The September Sessions: Music From a Film by Jack Johnson Various Artists

The September Sessions: Music From a Film by Jack Johnson Various Artists on 180g LP: Newly Remastered from the 16mm Motion Picture.

The September Sessions original soundtrack from the newly remastered 16mm motion picture. Available on 180g black vinyl.

Two soundtracks by Jack Johnson are getting reissued on vinyl, over 20 years after their release. The soundtracks to the documentaries Thicker Than Water and The September Sessions, both directed by Johnson himself and focused on surfing.

Before he was a singer and songwriter known for laid-back tracks like “Banana Pancakes” and “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing,” Johnson was a kid growing up in Hawaii with a passion for surfing. He was also interested in film, studying it in college. In 1999, Johnson directed his first documentary, Thicker Than Water, which featured a number of professional surfers doing their thing in various exotic locales, including Hawaii, Ireland, Australia, India, and Indonesia. The second, fully titled The September Sessions: The Tomorrowland Story Brought To Life In Brilliant 16mm Film, focused on a group of surfers in Sumatra.

For films, Johnson would score the surfing scenes and enlist other musicians for the soundtracks. “I’d watch the stuff on the screen and I’d just kind of play guitar along to it,” he recalled in an interview with The Dog And Surfer Roads, describing how it was recorded on a four-track cassette in a bedroom. “And the idea was we were going to go into a studio once we finished and record all the songs properly but came to the end and we just never did it. We just ended up using all the four-track versions. So the first movie, Thicker Than Water, is just all little four-track cassette recordings of the guitar and there’s no voice on that one, it’s just all instrumental. The second one has a little singing.”

For the soundtracks themselves, however, Johnson brought the talents of musicians like G. Love & Special Sauce, The Meters, Smoke City, and Finley Quay to the table. The soundtrack for The September Sessions also features Johnson’s cover of “Pirate Looks at 40” by Jimmy Buffet.