Music composers have often found cities to be inspirational – Elgar and Vaughan Williams focused on London, Mozart wrote a symphony for Prague while Puccini’s opera Tosca is set entirely in Rome.

Popular music in all genres has long been celebrated in song as well – from Will Fyfe’s ‘I Belong To Glasgow to ‘New York New York’ by Frank Sinatra.

But Scottish pianist and composer, Euan Stevenson stayed close to his roots, reflected on the happy times he had growing up and just what his hometown, Falkirk still means to him for an album that has just been released.

‘Sound Tracks’ by Earthtones Trio is a suite of nine, accessible contemporary classical music pieces influenced by the Central Scotland town’s people, places and landmarks plus the area’s rich history and culture.

All of this moved Euan, who was born and raised in Falkirk with family living there for many generations, to create the music for the Earthtones Trio comprising the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Principal flautist, Katherine Bryan and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Principal cellist, Betsy Taylor, with Euan on piano.

While honouring family, community and familiar places, world famous landmarks such as the Roman Antonine Wall and the modern-day iconic structure that is the Falkirk Wheel also inspired the music, which was commissioned by Chamber Music Scotland and Classic Music Live! Falkirk.

“I was honoured to be asked to compose a body of work relating to my hometown,” said Euan, who now lives in Surrey but heads back to see family in Falkirk most months.

“Sound Tracks is like my personal love letter to Falkirk but I think it will speak to many other people as well.

“There’s no doubt that working on the music increased my fondness for the town and made me feel so glad I was brought up there and involved with people who cared about me.

“Growing up there, performing at a young age at the church, going to school and playing tennis, all of it laid my foundations for my career as a musician and composer, and I’m hugely grateful.

Euan – he is also a highly acclaimed jazz musician and has written and released albums with Jazz FM Vocalist and Jazz Act of the Year, singer Georgia Cécile – started working on the project during the summer UK lockdown of 2020. With no concerts to play he was able to concentrate entirely on crafting the new music.

“As lockdown restrictions eased, returning to old stomping grounds of course stirred up childhood memories and emotions and inevitably a sense of nostalgia and melancholy found its way into the music,” said Euan.

The music, which also celebrates the award-winning Falkirk Core Path Network – some 300 miles of interconnecting pathways in the area – was motivated by the stories and imagined feelings of the myriad of people and communities who used the original pathways to travel to and from the region throughout the centuries.

“The album embodies my own feelings in many ways, but it also dares to capture the travellers’ feelings and stories, celebrating the people who have played a role in Falkirk’s fascinating history while shining a light on the present and the future,” said Euan.

Although he said the music wasn’t written to accompany any pre-existing visual elements, all the pieces on the album are cinematic in quality.

“In the manner of a film composer, I wanted to encapsulate in music the feelings and thoughts of a range of characters,” said Euan.

“These included me as the composer, as a young boy/adolescent and subsequently a parent, to Roman Centurions, Dark Age tribes, early 20th Century Italian immigrant families and even an 18th century female aristocratic composer who once lived in Callander House.”

Falkirk’s own multicultural heritage allowed Euan to draw from a diverse mixture of musical styles from across the globe so the album, released on the new Scottish label, iOcco Classical, is a vibrant mix of styles. “There’s a healthy dose of Scottish folk, jazz and western classical music which remain my core influences,” said Euan. “I start by improvising at the piano until a seed of an idea takes hold and then I gradually develop the idea into a finished composition.

“Writing music inspired by my formative years has been a revealing and extremely musically nourishing process.

“I owe gratitude to this community. In writing and recording this music, I hope to give something back to the people who came before me and to those who have helped me, and continue to help me, with my musical journey.”

Sound Tracks is available to stream and download and a limited number of signed CDs are available to purchase. Concerts are planned to promote the album throughout next year www.euanstevenson.com/soundtracks

9 December 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the premiere of the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies.

It’s also the anniversary of David Arnold’s game-changing score and singer k.d. lang’s landmark closing titles anthem Surrender. Both Arnold and lang spoke to Yahoo about creating the score, working with the Bond producers Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson and EON Productions, and what tracks from the film — and 007’s musical registry — still resonate.

“I was starting Godzilla when I got a phone call about Tomorrow Never Dies,” Arnold recalls to Yahoo.

Read more: Lee Tamahori looks back at Die Another Day at 20

The musical mind behind five Bond scores to date, Arnold is one of cinema and TV’s top composers and producers, and it was Pierce Brosnan’s second 007 adventure that saw the rising composing star handed the unique musical baton that was once held by one of his key musical influences: John Barry.

Despite his Bond covers album Shaken and Stirred – The David Arnold James Bond Project making a critically-lauded stamp on the Brit pop charts of 1996, it was not that collection that first beckoned Arnold into Bond’s jukebox web of spin.

“I’d sent some of these tracks [from Shaken and Stirred] to Barbara and Michael at EON — so I wasn’t treading on toes in terms of intellectual property, and because I wanted them to hear them,” he recalls.

“They were making the films and I loved the films — so it was a thank you.”

Read more: 16 actors who could be the next James Bond

With Shaken and Stirred allowing the Bond bosses to ‘hear where my head was it with Bond music’, Arnold says it was his work on Stargate (1995) and Independence Day (1996) ‘that definitely eased things in terms of making a decision’.

And the small detail that Bond music legend John Barry ‘had heard the record and liked it and was very kind about what I was doing.’

When discussing Bond’s producers, Arnold asserts: “the great value of Michael and Barbara as producers and what makes them special and different is that they hire people on the strength of what they do. And they let them do it. They don’t hire people and tell them what do to.”

