Over the course of several decades, Gustavo Santaolalla was recognized as a gifted musician, songwriter, producer, and composer as he enjoyed a multi-phased career that took him from Argentina to the United States and intermittently back to Latin America, overall a storied journey that included Grammy and Oscar wins, not to mention towering heights of respect for his artistic accomplishments. Santaolalla began his career while just a teenager, when he founded the Argentine rock band Arco Iris. With this band, he released several albums, some of them quite influential, before he fled his native country as it descended into a terrible military dictatorship in the late '70s. Santaolalla fled to Los Angeles, where he began a modest production career that would turn downright revolutionary by the tail end of the 1980s, when he began producing breakthrough albums for key bands amid the burgeoning rock en español scene. This production work carried him through the 1990s and into the next century, as he worked with, and in most cases helped break into the mainstream, major Latin artists such as Juanes, Julieta Venegas, and Molotov. His production work slowed, however, once he began composing film scores and producing soundtracks, among them Amores Perros (2000), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), and Brokeback Mountain (2005). By this point, especially in the wake of his Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain, he was often better known for his film work than his music production, not to mention his sporadic solo albums. Nonetheless, he remained a highly respected figure among Latin musicians and within the industry built upon them, for his association was generally considered to be a Midas touch.