An American Tail: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack
AllMusic; Amazon; Apple Music; Discogs; Last.fm; Spotify; Wikia; Wikipedia

This is the soundtrack (and score) to the movie An American Tail. It came out in 1986, and was composed by James Horner.

1. "Main Title": The mood of this piece kind of goes all over the place, but all of it is lovely. And parts of it incorporate instrumentation from "Somewhere Out There".

2. "The Cossack Cats": This is very frantic and somewhat Russian-sounding, and most of it sounds quite dangerous.

3. "There Are No Cats In America": The first actual song on the album, which consists of various mice from different countries telling tragic stories, interspersed with a very upbeat, cheerful refrain. I love it.

4. "The Storm": This starts out pleasantly enough, but eventually gets ominous, even scary.

5. "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor": The first half of this is instrumental, the second half is choral (but I can't make out any lyrics). Sounds very spiritual, though.

6. "Never Say Never": The second actual song, with a French bird singing to Fievel, trying to cheer him up and give him hope. Very nice.

7. "The Market Place": This is just a pleasant little melody, which mostly feels somewhat hopeful, to me.

8. "Somewhere Out There" (movie version): This is the movie's big hit, a duet between Fievel and his his sister, Tanya, each singing in different places, hoping to see each other again someday. Very emotional and pretty.

9. "Somewhere Out There", by Linda Ronstadt & James Ingram: The same song as above, this time sung by professionals, who technically sound better than the mice, but it's hard for me to say which version I prefer. (But I love both versions.) This is much grander in scope, but it's the mice's version that hits me hardest emotionally. Anyway, I could be wrong, but I feel like this song started the trend of movie soundtracks having professional singers cover one of the songs characters sing in the movie (with the famous singers' version usually playing over the closing credits). I suppose that could have started prior to this movie, but I can't think of any earlier examples off the top of my head.

10. "Releasing the Secret Weapon": Another frantic piece. The early part of it sounds scary to me, but then it gets happier, with a reprise of part of "There Are No Cats in America".

11. "A Duo": This is mostly sung by a cat named Tiger, who becomes friends with Fievel, who joins in the singing at some points. A very happy song about friendship.

12. "The Great Fire": This one's mostly just somber, but it has some louder, scarier parts.

13. "Reunited": This starts out rather quiet and slow, then picks up a bit with the melody from "Somewhere Out There". It alternates between quiet and more upbeat throughout the piece, and never really gets quite as joyous as I'd expect it to, but it comes close. The whole thing is just very tender.

14. "Flying Away and End Credits": As is often the case with end credits, this is something of a suite of a few different pieces of music from throughout the soundtrack, but probably some original parts too. I'd say it's kind of glorious.