with the de facto theme song, “Burn,” which plays as Draven puts on makeup and assumes his nocturnal-antihero persona.

Though, you could say The Crow has two theme songs. Not too shortly after, there’s a sequence where Draven runs across rooftops as Nine Inch Nails’ cover of Joy Division’s “Dead Souls” plays over the whole thing. (O’Barr was also a fan of Joy Division, whose former members turned down an offer from Most to re-record “Love Will Tear Us Apart” for the soundtrack.) Draven’s journey is mainly scored by Graeme Revell, co-founder of the industrial band SPK, whose compositions can go from jazzy to angelic to hard-rocking to plain ol’ maudlin.

Most made sure all the songs appear in the film. Rage Against the Machine’s “Darkness” (a re-recording of their “Darkness of Greed”) is briefly, faintly heard for a few seconds in an outdoor street scene, but the rest of the songs serve as background music for The Crow’s seedy underworld.

The first time we hear Stone Temple Pilots’ “Big Empty” (which they replaced for their initial selection “Only Dying” after Lee accidentally died on-set) is in the car with the psychotic cronies who killed Draven and his girl. They speed over to The Pit, the dingy watering hole with a busted jukebox that plays For Love Not Lisa’s “Slip Slide Melting,” The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Snakedriver,” Helmet’s “Milktoast,” and Violent Femmes’ “Color Me Once.” Machines of Loving Grace’s “Golgotha Tenement Blues” plays in a scene set in an apartment above the bar, where Draven takes out a guy who’s shooting up and making out with a waitress. The other songs, like Pantera’s cover of Poison Idea’s “The Badge” and Rollins Band’s cover of Suicide’s “Ghostrider,” are played at the club run by resident villain Top Dollar (Michael Wincott), as he’s upstairs either plotting, killing people, or doing freaky stuff with his even more creepy half-sister (Bai Ling).

Medicine and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult show up personally to perform re-recorded versions of their songs. Medicine, a rock band which would later feature Brandon Lee’s sister Shannon on vocals, performs “Time Baby III,” a redo of “Time Baby II” with Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins on vocals. Later, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult whips the club crowd into a moshing frenzy with “After the Flesh”—formerly titled “Nervous Xians”—matching all the bullet-riddled mayhem that’s happening above as Draven crashes a meeting between Dollar and his associates.

With all this angsty alt-rock covering The Crow, the song that plays during the end credits is the ballad “It Can’t Rain All the Time,” performed by Canadian singer/songwriter Jane Siberry. This full-length version of a song Draven did with his band Hangman’s Joke is supposed to be a somber, sorrowful closer to a film that’s essentially about pain, death, and heartbreak, but it sticks out like the sorest of thumbs. This may explain why “Big Empty” plays again after “It Can’t Rain All the Time,” giving audiences one more hit of the dark grunge before the movie ends.

While The Crow has become a launchpad for several sequels, a TV show, a video game, and a upcoming reboot with Bill Skarsgård as Draven, the soundtrack is seen as a much-adored time capsule for those grungeheads who wanted to delve further into the wide, wild world of alternative music. (My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way says he got into The Jesus and Mary Chain because of The Crow.). A decade ago, when Rolling Stone listed the best alternative albums from 1994, The Crow: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (number 37!) was deemed “1994’s most effective gateway drug,” a compilation that “ripped the flannel off millions of alterna-teens, sealed them in black vinyl and minted a new generation of goths.”

Depending on your age, The Crow, both the movie and the soundtrack, likely either made you or your parents proudly walk around looking like glammed-up corpses.