‘Roadrunner’ Director Shares a Massive Playlist With Anthony Bourdain’s Favorite Songs

The director of the new documentary about Anthony Bourdain, Roadrunner, has shared a massive playlist containing some of the late culinary journeyman’s favorite music.

The playlist fittingly starts with the Modern Lovers classic “Roadrunner” and goes on to feature an array of selections from artists like the Beach Boys, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop, the Stooges, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Marvin Gaye, Rosa Yemen, Joy Division, the Velvet Underground, Hank Williams, Parliament-Funkadelic, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Bob Dylan.

Roadrunner director Morgan Neville said of the playlist, “When I started making the documentary Roadrunner, pretty much the first thing I did was to put together a playlist of all the music that Tony mentioned. I kept adding songs he mentioned in books, interviews, Instagram stories, and more. I ended up with about 18-and-a-half hours of music. Recently, I checked with some of Tony’s friends and they added a few more in. It makes one hell of a jukebox.”

Roadrunner was released earlier in July after premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. The doc offers an extensive overview of Bourdain’s life and career — up through his death by suicide in June 2018 — while filming his CNN show Parts Unknown. While the doc has received generally positive reviews, it has ginned up some controversy over the use of AI technology to recreate Bourdain’s voice, which his widow, Ottavia Bourdain, has expressed her displeasure with.