Gustavo Santaolalla stands out worldwide as a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and composer whose path unfolded across distinct eras, beginning in Argentina where he established and guided the groundbreaking psychedelic folk-rock outfit Arco Iris during the early and middle years of the 1970s before relocating to Los Angeles. Across this trajectory he captured and shaped recordings spanning folk, punk, tango, and ambient electronica, while also guiding rock en español and Latin alternative performers such as Cafe Tacuba, Julieta Venegas, and Juanes. As a celebrated film composer his contributions encompass the music for Brokeback Mountain, The Motorcycle Diaries, Babel, and August: Osage County, and his original score for the video game The Last of Us earned widespread praise throughout the global gaming community. Solo efforts Ronroco and Camino brought him Grammy nominations, and he serves as co-founder and guiding force behind the electro-tango collective Bajofondo. The score he created for the eight-episode Hulu series Monsterland appeared in 2020.
Born in 1952 in a Buenos Aires suburb, Santaolalla started guitar instruction at age five yet never acquired the ability to read music. In his teenage years he assembled Arco Iris alongside Ara Tokatlián and Guillermo Bordarampé, taking the roles of singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The group merged rock with Latin American folk traditions and issued multiple praised recordings: Arco Iris (1969), Tiempo de Resurrección (1972), Sudamérica o el Regreso a la Aurora (also 1972), Inti Raymi (1973), and Agitor Lucens V (1975), the final release featuring his participation.
He subsequently assembled Soluna, whose members included Alejandro Lerner and Mónica Campins. That ensemble put out a single album, Energía Natural (1977), and performed occasional concerts before Santaolalla chose to depart Argentina for Los Angeles in 1978. His departure came amid the lethal dictatorship of military general Jorge Rafael Videla, who “disappeared” some 30,000 citizens.
Arriving in Los Angeles without acquaintances or recognition, Santaolalla rebuilt his career from the ground up. Drawn to the emerging punk and new wave movements, he launched Wet Picnic with fellow Argentine expatriate Aníbal Kerpel. The band performed frequently and ultimately issued the EP Balls Up (1982). Their partnership in Wet Picnic forged a lasting professional bond that continued well into the twenty-first century.
Santaolalla simultaneously embarked on production work. His initial U.S. production credit involved overseeing three tracks for Argentine folk icon León Gieco featured on 1981’s Pensar en Nada, and the two collaborated repeatedly thereafter. That same year he created the soundtrack for director Robert Dornhelm’s film She Dances Alone and produced and performed on Better Luck, the second album by the garage band the Plugz fronted by Tito Larriva, several of whose songs later appeared on the Repo Man soundtrack. He retained broad popularity and industry backing in Argentina, where in 1982 he recorded a self-titled solo album with keyboardist Alejandro Lerner, bassist Alfredo Toth, and drummer Willy Iturri; the project reached the charts domestically.
Following Argentina’s 1983 presidential election that installed Raúl Alfonsín, Santaolalla returned home. He rejoined Gieco for an expansive endeavor that would be preserved across multiple formats. Over roughly two years the pair journeyed from Argentina’s southern tip to its northern border, capturing performances with local folk musicians in their native settings; Santaolalla shaped the material using generators to operate his equipment. De Ushuaia a La Quiaca surfaced in 1985, achieved sufficient success to generate two subsequent volumes plus several documentary television programs, and, most significantly, introduced him to his future wife, award-winning photographer Alejandra Palacios, who documented the undertaking.
Heartened by that project’s reception, Santaolalla concentrated on production, shifting attention to Mexico amid the political, economic, and cultural turbulence that followed the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. Drawing on his own history of artistic emergence from upheaval, and noting the regional sway of Soda Stereo, he immersed himself in rock music. He guided Maldita Vecindad’s Y Los Hijos del Quinto Patio (1989) and El Circo (1991) as well as Caifanes’ El Diablito (1990), efforts that helped ignite the rock en español movement. Though he also produced albums for Los Prisioneros of Chile and El Divididos of Argentina, Mexico held primary appeal owing both to its nearness to Los Angeles and to a cultural climate that echoed his formative years in Argentina. During this surge he encountered the nascent Café Tacuba, the act most closely linked with his production legacy; he secured the band a contract with WEA Latina and produced their 1992 self-titled debut.
Beyond helming three additional Café Tacuba albums that decade—Re, Avalancha de Éxitos, and Reves/Yosoy—Santaolalla produced numerous prominent acts in the 1990s, among them the Gipsy Kings, Julieta Venegas, Molotov, Fobia, Peyote Asesino, Bersuit Vergarabat, and Puya.
