Ry Cooder

The combination of Jim Dickinson's songwriting and Ry Cooder's slide guitar blend like buttermilk biscuits and turkey gravy in what might be not only the best soundtrack by Cooder, but his best album as well. Recorded in 1989 (but harkening back to Cooder's epic 1972 masterpiece Boomer's Story), the instrumental accompaniment to Paris, Texas is painful in its melancholic sparseness. At times it seems as desolate as the desert roamed by the film's tortured protagonist, played by Harry Dean Stanton, who impressively sings "Cancion Mixteca" in perfect Spanish.