Soundtracks: Chicken/Egg

There are movies for which, after seeing them, I almost immediately get the soundtrack: Scott Pilgrim,  2001, and Garden State are just a few.  And then there are soundtracks I get before, or without ever, seeing the movie (or musical).  Sometimes it's for a particular song; sometimes the whole album is great.

1. A Life Less Ordinary:  I didn't even know this film existed until I started trying to track down Beck's "Deadweight."  I would get the song stuck in my head, and my usual method for curing that nowadays is to buy it and play it repeatedly until my husband gets sick of it.  That's difficult when the song isn't on any of the artist's albums.  Eventually we tracked it down to this movie's soundtrack, which I ended up buying used; we eventually watched the movie itself a couple years later.
2. Cowboy Bebop:  One summer when we went out to visit my folks, my brother had a disc of Cowboy Bebop songs (Yoko Kanno & the Seatbelts) in his car.  "Cats on Mars" (which you can hear sometimes as music in station breaks on Sirius-XM's Alt Nation channel) was the original hook, and I ended up getting the boxed set for Christmas, along with the DVDs.  It took a while before I got around to watching the series, but the project overall (series and music) is just great.
3. Fame:  My sister gave me this album; I knew a handful of songs off it, but I've never seen the movie.
4. Footloose:  Footloose was one of my mom's house-cleaning albums.  (Yes, albums, as in vinyl.)  The other was Harry, which is a great album in its own right, but not a soundtrack, although some songs from it were later used in movies.  I digress...  I didn't realize Footloose was a movie until much later, and eventually we did get around to watching it.  The album was, of course, a hit in its own right, and as a child of the '80s, I got a lot of exposure to them.
5. Godzilla 2000:  It's possible I've seen all of the movie, but I got the soundtrack based on liking whatever song they were using in the preview... which then wasn't actually on the album.  The parts of the movie I saw later were... meh.  But the album?  This was my first exposure to Rage Against the Machine, Ben Folds, Fuel, the Foo Fighters, and Green Day.  (I mostly listened to pre-90s rock in high school.)  And the Godzilla mix of Green Day's "Brain Stew" is still my favorite version of that song.
6. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat:  I'm not sure where I first heard music from this, but it was in high school, because I remember gushing to the high school librarian about it.  (Everything new to you is obviously new to the world when you're a teenager.)  I think we picked up the vinyl ablum somewhere, and I've got it on CD now.  One day I'll see it!
7. Muppets - The Green Album:  This is a movie I just haven't seen... yet.  We missed it in the theater, but I want to see it.  Sirius-XM's Alt Nation channel was playing the album as a feature for a while when it came out, and I loved OK Go's cover of the Muppet theme.
8. Snakes on a Plane:  They played some of the songs off this album on the XM alt-rock stations.  The movie was practically a cult classic before it was even released (how many scripts get edited to include fan-written dialogue?), but it's horror, even if it's campy horror, so I can't watch it.
9. Strange Days:  I suppose technically I didn't get this album; my husband had it already when I met him.  But I really liked the Deep Forest tracks, so I adopted it into my playlist before ever seeing the movie.  I still haven't watched the whole thing; parts of it were too scary for me.
10. Phantom of the Opera:  One summer my siblings and I went to visit my cousins in Chicago, and the soundtrack for this was one of the things my aunt had in her car.  I don't actually care for the story that much; the main female lead has a creepy stalker and a boyfriend who tries to convince her that the creepy stalker is just her own personal hallucination.  But the music!  I saw it finally after the local theater redid their stage and the Broadway show could come up.