Setting the Tone
When I began shaping Asherah: A Love Odyssey, I knew that music couldn’t just sit in the background. It had to carry weight, to be as much a storyteller as the camera or the dialogue. Asherah’s journey is dense, layered with myth and symbol, and I wanted to give the audience places where they could breathe, connect, and even smile.
That’s when I reached back to the 1960s.
It wasn’t nostalgia that led me there. It was the recognition that the 60s were not just a decade — they were a prophecy. A moment in history when rebellion, renewal, and cosmic yearning were all breaking loose at once. And the music of that time captured those currents more directly, more honestly, than any textbook or cultural analysis ever could.
Opening the Door with The Doors
The opening track of Asherah: A Love Odyssey is The Doors’ “Take It as It Comes.”
On the surface, it’s a simple enough choice. Pop-accessible, recognizable, a song that hooks the ear and puts the viewer at ease. But listen closer and you hear Jim Morrison singing about patience, about cycles of love and time: “Go real slow / You like it more and more.”
That restless, youthful energy was exactly the spark I wanted at the start of the film. It connects the audience to something familiar before they are asked to lean into the deeper, stranger waters of Asherah’s myth. It’s a handshake, a wink, a reminder: yes, this story is cosmic, but it’s also yours.
The Doors ground the opening in the here and now — in that moment of the 1960s when urgency and discovery pulsed in every riff.
Closing the Circle with The Byrds
If the film begins with Morrison’s urgency, it ends with Roger McGuinn’s calm.
The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” is one of those rare songs that feels both timeless and timely. Its 12-string guitar shimmers like sunlight breaking through, and its lyrics — lifted from Ecclesiastes — remind us that to everything there is a season, a cycle, a turning.
It was important to me that the ending didn’t slam the door shut. The Byrds don’t deliver finality — they offer ventilation, openness, and the sense of completion without closure. The audience leaves with harmony, but also with possibility.
As for how that final moment looks and feels on screen… that’s something I can’t give away here. Let’s just say the music doesn’t only close a chapter — it opens a door. And that door is waiting for you in the theater. 😉
The Difference Between Nostalgia and Prophecy
It’s worth pausing here to note the difference between this choice and what other filmmakers have done with 1960s music.
Take Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. His needle-drops were about immersion. He recreated the texture of 1969 in all its radio chatter and jukebox pop. It was brilliant, and it worked because the film was a love letter to an era.
But my approach in Asherah is not anthropological. It’s poetic.
I’m not quoting the 60s to bring back the smell of gasoline or the flicker of neon. I’m drawing on its spiritual DNA: rebellion, transformation, and the yearning for cosmic meaning. These weren’t just cultural fads — they were signals of a deeper current running through human history. The music captured it.
The Doors and The Byrds, side by side, are not just songs from a decade. They are two halves of a cycle. Urgency and patience. Spark and harmony. Restlessness and rhythm. By placing them as bookends, the film doesn’t just dip into the 60s. It completes a circle that belongs to all of us.
Why the Music Matters
The music of the 1960s reminds us of something essential: that cycles of completion and awakening are not bound to one decade or one story. They are the rhythm of existence itself.
By beginning with The Doors and ending with The Byrds, Asherah: A Love Odyssey aligns itself with that rhythm. It doesn’t just tell a myth — it joins a movement, one that started long before us and will continue long after.
And how it all comes together in the final moments? Well, that’s something I can’t give away here. You’ll have to step into the theater to feel how the music carries the story to its close. 😉
Because Asherah’s odyssey, like the music, doesn’t end.
It turns, turns, turns.
