Little Miss Sunshine - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [20th Anniversary Edition]

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack – Little Miss Sunshine (20th Anniversary Edition / Yellow with White Marble Vinyl)

Some soundtracks just collect songs. This one built a world. When Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris needed music for their 2006 story of a family coming apart inside a yellow VW bus, they handed the job to Denver's DeVotchKa and composer Mychael Danna, and the pairing produced one of the most quietly beloved scores of its decade.

DeVotchKa perform the bulk of the music here, and their instrumentation of tuba, accordion, strings and Nick Urata's high lonesome croon gives the film its bruised, carnival-at-dusk atmosphere. "The Winner Is" has long since outlived the movie that birthed it, resurfacing in trailers and commercials for two decades running. Sufjan Stevens turns up twice with "No Man's Land" and "Chicago," and the record leaves room for a couple of hard swerves, including Tony Tisdale's "Catwalkin'" and a remix of Rick James' "Superfreak" that lands exactly where the film needs it to.

Twenty years on, it holds up as the rare soundtrack that plays start to finish as an actual album rather than a souvenir. The score and the songs share the same warmth and the same slightly cracked optimism, which is precisely why people keep coming back to it.

This 20th Anniversary Edition is pressed on yellow with white marble vinyl in a limited run of 500 copies for Phineas Atwood Productions. A proper anniversary treatment for a record that never stopped circulating.