When Garden State debuted in 2004, it felt like it was a movie made for me — a hopeless romantic millennial teen girl from New Jersey grappling with loneliness who had a fascination with pop culture and a burgeoning interest in music discovery thanks to my dad’s Sirius (not XM quite yet) account. The movie, which follows actor/waiter Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) as he returns home to New Jersey where he unpacks a lifetime of trauma after his mother dies and decides to go off of his antidepressants, felt like a love letter to my home state (and Braff’s).
I was charmed by Andrew’s love interest, manic pixie dream girl Sam (Natalie Portman), and drawn to Andrew’s journey from emotional paralysis back to life. At the time, it felt deep — screaming into an infinite abyss deep. (Keep in mind, I was 15 at the time.) But what I quickly realized was that while I enjoyed the film, it was the indie pastiche score that was so affecting — the needle drops that made my emotions swell, like when Andrew goes on a shortlived nighttime motorcycle cruise to the prog-rock-meets-pop song “Caring Is Creepy” or shouts into a Newark quarry alongside Sam and best friend Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) to Simon & Garfunkel’s melancholy folk number “The Only Living Boy In New York.”
Regarding the Shins’ “New Slang,” Sam infamously told Andrew, “You gotta hear this one song, it’ll change your life.” That sentiment applies times 13 (14 if you count Alexi Murdoch’s “Orange Sky” which wasn’t featured on the soundtrack because The O.C. had featured it.) Two decades since the release of Garden State, the film’s 52-minute soundtrack — which came out 20 years ago this Saturday — has lived on as an indie-rock phenomenon, part of a cultural tidal wave that ushered underground music into the mainstream. And for a brooding teen girl like me, the Garden State soundtrack became a gateway drug for my love of indie rock.
Curated by Braff himself, the soundtrack followed a bevy of influential soundtracks like High Fidelity, Almost Famous, The Virgin Suicides, and 8 Mile. But the Garden State soundtrack felt like it was engineered specifically for the WB teen soap generation (complimentary) amid the rising cultural dominance of hipsters and Pitchfork reviews. Because of a limited budget, the writer/director/producer/star ended up crafting a glorified mixtape of songs that were scoring his own life. There was a sweetness — a quirkiness — that made it endearing, and aptly mirrored the emotional arcs of his on-screen alter ego.
Zero 7’s spacey, psychedelic “In The Waiting Line,” flanked by Sophie Barker’s sensual vocals, evokes Andrew’s ecstasy-fueled despondence during a hometown party. Remy Zero’s sweeping ballad “Fair” will forever be inextricably linked with Sam, at peak manic pixie dream girl, tap dancing in front of Andrew after he reveals the crushing lifetime of guilt he’s harbored since his mother’s accident when he was a child. And Frou Frou’s lush synth-pop classic “Let Go,” which scores Andrew and Sam’s grand finale kiss as he decides to stick around New Jersey, turns making out in the Newark airport baggage claim into an unfathomable romantic grand gesture.
Besides elevating the onscreen material, the soundtrack gave the public an entry-level concept of “indie rock” to latch onto, one that bridged the gap between music blogs and the Starbucks rack. The album was a phenomenon, eventually going platinum and taking home a 2005 Grammy award for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album. It even became the subject of a Saturday Night Live sketch when Braff hosted the show. In the sketch, the album was jokingly dismissed as a “Pitchfork mix CD,” which spoke to how prominent indie music and its surrounding culture were becoming, even if the tracklist’s softer, more easy listening version of indie wasn’t that closely aligned with what Pitchfork was hyping up at the time. (It did earn a solid 7.0 review.)
The soundtrack became a breakout vehicle for many of its artists. Frou Frou may have disbanded the same year Garden State was released, but it proved to be a launching pad for vocalist Imogen Heap, who would release her renowned solo album Speak For Yourself the following year. This led to another example of Garden State/O.C. crossover when “Hide And Seek” played in the show’s second season finale as Marissa shot Trey, a scene that still haunts millennials (and made for another memorable SNL moment). The Shins exploded in popularity — and found themselves finally making money — as Garden State fans discovered their 2001 debut album Oh, Inverted World and 2003’s Chutes Too Narrow. If fans didn’t already know Iron & Wine, they most certainly did after hearing their cover of the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights.” (Likely, they ended up Postal Service fans, too.) Of course, names like Simon & Garfunkel and Coldplay needed no introduction. But for younger listeners, Braff provided a less conventional entry point into their discographies than “The Sound Of Silence” or “Yellow.”
Following the success of Garden State, Braff notably tried to recreate the magic of the film with soundtracks for 2006’s The Last Kiss and 2014’s Wish I Was Here. The compilation for The Last Kiss featured songs like Imogen Heap’s “Hide And Seek,” Schuyler Fisk and Joshua Radin’s “Paperweight” and Fiona Apple’s “Paper Bag.” While he included the same type of eclectic mix of semi-obscure and classic artists as he did on Garden State, they weren’t quite as memorable. But if Braff’s attempts to repeat Garden State fell flat, the original’s legacy has been lasting. And at a time when we’re experiencing the golden age of the soundtrack — between Barbie, I Saw The TV Glow, Daisy Jones & The Six, and The Idea Of You — it’s impossible not to see how Garden State lives on as one of the blueprints.
