Acclaimed writer-director Cameron Crowe hand-picked the songs for the "Elizabethtown" soundtrack, which features trailblazing young artists like My Morning Jacket and Ryan Adams as well as Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Elton John and Tom Petty, to name a few. Crowe set out to achieve a true synthesis of sound and vision with the "Elizabethtown" soundtrack and the result plays like a dream road trip. "Hopefully," Crowe enthuses, "like some of my very favorite movies, from 'Harold and Maude' to 'Shampoo' and 'The Royal Tennenbaums,' the music [featured in 'Elizabethtown'] is forever married to the images and the people we come to know so well in those two wondrous hours spent watching in the dark."

A love letter to the resilience of the life force, "Elizabethtown" is a story of an unexpected romance that develops against the backdrop of a Kentucky patriarch's hilariously elaborate memorial. The film stars Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Judy Greer, Bruce McGill, Jessica Biel, and Paul Schneider.

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Director Cameron Crowe is known for paying very close attention to the soundtracks to his movies. For Elizabethtown, in which he revisits his Kentucky roots, Crowe has put together a low-key album full of gently moaning pedal-steel guitars, fretful mandolins, and men in full sensitive-balladeer mode. Whereas Almost Famous reached for the hedonistic 1970s, Elizabethtown tries to evoke a timelessly rootsy vibe through artists new (Ryan Adams, Wheat) and classic (Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham) alike. Petty, Buckingham, and Kentucky natives My Morning Jacket all contribute new tracks, while Crowe and film scorer Nancy Wilson wrote the theme song, "Same in Any Language," for I Nine to perform. But once again, it's Elton John who pulls the chestnuts from the fire. Just as his "Tiny Dancer" was the clear highlight of the Almost Famous soundtrack, an old Elton epic overshadows the rest of the Elizabethtown lineup. Culled from Sir Elton's 1971 album Tumbleweed Connection, "My Father's Gun" is the kind of superb fake-roots song that paradoxically makes the others contributors sound arch. Go figure. --Elisabeth Vincentelli

More Soundtracks from Cameron Crowe Films

Fast Times at Ridgemont High	Say Anything	Singles
Jerry MaGuire	Almost Famous	Vanilla Sky