looking for. Walter likes scores to be part of his movie’s environment instead of the factor that’s driving it, and I’ve always looked at film music as an environmental issue." Other performers on the soundtrack were multi-instrumentalist David Lindley and percussionist Milt Holland. Some of the songs were released as an album, The Long Riders. It was the first of several soundtracks Cooder would write for Walter Hill. Cooder later said this was "the simplest" of his soundtracks to do, adding that: I’d heard and played enough old time-Southern music that it wasn’t too much of a stretch for me to create it. The film was about community and family, and I had to think what the music would have felt like in those days. It had to capture that early American aesthetic, which is a world away from how we live now.... You have to sound "authentic," but you also have to invent that authenticity. I had to imagine myself in another time, and not think about what was happy, sad or dangerous to Arnold Schwarzenegger, but what was happy, sad and dangerous to Jesse James. I ended up concentrating on the scene’s emotions, and the music worked fine. Release Critical response Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote of the film, "Even its languid moments hold a certain fascination, what with Ric Waite's handsome photography and a cast that Noah might envy. The film is slow and only vaguely speculative, though, without much story to give it shape." Todd McCarthy of Variety stated that the film "is striking in several ways, not the least of which being the casting of actor brothers as historical outlaw kin, but narrative is episodic in the extreme and disparate artistic qualities fail to completely jell into satisfactory whole. Despite interesting try, this wouldn't appear to be the film to get Westerns off the ground again." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "the Western will live as long as directors make Westerns as fresh and exciting as 'The Long Riders,' which tells an oft-told story uncommonly well." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times said, "Since 'The Long Riders' various writers, which include James and Stacy Keach, who also play Jesse and Frank James, and its director Walter Hill, haven't anything new to reveal, their film by default becomes merely an