Twenty years ago, the music industry was wholly unprepared for the Garden State soundtrack and its “life-changing” songs by the Shins, Coldplay, and Iron and Wine. The 2004 movie, which actor Zach Braff wrote, directed, and starred in, was a coming-of-age cringe comedy about grief, following Braff’s character, Andrew Largeman, as he returns to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral and struggles to feel anything but numb. Then Natalie Portman’s quirky character, Sam, arrives to break out of his funk.
In one scene, she places headphones on him and says, “You gotta hear this one song. It’ll change your life, I swear.” The tune was the Shins’ dreamlike 2001 moodpiece “New Slang,” and judging from sales of the Grammy-winning soundtrack, later certified platinum, it changed at least a million lives.
“Back in this era, the Virgin Megastore was around the corner from a movie theater in [New York City’s] Union Square,” Braff recalls in a phone interview. “And so many people were going directly from the movie theater to the Virgin Megastore to buy the soundtrack that Virgin had to put a sign in the CD slot that said, ‘We are out of the Garden State soundtrack. Please stop asking.’ The thing just caught fire.”
The Shins’ frontman, James Mercer, credits the soundtrack with transforming his career. “We have a lot of young people in our audience still, and I think it’s probably because of Garden State,” he tells Rolling Stone.
So does Sam Beam, who performs as Iron and Wine: “Literally the size of our shows doubled overnight because this movie soundtrack caught on,” Beam says. His folky interpretation of the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” played during a romantic scene in the movie. “We went from playing little shoebox-sized places to rooms twice the size.”
This spring, Braff, now 49, and many of the musicians featured on the soundtrack will celebrate the soundtrack and movie’s legacy at a benefit concert. The Shins, Iron and Wine, Frou Frou, Colin Hay, and many others have all agreed to perform at the Garden State 20th Anniversary Concert, which will take place at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre on March 29. The event, which will feature renditions of every song on the album, will raise money for the Midnight Mission, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit that helps provide food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities to the city’s homeless population. Tickets go on sale at 9 a.m. PT on Friday via Ticketmaster.
The idea for the concert relates to charitable work Braff was doing during the Covid lockdown, when he and his friends spent their weekends packing bagged lunches for the Midnight Mission. “We got really good at this assembly line, and we made between 100 and 200 lunches every Saturday,” he says. “It made us feel like we were doing something at a time when we all felt like there was nothing we could do.” One of Braff’s best friends — singer-songwriter Cary Brothers, who helped Braff find the bands for Garden State’s soundtrack and whose melancholy, indie-folk ballad “Blue Eyes” features on the album — would drive the meals down to Skid Row every weekend so they could be distributed.
About six months ago, Brothers suggested celebrating the movie with an anniversary concert. Braff’s first reaction was, “That sounds really hard.” But then the actor realized the concert could raise money for the Midnight Mission.
Brothers connected him with a friend, Laura Glass, who has organized similar charity events for Will Ferrell. She agreed to help out but told them that between navigating artists’ touring schedules and finding an open Saturday at the Greek, they wouldn’t be able to put the event together until 2025. Braff was still interested. “I just sat back and let Laura and Cary take the reins,” Braff says. “I was like, ‘They’re never going to be able to do this.’ And they miraculously pulled it off, and it’s thrilling.”
“Opportunities like this are incredibly rare,” says Glass, founder of Cocolittle Media and the concert’s executive producer. “I’m truly honored to produce a show that not only celebrates the profound impact of this once-in-a-generation soundtrack but also supports families facing homelessness.”
THE ‘GARDEN STATE’ SOUNDTRACK began as a mix CD of Braff’s favorite tunes, circa 2004: a Shins song he discovered thanks to a music supervisor on Scrubs, the sitcom he starred on at the time; a moving ballad by Men at Work frontman Colin Hay, who had been performing solo in L.A.; and a Frou Frou song whose lyric “There’s beauty in the breakdown” reflected the movie’s theme of catharsis. He also included songs by Coldplay, Simon and Garfunkel, Bonnie Somerville, and Nick Drake for good measure.
“Other than the songs by Colin Hay, Cary Brothers, and Bonnie Somerville, I don’t think I’ve ever heard these songs live, so that will be thrilling,” Braff says. “I didn’t know any of the other artists personally when I made the movie.”
Braff’s friends turned him onto a lot of the songs he used. Even though he says he’s a big Simon and Garfunkel fan, it took a friend to introduce him to “The Only Living Boy in New York” — the duo’s 1970 album track, which soundtracks the pivotal scene toward the end of the movie when his character screams in the rain alongside Portman and Peter Sarsgaard. “When I heard it, I was like, ‘I don’t know where this goes, but this has to be in the movie,’” he recalls. “And everyone’s like, ‘You’re never going to get a Simon and Garfunkel song in this tiny indie,’ and we managed to do it.”
Since Garden State was Braff’s first foray into filmmaking, he wasn’t working with a big budget, so he had to persuade artists like Simon and Garfunkel and even indie artists to allow him to use their songs. “We would show them how their song was being used in the movie, and be like, ‘Hey, there’ll be backend [royalties] for this, but we don’t really have a ton up front,’” he recalls. “Most of the times that you say that, it doesn’t pay out, because it’s very rare that soundtracks hit like this one did. But this one went platinum and won the Grammy. So it actually was meaningful to a lot of these bands. And most importantly, it gave them exposure.”
“It gave me enough of a career boost that I was able to bring attention to my whole group of singer-songwriter friends at the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood,” Brothers says. “The soundtrack didn’t just help the artists it featured; it helped a whole genre and generation of musicians.”
