The Gael/Promontory – The Last of the Mohicans (and The Maple Leaf Forever)

Note: This blog post was drafted ahead of time and has been released through pre-scheduling.

As threatened promised a week or two ago, welcome to my first post about songs that regularly play for me on Spotify.

First thing – these days, I listen to music a lot less than a lot of people. I don’t usually listen to anything at all while I’m writing, but I will, sometimes, listen to music in between writing sessions – or while doing something very tedious but writing-related, such as during a morning set aside towards the start of a month to send out my stories and poems to publications.
I’ll sometimes remember I have music available to me and use it to entertain while doing other, household chores as well, although usually only after I’ve run out of patience for podcasts and audio dramas (and language lessons.) I only started using Spotify this year, and my playlists there are very much works in progress.

Now, when I last re-watched 1992’s epic historic romance-drama war film The Last of the Mohicans about four years ago, I was not overly impressed. It felt quite long, and it seems to be suffering from some form of recent neglect which makes current available copies quite dark and a bit physically difficult to watch, but, I found, once you got towards the ending, it all became almost worth it. (I give it my standard star rating for “Good, I’ll watch this again… sometime” in my film notes, where I specifically wrote the last minutes lift it up significantly.)
Please note they are also working towards earning themselves an R for violence, if you don’t want to see people get hit with hatchets and things, don’t watch this film. It’s set during the French and Indian Wars. This is the war that led to Britain being the great power in northern North America for awhile, and this included a battle that is commemorated in another song that appears on my Spotify list, the decisive British victory on the plains of Abraham, as noted in Anglo Canada’s old unofficial anthem – The Maple Leaf Forever with its reference to General Wolfe as a conquering hero.) (I usually have an instrumental version play, because it’s less distracting when I’m trying to do something else too, but I thought I’d share the lyrics version with you.)

Getting back to the Mohicans, I think a large part of the reason for The Last of the Mohican‘s cinematic success over the years is due to the score.
If I’ve understood the information from Wikipedia correctly, composer Dougie MacClean (OBE) first released a version of this song in 1990, and then it was re-orchestrated for the instrumental purposes of the film by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman.
This seems to be why you will encounter essentially the same song under two different names. I have yet to decide on my favourite Spotify-available version, but this is the one I have running at the moment.

I found it powerful and memorable enough that I remembered to look it up a couple of years after re-watching the film to add it to my playlist. I have about forty songs on my playlist at the moment, and some of them I skip over regularly, but this one, I very rarely skip. However, this was not the first movie-song that I added to my Spotify playlist. It was a movie-song from a 1980s film which had that dubious honour, and I will reveal what it is in the next song-post. Until then, here are some clues:
Like The Last of the Mohicans this film was also a remake
It also tells an epic-historic story
and it shares a cast member with The Last of the Mohicans but if I tell you who it is, you’ll figure it out.
Have you guessed? .