Constructing a soundtrack album is a gentle -- and perhaps lost -- art. This author is old enough to remember the 1990s heyday of movie soundtracks, when film producers would regularly license charting pop hits, obscure deep cuts, upcoming rappers, and underappreciated indie bands to construct carefully curated and meticulously produced albums that lived happily in your friends' cars all summer. There was a time when an unsuccessful film could recoup a lot of its theatrical losses with overwhelming soundtrack record sales. See: "Dead Man on Campus."

As the music industry collapsed in the early 2000s, however, soundtrack records fell out of favor. Movie songs became mere playlists, neither arranged on a CD in any cogent order nor lending themselves toward a general thematic thrust. We '90s teens can now whine (as is our wont) that soundtrack albums are, in the '20s, rarely more than "pile of neat songs.