The Music

Set in contemporary Detroit, Ovid and the Art of Love honors the musical culture of the Motor City with a soundtrack that captures the city’s extraordinary music from the Motown era to the present.

To give the film a recognizable but fresh sound, the production sought classic soul music from record labels like Armen Boladain’s Westbound Records and Ronnie McNeir’s Setting Sun Records that operated in Detroit and Michigan independently of the Motown company. From this search came songs of brilliant lesser-known artists – the Dennis Coffey Band, Bill Moss and the Celestials, Caesar Frazier, and Marc LaRoi Cummings – who are featured in the movie. Ovid and the Art of Love also presents modern Detroit sounds: hip-hop songs from Danny Brown and DJ Body Mechanic, Detroit electronica from Luke Hess and Ben Christensen, and an acoustic song from the spoken-word poets of the Detroit Poetry Society, Intellect Allison and ROCKET(!!!)MAN. We are also delighted that the Grammy Award-winning operatic tenor George Shirley, a Detroit native and 2015 recipient of the National Medal of the Arts from Barack Obama, lent his legendary voice to this film with his interpretations of arias by Puccini and Gounod.

Since the story is universal, the film also features original songs by contemporary artists from other cities, including Neighbor’s Pool by the Brooklyn-based duo Desire Path, with J. David Nugent and Patrick F. Albertson; and Sad Harp Hip Hop by the Berlin artist BerlinoneDiamondBeatz.

Altogether, this music forms a unique soundtrack that provides an unusual sampling of the sounds of Detroit as well as other modern cities.