Nevertheless, Coppola knew what she wanted and, pressed for time, Godin and Dunckle returned to the studio for a weekend. In need of vocals, they turned to the only singer they knew, fellow Versailles native and Phoenix frontman, Thomas Mars, who in a twist of fate no one could have anticipated, Coppola would later end up marrying. “We showed Thomas the scene where ‘Highschool Lover’ plays,” Dunckle recalls. “It was in the scene where you have Trip Fontaine lying on the floor with Lux and there’s this theme playing in the background. So that’s why he was thinking about ‘playground love’ when he wrote the lyrics”.
Eager to separate his cameo appearance from his band, Phoenix, Mars assumed the moniker of Gordon Tracks and, working alongside saxophonist Hugo Ferran, Air created the song ‘Playground Love’ based on the instrumental ‘Highschool Lover’, which permeates much of the score. Though Godin was initially hesitant, it would eventually serve as the album’s opening track; an enduring piece of cinematic music that reflects the film’s themes, while standing alone as its own melancholic love song.
With recording complete and Air unable to record new material due to touring commitments, Coppola found herself in something of a predicament. Having already excised much of the novel’s more graphic content with a view to reshaping the film into a more romantic story, much of Air’s darker material no longer fit. Working with music supervisor Brian Reitzell, Coppola set about splicing select tracks to picture in a manner more akin to needle drops found elsewhere in the film, alongside period songs from the likes of ELO, Styx, Al Green and The Bee Gees.
“Maybe she wanted to have something more close to the picture, but we didn’t have the time to do that,” Dunckle muses. “We had just a video tape player and hard drives to record the music… All we could do was create a piece of music and give it to her, and she had to cut it to the picture.”
With 2025 marking the 25th anniversary of the album’s release, Godin and Dunckle decided to revisit the recordings and create a redux version using the original stems for each instrument. They soon discovered that they had lost several hard drives from the original recording sessions. “We didn’t realise that it could become an interesting, well-known album,” Dunckle laughs. “But in cinema 50% of movies are lost, so doing some safeties is really important. It’s part of your job as an artist to take care of your art and to save it and to regularly do some digital copies.”
The duo set about painstakingly reconstructing the missing elements. ‘Highschool Lover’ had to be re-recorded entirely from scratch using the same instruments, equipment and musicians. ‘Suicide Underground’, an ominous, pensive track built around a demo of the film’s narration, was rebuilt with only the original drum stems for reference, while its dialogue, originally sampled from a VHS, had to be separated from the original master with AI before being added to the new mix.
“We did like Peter Jackson to extract the vocals from the record,” Godin explains with a smile. “With half the other tracks it was just one instrument, or maybe two, that were missing. In the past when we used to record on tapes, you didn’t lose anything, but now with the computer and the hard drives and the safeties, we still lost that stuff.”
While they share names, Air’s album remains a tantalising glimpse of what might have been – a collection of darker soundscapes that found themselves without a home as Coppola’s vision evolved. While only ‘Playground Love’, the instrumental ‘Clouds Up’ and numerous variations of the ethereal ‘Highschool Lover’ are present in the final edit, it remains a fascinating snapshot of a band exploring new sonic possibilities that would go on to shape their sound.
“I don’t know if our soundtrack is good or not, but in my opinion, to do something kind of remarkable and noticeable, you have to be a little bit off,” Dunckle states modestly. “The soundtrack is a little bit off. It sounds like another thing on the album, but it pulls the feeling of the movie into something kind of different.”
