Endnotes.

TORN.net get the full version of Annie Lennox’s “Into the West,” soon to close a splendid fantasy trilogy at a theater near you. Those of you who found the Soundtrack.net excerpt to be a tad shrill will be happy to discover that that 30 seconds was the loudest part of the song. Also, in LotR news, I missed out on the TTT:EE Grand Central extravangaza yesterday, although it may have been just as well given some of the complaints coming in.

A Lament for the Third Age.

Eat your heart out, Glenn Yarbrough. Soundtrack.Net posts their review of the Return of the King score, complete with 30 second clips from each song. For the third time in a row, it sounds like Howard Shore hit it out of the park…I don’t think you can overestimate how much he’s improved these films with his work, particularly after you consider the pedestrian and distracting score of the new Matrix movies. If you’ve never read the trilogy and don’t know how it all ends, I wouldn’t click through. But if you have…some of these snippets are really beautiful and tantalizing (“Hope and Memory” and “Twilight and Shadow,” for example), and none more so than “The End of all Things” and “The Grey Havens.” The Annie Lennox song that closes the film isn’t exactly what I was expecting, to be honest, but I can see it growing on me.

Here Comes the Reign Again.

Although not as much news about Return of the King leaked out from Comiccon as I would have liked, ex-Eurythmics siren Annie Lennox has announced she’s singing on the “title” track (like Enya [“May it Be”] and Emiliana Torrini [“Gollum’s Song”] before her.) Well, I prefer this to the Liv Tyler song rumor that went around a few months back, even if that is a bit unfair (I’ve never heard Tyler sing.) Perhaps they’ll both make the final cut.