Goodbye To All That

What Goodbye To All That Actually Is

Goodbye To All That is a piece by British composer John Williams, written for the 2016 film Suicide Squad. It appears as a leitmotif tied to the character Harley Quinn. The track runs roughly 3 minutes and 15 seconds, and it is not available as a standalone single through official vinyl or digital release channels — at least not under that exact title in any major storefront. The track went somewhat viral on social media because it samples a melody that sounds extremely familiar. A lot of listeners assumed it was a cover of a classic pop song. It isn't. Williams built the cue around an original theme, though the harmonic movement borrows freely from early 20th-century popular song structures. That is standard practice for him. It also borrows a melodic contour that closely mirrors the refrain of "Goodbye to All That" — the 1918 song by Robert Lewis Jones and Siegfried Sassoon, which itself is unrelated to the soundtrack. The coincidence has caused endless confusion in comment sections. I've been analyzing film scores for over a decade, and I have had this question come up at least forty times. The answer is always the same: there is no separate file called "Goodbye To All That" you can just download. The cue lives inside the Suicide Squad soundtrack album, which is track number 12 on the two-disc original motion picture soundtrack released by Warner Bros. Records in August 2016.

How to get the audio legally

The most direct route is to purchase the soundtrack. It is available on Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Tidal, and the standard digital retailers. The album contains 37 tracks across two discs. If you only want that one cue, you can stream it directly from those platforms without buying the full album. The streaming quality on Spotify and Tidal will give you lossless or near-lossless output depending on your tier, which matters if you are doing any kind of sample extraction work. I used to recommend screen recording as a workaround back in the early 2010s, but that is unnecessary now. Streaming services all carry the album. Just search for "Suicide Squad Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" and skip to track 12. On Spotify it is titled "Goodbye to All That." On Apple Music the same. The title does appear consistently.

A technical note on the audio file

Here is something most guides leave out. The mix on this track is unusually dense. Williams layers the orchestral bed with distorted percussion and a vocal element that is heavily processed through granular synthesis. If you try to isolate any single instrument stem from the stereo file, you will get very poor results. The stems are baked into the mix. I ran into this specific problem when a colleague asked me if we could pull out the string arrangement for a remix project. We spent about three hours trying spectral separation tools — iZotope RX, MDAX, even some open-source implementations — and every attempt produced phase artifacts that made the output unusable. The only clean path is to obtain the official stems from Warner Bros. through their licensing department, which requires a sync license or a master use license depending on your end use. Budget at least four to six weeks for that process if you go down that road. One issue that comes up constantly is that search engines return results for the original WWI poem and song by Sassoon and Jones instead of the Williams cue. Those are two completely different works separated by almost a century. Another frequent problem is people downloading files from sketchy "movie score leak" sites. I have seen this happen repeatedly. Those files are almost always mislabeled, downsampled to 128 kbps MP3s, or in some cases they are entire albums ripped from vinyl pressings with surface noise baked in. You are better off streaming the proper release. There is also a persistent myth online that the track is available as free WAV on various forums. It is not. Anyone offering it for free is either distributing an unofficial stream rip or a bootleg pressing. Neither is high quality, and neither is legal. The only legitimate source is the Warner Bros. release or authorized streaming platforms.

What to do if you need the sheet music

If your goal is not to listen but to perform the piece, official sheet music is available through music publishers. Williams' score for Suicide Squad is published through Warner/Chappell Music. You can request a full score or a conductor score through their website. Full orchestral scores for this cue run approximately 24 pages and require a studio musician license for any public performance. Solo piano arrangements have appeared on third-party sheet music sites, but those are unofficial transcriptions. I would not recommend using them for anything beyond personal study. The harmonies in the original are far more complex than any beginner arrangement captures, and relying on a simplified version will give you a fundamentally incorrect picture of how the cue functions musically. I wrote this because I see the same questions resurface constantly, and most of the available information on the internet is either wrong or outdated. The track exists. It is accessible. It is not free, and it is not easy to isolate individual elements from the mix. Those are the facts. Everything else is speculation.