He also released two solo albums: G.A.S. (1995), a rock recording, and Ronroco (1998), an acoustic instrumental set spotlighting the ronroco and charango, traditional Andean lute-family instruments. Issued by Nonesuch, Ronroco drew the notice of producer/director Michael Mann, who incorporated “Iguazu” into his 1999 film The Insider, opening doors to further scoring assignments.
The first arrived with the 2000 score and soundtrack for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, which featured original Santaolalla music alongside fresh recordings from Venegas, Control Machete, Illya Kuryaki & the Valderramas, and Ely Guerra. Both the movie and its soundtrack garnered international recognition and charted. In 2001 Santaolalla co-founded the South American supergroup Bajofondo Tango Club (subsequently shortened to Bajofondo) as a studio venture exploring a modern take on tango and other Río de la Plata styles; their self-titled debut appeared that year. He scored and supplied the soundtrack for Iñárritu’s 21 Grams in 2003. The next year his production on Café Tacuba’s Cuatro Caminos earned a Grammy for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album.
Introduced by Iñárritu to Brazilian director Walter Salles, Santaolalla received an invitation to compose the soundtrack for the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, securing a BAFTA Award in February 2005. That year also brought a Latin Grammy for Producer of the Year, recognizing work on seven albums including Juanes’ Mi Sangre.
Santaolalla first met Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee in 2003; Lee had been chosen to adapt Annie Proulx’s short story into Brokeback Mountain. After reviewing the script, Santaolalla composed and recorded the score prior to filming. The picture premiered in late 2005, generating extensive coverage. He received a Golden Globe for the original song “A Love That Will Never Grow Old,” co-written with Bernie Taupin and performed by Emmylou Harris, and won the 2006 Oscar for Best Score.
Leveraging his stature, Santaolalla assembled a roster of veteran Argentine tango figures for a documentary film and recording-performance project led by Salles. The lineup comprised eighteen legendary musicians and singers, among them Emilio Balcarce, Carlos García, Osvaldo Berlingieri, Virginia Luque, and Lágrima Ríos, none younger than seventy. Most performed at a filmed, sold-out concert at Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colón on August 24, 2006. Santaolalla subsequently issued a two-volume compilation drawn from the event; Café de los Maestros captured that year’s Latin Grammy for Best Tango Album. He maintained activity in film and pop, learning the oud to infuse a Middle Eastern texture into the soundtrack for Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel, which earned him another Oscar.
Over the ensuing six years Santaolalla produced and performed on numerous recordings, including Marisa Monte’s O Que Você Quer Saber De Verdade, Calle 13’s Tango del Pecado, Mercedes Sosa’s Cantora, Venegas’ MTV Unplugged, Café Tacuba’s Sino, and Juanes’ La Vida… Es Un Ratico, the last of which received a Grammy for Best Latin Pop Album. He also scored or contributed songs to at least eight films, among them Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2010). In 2011 he supplied the soundtrack for Thierry Klifa’s Les Yeux de Sa Mère and for Salles’ adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and, with Kevin Kiner, created the soundtrack and score for the first season of the AMC series Hell on Wheels. In 2013 he entered video-game scoring with the globally acclaimed, award-winning survival horror title The Last of Us.
During 2014 Santaolalla partnered with songwriter Paul Williams on a theatrical musical drawn from Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and contributed to the animated feature The Book of Life produced by the director. He persisted in recording and touring internationally with Bajofondo while conducting master classes. In July he released the solo instrumental album Camino via Sony Music Masterworks. In 2015 he entered the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame, supplied the score for the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer, and added music and cues to Argentine filmmaker Damián Szifron’s Relatos Salvajes.
The following year he furnished several pieces to the collaborative soundtrack for Fisher Stevens and Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood and issued the album Qhapaq Ñan, which includes the track “Desandando el Camino.”
In 2017 Santaolalla put out the live full-band recording Raconto along with scores for Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars, To End a War, and Thierry Klifa’s Tout Nous Sépare. The video-game soundtrack The Last of Us, Vol. 2 arrived in 2019 to broad acclaim and streaming-chart success.
Santaolalla scored and wrote the soundtrack for Hulu’s limited series Monsterland, adapted from Nathan Ballingrud’s short-story collection North American Lake Monsters; at the time it received only an acclaimed streaming release. Remastered versions of 1982’s Santaolalla and 1995’s G.A.S. also appeared through Ditto Music. In 2021 he and Alfonso G. Aguilar recorded scores for both seasons of Amazon Studios’ series El Cid, after which Santaolalla issued the solo collection El Cid: Themes and Inspirations. He further contributed to the soundtrack for Netflix’s animated series Maya and the Three and scored the Apple Studios film Finch. A physical edition of the Monsterland soundtrack surfaced in 2022 from Death Waltz Recording Company via Light in the Attic.
