Songs in the Key of X
Encyclopedia
Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by The X-Files is a 1996 compilation album released in association with the American science fiction
Science fiction on television
Science fiction first appeared on a television program during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Special effects and other production techniques allow creators to present a living visual image of an imaginary world not limited by the constraints of reality; this makes television an excellent medium...

 television series The X-Files
The X-Files
The X-Files is an American science fiction television series and a part of The X-Files franchise, created by screenwriter Chris Carter. The program originally aired from to . The show was a hit for the Fox network, and its characters and slogans became popular culture touchstones in the 1990s...

. The album contained a mixture of songs that were either featured in the series, or shared thematic elements with it. Songs in the Key of X received generally positive reviews, and peaked at No. 47 on the Billboard 200
Billboard 200
The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists...

 album sales chart.

Production

When plans for the album were initially proposed, executives at both Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Broadcasting Company, commonly referred to as Fox Network or simply Fox , is an American commercial broadcasting television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Launched on October 9, 1986, Fox was the highest-rated broadcast network in the...

—the network responsible for the series—and Warner Bros. Records
Warner Bros. Records
Warner Bros. Records Inc. is an American record label. It was the foundation label of the present-day Warner Music Group, and now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of that corporation. It maintains a close relationship with its former parent, Warner Bros. Pictures, although the two companies...

 began compiling a list of possible inclusions, most of which were eventually rejected. Artists such as Tom Petty
Tom Petty
Thomas Earl "Tom" Petty is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He is the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and was a founding member of the late 1980s supergroup Traveling Wilburys and Mudcrutch. He has also performed under the pseudonyms of Charlie T...

, Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen , nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter who records and tours with the E Street Band...

 and Seal
Seal (musician)
Seal Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel , known simply as Seal, is a British soul and R&B singer-songwriter, of Nigerian and Brazilian background. Seal has won numerous music awards throughout his career, including three Brit Awards—winning Best British Male in 1992, four Grammy Awards, and an...

 were approached to possibly contribute material; and although all three were admitted fans of the series, none were able to get involved in the project.

Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello , born Declan Patrick MacManus, is an English singer-songwriter. He came to prominence as an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s and later became associated with the punk/New Wave genre. Steeped in word play, the vocabulary of Costello's lyrics is broader...

 and Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...

's track, "My Dark Life", came about as a result of one record executive asking Costello to provide a song that would sound like "'you went into the studio with Brian Eno or something"—the two musicians had recently met at a film screening, and reconvened to record the song the following week. Rob Zombie
Rob Zombie
Rob Zombie is an American musician, film director, screenwriter and film producer. He founded the heavy metal band White Zombie and has been nominated three times as a solo artist for the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance.Zombie has also established a career as a film director, creating the...

 has described his collaboration with Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans more than four decades...

 on the song "Hands of Death (Burn Baby Burn)
Hands of Death (Burn Baby Burn)
"Hands of Death " is a song created and sung by Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper which can be found on the Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by The X-Files compilation album for music featured in or inspired by the popular TV series The X-Files.The song is also featured on Rob Zombie's...

" as one of the "great moments where you really feel like you've made your dreams come true". Zombie and Cooper were nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance
Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance
The Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance was an award presented at the Grammy Awards to recording artists for works containing quality performances in the heavy metal music genre...

 in 1997 for the song, losing out to Rage Against the Machine
Rage Against the Machine
Rage Against the Machine is an American rock band from Los Angeles, California. Formed in 1991, the group's line-up consists of vocalist Zack de la Rocha, bassist and backing vocalist Tim Commerford, guitarist Tom Morello and drummer Brad Wilk...

's "Tire Me
Tire Me
"Tire Me" is the sixth song from the album Evil Empire by Rage Against the Machine. Although "Tire Me" never had a music video, was never released on any media formats, and had no radio airplay, the song won the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance....

".

Track listing

Producers used the Compact Disc's pregap
Pregap
The pregap on a Red Book audio CD is the portion of the audio track that precedes "index 01" for a given track in the table of contents . The pregap is typically two seconds long and usually, but not always, contains silence...

, so a listener would have to actually manually rewind the first track a full nine minutes to hear the 2 hidden tracks. This is hinted at in the CD booklet - "Nick Cave and the Dirty Three would like you to know that "0" is also a number." Not all CD or DVD players will allow you to "rewind" back to these tracks as this violates Red Book standards
Red Book (audio CD standard)
Red Book is the standard for audio CDs . It is named after one of the Rainbow Books, a series of books that contain the technical specifications for all CD and CD-ROM formats.The first edition of the Red Book was released in 1980 by Philips and Sony; it was adopted by the Digital Audio Disc...

.

Release

Songs in the Key of X was released on March 26, 1996. It would eventually reach a peak chart position of 47 in the Billboard 200
Billboard 200
The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists...

 album chart on April 13 that same year, spending a total of ten weeks in the chart. The album also spent five weeks in the Swedish Sverigetopplistan
Sverigetopplistan
Sverigetopplistan, earlier known as Topplistan and Hitlistan and other names, is since October 2007 the Swedish national record chart, based on sales data from Swedish Recording Industry Association ....

 charts, peaking at number 42, and six weeks in the Finland's Official List chart, reaching a peak at number 24.

Reception

Reviews for Songs in the Key of X were generally positive. Upon the album's release, Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...

s David Browne rated it a B, calling it "easily the most ambitious record ever assembled for a TV soundtrack". Browne felt that the contributions to the album by Sheryl Crow and William S. Burroughs were amongst its highlights, though felt that the compilation was "dragged down by ponderous contributions" from Nick Cave and Elvis Costello. Allmusic's Steven McDonald was mostly positive towards the album, rating it three stars out of five and stating that "while not perfect, the album makes a nice alternative compilation", noting that it shares the television series' "blue-light glow of twisted mystery". McDonald felt that the Foo Fighters cover of Gary Numan's "Down in the Park" and Elvis Costello's "My Dark Life", along with Mark Snow's theme for the series, were the highlights of the compilation. Sandy Masuo, writing for the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

, rated the album three-and-a-half stars out of four, finding that the compilation's "unsettling ambience" suited the "deliciously creepy" atmosphere of the series. Masuo felt that the collaborations between R.E.M.
R.E.M.
R.E.M. was an American rock band formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1980 by singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry. One of the first popular alternative rock bands, R.E.M. gained early attention due to Buck's ringing, arpeggiated guitar style and Stipe's...

 and William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

, and Elvis Costello and Brian Eno, ultimately turned out to be "more interesting in theory than in practice"; although adding that "Down in the Park" was the best track present on the compilation, with the contributions of Rob Zombie, Alice Cooper and P.M. Dawn also noted as highlights.
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