“I think Zach was really in tune with using music as a tone-setter,” says Beam, mentioning the scene of romantic vulnerability where his song is featured. “I thought it was cool. It was a really intimate moment and … not like I’m bragging, but it’s a very intimate-sounding song. It works in that kind of a moment.”
Even Paul Simon started performing “The Only Living Boy in New York” live for the first time after Garden State. Unfortunately, the artist — who has performed sparingly since concluding a farewell tour in 2018 — won’t be at the benefit concert. “Paul Simon isn’t performing live right now, so part of the time that we have between now and the actual event is to get somebody really fun and exciting to cover his song,” Braff says. “And the other song like that is Nick Drake’s ‘One of These Things First.’ He’s obviously not alive, so our goal is to get a really exciting, fun artist to cover that song, as well.”
The band that benefitted most from the movie and its soundtrack was undeniably the Shins, the Albuquerque-based indie rockers that had released two indie albums when the film came out. “It was one of the first-ever licensing opportunities we ever had,” Mercer says. “We were all dirt poor. We knew that he was going to make an independent film, and he really liked the songs, so we were just immediately like, ‘Yes. Totally. Just do it.’ It’s like a free music video, basically.”
When the offer came in, Mercer had no idea that Portman would name-check the Shins onscreen or call “New Slang” a life-changing song. He found all that out later when his friends called him up, astounded, asking him if he’d seen it yet. “I went to see the movie with my now-wife, and I remember just kind of shrinking in my seat, like, ‘Oh, my God,’ because it’s very conspicuous promotion of the band,” he says. “It was really, really cool.”
At the time, the Shins had just finished a small tour. After the movie came out, they received offers to play college campuses. “We started getting paid really well,” he says, “and it was all because the kids had seen the movie, and they’re like, ‘What is this band? We got we gotta check them out.’ It was a big change. I highly recommend Natalie Portman doing a commercial for you to any band.”
For Braff, the song to feature in that scene was an easy choice. “The trick with that scene was to find a song that universally made people smile,” he says. “I love that song, and every time I played it for people, they loved the song.”
The way Braff highlighted the band’s “New Slang” in the movie became an early internet meme, and he even got in on the joke himself in an SNL skit. Mercer says he had unfounded worries at the time that the Shins were in danger of “jumping the shark,” since sudden popularity was at odds with his “indie-rock work ethic,” but he’s happy with how it all worked out. The band went from nightclubs to theaters, thanks to the movie, and continue to play theaters today, making what he calls “a proper living.”
Braff believes the soundtrack’s success lies in the way the movie and the music played off each other. “People had a reaction to the film that was really positive, and people wanted to relive that experience through the album,” Braff says. “And that doesn’t really happen anymore. People just buy songs, and they don’t usually buy full soundtrack albums anymore.”
Incidentally, the Garden State soundtrack isn’t available to stream in full on Spotify, where it’s missing Hay’s song, or on Apple Music, where it’s available only as a user-generated playlist. “I’m not sure why that is,” Braff says. “That might have happened because of some language in the contracts. But everyone should buy Colin Hay’s albums, because they’re incredible.”
WHEN BRAFF RECENTLY rewatched Garden State at an outdoor screening in Los Angeles, he had a full-circle moment. He was seated next to his mom, who had gone with him to the movie’s Sundance premiere, and it returned him to the feeling he had about himself 20 years ago. “When I watch it now, I see myself,” he says. “I see someone who’s really terrified of all that’s in front of him. I see someone who’s suffering. And the movie isn’t about how this guy all of a sudden over the course of a few days has this enormous change. It is about how he starts to see a bit more hope and optimism in his life through meeting this person [Portman’s character, Sam] who is so unique, interesting, and exciting that she sort of saves him from himself.”
Mercer, too, recently rewatched the film with his wife and kids. He was struck by the way the film depicted post-college malaise and melancholy and the awkwardness of meeting new people. He was also grateful to see the Shins’ scene again — or at least for his kids to see it. “It definitely made me appear to be cooler than your average dad to them for, you know, a week,” he says, laughing. “It was good.”
Braff is looking forward to bringing his family and friends to the event next spring with the hope of giving them a special night. “We’re planning all sorts of surprises for the audiences, some behind-the-scenes clips, clips from the movie, and a bunch of surprises that we need around six months to pull off,” he says. He also hopes that some of his co-stars in the movie are available to make appearances at the benefit concert. “It’s a little hard to nail anyone down six months out,” he says. “But they all know about it and they’re all super supportive, and I’m hoping that their schedules will allow for them to be here.”
Similarly, because of the musicians’ touring commitments, Braff says the concert will be only one night in Los Angeles, as opposed to, say, organizing another Garden State concert in New Jersey to tie it in with the movie’s setting. “I live in L.A., and anyone who lives in L.A. sees the crisis that we have on our streets with people that are suffering,” he says. “I think I just wanted to act locally and give the money locally. It came down to me wanting to give back to my community where I currently live.”
In addition to helping out the charity, the artists performing at the event are excited to celebrate what the soundtrack meant for their careers. “Whenever Zach asks me for anything, I just do it,” Mercer says. “‘Of course. I owe you, dude.’ Have other movies ever done that? Maybe some of those John Hughes movies from the Eighties. [Garden State] was pretty important.”
Brothers says he has two goals as a producer for the show. “I want to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience as a thank you to all the fans that made this soundtrack such a success, and I want to raise as much money as possible for the Midnight Mission, a charity that I adore,” he says says. “As a performer on the show, it feels like the reunion of a winning team who have never been in a room together. The scene backstage is going to be as special as what happens on the stage.”
“I think it’s going to be a lot of fun,” Beam adds.
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