In Wim Wenders 1984 film Paris, Texas, Harry Dean Stanton wanders around the West Texas desert, disheveled and bewildered. He collapses in a convenience store and via his wallet he is identified as Travis Henderson. Travis' brother in Los Angeles is contacted and he comes and picks him up. He had not heard from Travis for four years and believed him to be dead. Gradually, the story unfolds. Travis is re- united with his son and then goes to Houston to look for Jane, Hunter's mother and Travis' ex (Nastassja Kinsky), who it turns out is working in a peep show club.
Paris, Texas is a very visual film. Harry Dean Stanton's face and baseball cap. The desert. Nastassja's blonde hair and bright pink jumper. The sunsets over L.A. Billboards and shop fronts. But it's also very much defined by its soundtrack, Ry Cooder's music, the Tex- Mex songs, the dialogue included in the soundtrack including the famous eight minute long 'I knew these people...' speech (and the point at which after Travis has talked to Jane on the phone at the peep show club for several minutes, Jane sighs, 'yep, I know that feeling', sampled by Andrew Weatherall on Screamadelica as the endnote of I''m Coming Down. I knew these people... was also sampled by The Orb and others).
As an album Ry Cooder's songs and score work on their own. Listening to it makes one want to watch the film again of course- never a bad thing. Ry Cooder's playing- slide guitar, Tex Mex blues, finger picking, reverb- is perfect, evoking Travis and Jane's loss and melancholy, and the vast emptiness of the desert. Wenders placed ambient microphones to pick up the sound of the desert and the wind. Cooder discovered the desert wind is in E- flat so he tuned all the instruments to that note, Cooder's guitar pitched to the key of the wind.
Cancion Mixteca is a Mexican folk song, written by Jose Lopez Alvarez between 1912 and 1915. It has become the song for many Mexicans who have left their homeland, a song of homesickness. In the film and on the soundtrack Harry Dean Stanton sings it, with Cooder on guitar and piano.
Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts,
and, to see myself, as lone and dismal as leaf on the wind,
I would that I'd weep ‒ I would that I'd die ‒ out of sorrow!
O land of sunshine! I sigh for‐to see you.
Now that, far from you, I live without light ‒ without love.
And, to see myself, as lone and dismal as leaf on the wind,
I would that I'd weep ‒ I would that I'd die ‒ out of sorrow!'
And here's the monologue. It's not a Paris, Texas post without it.