In general, asking questions of the “How I Met Your Mother” creators at press tour is a fool’s errand. Because of how they’ve designed the show, and because they’ve decided they want to preserve every secret, Craig Thomas and Carter Bays have made an art of coming to press tour events, not saying anything, and apologizing for doing so. And with CBS being “pretty optimistic” about closing a deal for a ninth season (i.e., one past the upcoming one that everyone assumed would end the series), Thomas and Bays have to be even more mum than ever.
(We can discuss the ramifications of a ninth season if/when that happens. All I’ll say now is that if Thomas and Bays stick to their original plan for the eighth season and do something different for the ninth, it could work, but if they just wind up elongating the season 8 story arc over twice as many episodes, it will be… ungood.)
But at CBS’ press tour party, Thomas actually had some concrete show info he could reveal for once:
After many years of many goofy, catchy, memorable original songs, “How I Met Your Mother” is finally getting its own soundtrack album.
“We’ve been asked by the fans for years, ‘When is a soundtrack going to come out?'” he explained. “We’ve never been able to make it happen. Finally, we decided, ‘Look, it could be the last year of the show, we don’t know if there could be more. This is the time to do it.’ We compiled everything. It’s 20 tracks, 40 minutes of music. On premiere night (Monday, Sept. 24), the soundtrack is going to go up on iTunes.”
He said they were still finalizing a few of the track choices, but obvious picks include a full version of the theme song, all the Robin Sparkles songs, “Nothing Suits Me Like a Suit,” the Puzzles theme song, plus a more elaborate version of a song the show has featured often in recent years.
“We are going to do a fully-produced version of the ‘Bang-Bang-Bangity-Bang’ song,” he explained, “perhaps with a slight New Orleans theme.”
(I asked whether “Ted Mosby Is a Jerk” would be on there, and he said, “That’s its own album. It’s a half-hour.” I noted that since there won’t be a physical CD, track length shouldn’t be an issue. So we’ll see.)
And though a few other details still have to be ironed out, Thomas is pretty sure they have a title for the album:
“How I Met Your Music.”