The ’90s movie soundtrack that still makes millennial hearts flutter

By Sheena McKenzie, CNN

(CNN) — Backlit by an orange sky, Romeo appears. He smokes on a derelict outdoor stage; the only curtains here the blonde hair framing his face. The moody keyboard of Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” swells, a 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio comes into focus, and a million teenage crushes are launched.

The year is 1996 and director Baz Luhrmann has reimagined William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” for the MTV-era. Fair Verona is now a Venice Beach-style metropolis, the rivaling families tote guns rather than swords, and Romeo pops an ecstasy pill before going to the party where he falls for Juliet, played by a 17-year-old Claire Danes.

But it is the soundtrack – an eclectic mix of songs spanning Des’ree’s ballad “Kissing You,” The Cardigans’ sugary hit “Love Fool” and Garbage’s sexy trip hop tune “#1 Crush” – that captured both the film’s kaleidoscopic energy and shape-shifting ‘90s music landscape.

On its 30th anniversary year – and with ‘90s nostalgia at full tilt – the compilation is also a snapshot of a unique cohesion between film and record companies. A time when albums were a key part of the movie experience that continued on peoples’ CD players long after they’d left the cinema.

For teens during the decade, soundtrack albums were must-have merchandise, PARENTAL ADVISORY labels be damned. The same year as “Romeo + Juliet,” “Trainspotting” came out and Iggy Pop’s thumping “Lust for Life” set the pace for another CD that was both achingly cool and a massive commercial success. This was the era of “Dangerous Minds” (1995), “Good Will Hunting” (1997), “Cruel Intentions” (1999), and many more great albums that those of a certain age remember as clearly as the movies themselves.

A golden era

What was driving all these compilations? CDs were relatively cheap to make, with big profit margins (remember paying $15 for a new release?), and record companies were selling a ton of them. The 1990s marked the biggest boom in record industry history. “Record companies could afford to pay six and sometimes seven figure sums for the soundtrack rights for the film,” said Marius de Vries, co-music producer on “Romeo + Juliet” for which he and fellow music producers Craig Armstrong and Nellee Hooper won a BAFTA.

The “Romeo + Juliet” album itself peaked at No.2 on the Billboard 200 charts and went multi-platinum in several countries. Meanwhile, as de Vries points out, films in the ’90s were “regularly spawning enormous hit singles.” Think Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” (“The Bodyguard,” 1992) or Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” (“Titanic,” 1997).

With big money came longer production times of sometimes a year or more, in high-end studios. For the pivotal moment Romeo meets Juliet, Armstrong used a 60-person-strong string orchestra, something he said would be unusual today. Likewise, de Vries had a classical choir in the studio for the film’s soulful renditions of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and Rozalla’s “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)” – both sung by baby-faced choir boy Quindon Tarver.

Luhrmann wanted commercial music to form the “spine” of the film, recalled acclaimed Grammy-winning composers Armstrong and de Vries, with these songs bleeding into the score. Radiohead’s specially-commissioned “Exit Music (for a Film),” for instance, plays soon after the star-crossed lovers perish. Its ghostly lyrics begin: “wake from your sleep.” Luhrmann “uses Radiohead the same way that you’d use a piece of Mozart… he has no class barriers where music is concerned,” said Armstrong. “Whether it’s contemporary, classical, garage, electronic, he treats it all with the same reverence.”

Representing youth culture

So how did certain songs make the cut? The curation was largely down to elusive multi-Grammy-winning producer and songwriter Hooper. Friend and musician Justin Warfield recalled Hooper’s epic house parties in London, where the producer regularly played dance tracks that ended up in “Romeo + Juliet.” Hooper was “testing the music as a DJ would in a nightclub,” said Warfield, “but trying it on an audience of friends before he put it in the final cut of the film.”

One night Hooper showed him a rough cut of the film’s gas station shootout scene between the Montague and Capulet boys, with the idea Warfield’s band at the time, One Inch Punch, would do the accompanying music. Warfield was electrified by what he was seeing: “I can’t believe the guns they’re using, the wardrobe, the language, the modernization of Elizabethan in an almost street language.” Absolutely, he would do the music. But first, Hooper had a question: “Baz (Luhrmann) really wants to know if you can rap in Shakesperean.” Warfield duly researched the prose and rapped one of the scene’s tracks: “Pretty Piece of Flesh.”

Portals of discovery

Part of the magic of the ‘90s was the commissioning of new music just for soundtracks, said Yasi Salek, host of the podcast, “Bandsplain.” “You got these really special songs that would only ever exist on this one CD at that time. So you were, of course, going to run to the store and buy it.” The compilation CD was “like a portal that opened up worlds to you,” she added.

At the same time, great indie films were being made, and underground music was now the mainstream. As Salek notes, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” reached No.1 on the Billboard charts in 1992. And “this brief, intersection moment,” is “why, for me, soundtracks from these ‘90s movies are just top tier, gold standard.”

In the next decade, the rise of online streaming and death of CDs marked the end of the film soundtrack as we knew it. And while the current wave of ‘90s nostalgia is partly cyclical, it also taps into a longing for a “much more unified mass culture,” said Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast, “60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s.” In the fragmented internet age, “you don’t have that same feeling of unity, where everybody is listening to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or ‘You Outta Know’ at the exact same time.”

These days you’re more likely to see “songs that are included within a film or TV show that are a ‘moment,’” said Salek. She pointed to Katy Perry’s “Firework” in the film “Eddington” (2025), or the way Emma Stone’s character in “Bugonia” (2025) sings along to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”

De Vries meanwhile is encouraged to see “a lot of fresh, young, adventurous, experimental film composers coming up,” like Daniel Blumberg who last year won an Oscar for his “extraordinary” score for the “The Brutalist.” De Vries sees a bit of a sea change in “how much musical experimentation is being allowed into filmmaking again, and how much tolerance the right directors have for pushing the envelope.”

But without a doubt, the ‘90s were “a bunch of very golden years,” he said. “At the time, we were just having a lot of fun, and I think possibly that was reflected in the music we were making.”

Video by Max Burnell, CNN.

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