While these days James Horner is no stranger to sentimental films requiring very noble and worthy music, in 1989 he was far less experienced at doing them and so perhaps shouldn't be as surprising as it is that Horner's score for Dad, in which Ted Danson cares for his dying father, played by Jack Lemmon, sounds an awful lot fresher and more exciting than Horner's music for similar films in the last couple of years, which now tend to be slightly over-stated and almost make too much effort.

For one thing, Dad contains a killer theme (if you pardon the pun) performed sometimes on piano (by Ralph Grierson) and sometimes by Horner's full orchestra. It gets a hideously cheesy pop arrangement in the seventh cue that is worth skipping at all costs. The only other real idea in the score is a piece of sprightly bluegrass in "Mopping the Floor", which may lead you to suspect that the score is not substantial enough to warrant attention, but that isn't the case. For one thing, the album is a shade under 40 minutes long - an ideal length for material like this.

It's interesting to think how much Horner has changed. In Dad, he composed a number of interesting variations on his main theme and put out an album running 39:06; writing for a similar film today, I'm sure he would just repeat his theme ad nauseum and put out a 79:59 album. Dad is one of the most difficult-to-find of all of Horner's scores, but his fans would be well-advised to remortgage their house or sell their grandmother or something to raise funds to buy it on Ebay because it's a delightful score. (A word about the shoddy packaging: don't be put off by the "Music Composed, Produced and Performed by James Horner" credit - the only performing he does is with his conductor's baton - there's very little synthesised material.)