'Westworld' Soundtrack: Player Piano Covers Of Pop Songs Spread 'Westworld's Most Replayed Metaphor

One of the more distracting, but plausibly tourist-y, elements of the titular theme park in HBO’s Westworld is the pop-song-slinging player piano in the Sweetwater Saloon. It plays plinky covers of popular songs. Now HBO has made available the Westworld piano covers by Ramin Djawadi.

The EP includes player piano covers of Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises,’ Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun,’ The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ and The Cure’s ‘A Forest.’

Here’s the full playlist of Westworld piano tracks, including the show’s main theme (the opening credits are extraordinary):

Not only is the piano emphasized heavily in the opening Westworld credits, but the Sweetwater player piano has become one of the show’s most enduring (and perhaps over-used) metaphors. Like a robot, player pianos can produce complex actions based on what we’ve programmed into them, often with a degree of artistry and sophistication that transcends the simplicity of the instructions involved.

But unlike the robots of Westworld, the player piano has no capacity for self-reflection. It will never react to the way the external world reacts to it. There can be none of the strange loop feedback that rewrites self-identity and creates the metaphorical mind-space necessary to develop a conscious and subconscious. The player piano may make beautiful sounds, but it has no artistry of its own. Will the same prove true of the Westworld androids?