I Don't Know How She Does It

Album Review

Composer Aaron Zigman's résumé is filled with the scores for romantic and romantic-comedy films like The Notebook, The Proposal, Sex and the City, and The Ugly Truth, so he seems like the logical choice for I Don't Know How She Does It, which traces the struggle of a modern woman to balance marriage and mothering with a demanding white-collar professional career. Zigman's special task in this case seems to have been to weave his background score in among the many pop tunes the soundtrack also contains. (Performed by the likes of Nat King Cole, Teena Marie, and Bill Withers, they are available on a separately released various-artists album.) Not surprisingly, then, many of the 28 cues heard on this score CD sound like soft rock songs without lyrics. Acoustic guitar and piano play catchy tunes, augmented with stringlike sounds. At times, the themes are pensive and low-key, suggesting sad moments in the story, and once, on "Shoogie," Zigman brings in a horn chart and a vocalist for a light funk workout. Much of the time, however, the tracks just sound like candidates for adult contemporary airplay, if they were only developed a little more and had lyrics added. The minute and a half of the "Main Title," for example, combines a fingerpicked acoustic guitar pattern with piano counterpoint, and it seems that at any second Gordon Lightfoot might come in singing something romantic. That never happens, but it's easy to suppose that these themes dovetail nicely with the actual pop/rock songs also heard during the film.