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Arnold suggests the sibling pair are like “the safety bumpers in a ten-pin bowling alley to stop your ball leaping into a place it shouldn’t be. We are all heading in the same direction and there are lots of ways of getting to the end, but they’ll keep it on track.”

Read more: Every James Bond film ranked

However, such a dream job for Arnold still had its initial terrors. “When I got asked to do it, it was a brief second of elation followed by an absolute panic,” he muses. “All of a sudden, you’re not thinking about doing it, you’re now doing it. I’ve actually now got to do it. And that is mildly terrifying.

“But they did lead me into it very gently and let me score the opening pre-title sequence as a separate standalone just to see how we all got on. It was a lovely thing for them to do.”

One of the striking successes of the Tomorrow Never Dies score is how it represents a perfect Venn diagram of Moby, Alex Gifford, The Propellerheads, Sheryl Crow, lyricists Don Black and David McAlmont, Arnold and, of course, k.d. lang.

It was as much a Brit Pop 1997 moment as Goldfinger’s music by John Barry, Anthony Newley and Shirley Bassey were in 1964. Like Arnold, Bond music resonated with k.d. lang way before Tomorrow Never Dies.

Read more: David Arnold shares his favourite James Bond cues

She remembers how “musically, I loved Nancy Sinatra’s song You Only Live Twice because of the musical theme the strings played in the song. I thought that was indelibly memorable.”

But lang’s top Bond anthem “beyond doubt is Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger — to me that’s the quintessential Bond theme.”

Songs are important to David Arnold. And not just Bond songs. “I do think radio is the greatest,” he declares, “and I think songs are the finest of all art forms.” When it came to score versus song, Arnold suggests he is “such a huge fan of the interpolation of the song into the score and for it to hold hands with a composer… whenever I listen to a John Barry song, I feel the movie and the entirety of it.”

Arnold wanted the same with Tomorrow Never Dies and because his work on the film would come “from a perspective of someone who loves these things and who loves Bond songs and loves the scores, I am going to write a song. I had no idea whether it would get used. It didn’t matter.”

Read more: Bond producers share update on Bond 26

That song was Surrender. Co-written with legendary Bond lyricist Don Black and singer David McAlmont and gifted an exemplary and not easy vocal from k.d. lang, Arnold “wanted people to somehow see the movie in that song.”

Twenty-five years later they still do. “I’d read the script,” he continues “I’d seen some rushes, I’d spoken to Roger Spottiswoode, I’d spoken to Pierce and Barbara and Michael, and I had an idea about where it was heading. I knew we were coming off GoldenEye which re-ignited the franchise. If we were going to kick a door in and say ‘we’re back’ then I wanted the song to do that… And that became the main central thematic core of the score which appears in the opening sequence.”

When it came to casting Constant Craving singer k.d. lang for his vocal, Arnold says it was ‘always her’ without hesitation. “I don’t know anyone else who could have done it, if I’m being honest. It is the velvety way she finds her way in and around the song.

Read more: Mat Whitecross talks The Sound of 007

“Before you know it, you are encased in her vocal. You start off being at the front of it and you finish being inside it.” lang herself remembers how “it was a very challenging song to sing. It really stretched me.”

She continues, “I just thought the outcome was stellar, and I thought it was worthy of the Bond family. I was proud to be a part of it.”

Arnold goes further about his first and crucial Bond song appointment. “She’s got an extraordinary technical ability. And the amount of interpretive and genuine emotional heft that she can deliver in a vocal is very moving. And it was one of the easiest recordings I’ve ever had. She starts singing and you just shut up and record it. It was like two or three takes and that was it. Every single thing was gold.”

A less golden moment was a last-minute decision to move Surrender to the end-credits of Tomorrow Never Dies. Sheryl Crow’s non-Arnold song of the same name ultimately accompanied the opening titles.

Read more: Every James Bond theme song ranked

Competent and playful, the song arguably pales in comparison as it tries to be the film-defining Bond song that Surrender already was. k.d. lang confesses how “it was super disappointing to me because I thought I was doing the opening song.

“I honestly don’t know what happened, and I can certainly theorise, but I’m still very proud to have participated in the Bond theme world.”

Twenty-five years later, I ask David Arnold what are the cues and beats of his Tomorrow Never Dies score he most proud of? Without pause he replies, “I still do really like Surrender. I think it’s great. I tend to like the things I do with other people, because it makes me not think about what I have done so much.

“So, Backseat Driver was good fun. And the Kowloon Bay cue with that melody – which is like an electric guitar – before it goes back into a warm, medicated version of the melody of Surrender with that fretless bass.”

k.d. lang is also proud of her place in the Bond Music Hall of Fame. And she likes the film. “It was a good one! I mean, they’re all good, and everyone has their favourites and time can shed different aspects of your opinion on them. But I definitely loved it, as I do all Bond films, essentially.”

I tell her how the Bond and film music fan world continue to hold Surrender in high regard. “It’s nice to hear that. It’s really nice to hear that people appreciate it,” she adds. “To me, it sounds like a Bond theme and, again, that’s such honourable company to keep.”

Having never really left the Bond music world through various collaborations, anniversary concerts, event advice, documentaries and sidebar composing, Arnold ponders how he “was just thinking the other day about Bond retrospectively and in a world of huge budget, studio movies I’ve had k.d lang, Chris Cornell, Scott Walker, and Garbage all in that fold…

“I am thinking that is a pretty cool bunch of people to have in a Bond movie.”

He concludes, “if you do it honestly and enthusiastically with a real sense of knowing that the film is king and an awareness of its history — but also the possibilities of its future that you can do your best stuff.”

A two-disc, 25th anniversary reissue of the Tomorrow Never Dies score is now available from La-La Land Records.

Many thanks to David Arnold and k.d. lang.

Watch: The five best James Bond movies