Martin Scorsese’s new film “The Irishman” has sent the book it’s based on, Delaware prosecutor-turned-author Charlie Brandt’s Frank Sheeran confessional “I Heard You Paint Houses,” to the top of the New York Times bestseller list 15 years after its initial publication. As with most Scorsese movies, Robbie Robertson produced the soundtrack, which includes a couple of songs that also appear on his new solo album, “Sinematic.” This one doesn’t appear until the closing credits of the three-and-a-half-hour epic, and doesn’t appear on the film’s soundtrack album, either, probably because the lyrics don’t track with the film’s plot.
In an interview last week, Robertson told Variety:
“This movie is based on a book called “I Heard You Paint Houses” — that’s a mob expression, it’s about blood being splattered — and one day, because I was working on this movie and my album at the same time, I wrote a song with that title, telling a story about a character who is a hit man. My friend Van Morrison was in town and he said, what are you working on? I played him [a sketch of] this song, he liked it and he ended up singing on it.”
