Soundtracks
Thursday, December 11th, 2008Welcome to the liner notes for my new free download album, Soundtracks, featuring highlights from my work as a film soundtrack composer. It is my 2008 holiday gift to all who have supported me over the years. Perhaps one day I will put these notes together in a more visually arresting package, but for now, I’m simply posting them to my blog.
I worked primarily in documentaries and multimedia videos. I also had some song placements in major film and television productions, but those tracks are not included on this compilation. Everything on this album is music that was composed directly to the action onscreen, as opposed to songs written independently of the film and simply added to the picture. Some of my favorite music I’ve ever written is included on this album.
1. Offshore… This short and introspective track was written for Kristen Nutile’s documentary short of the same name. The film was about a boy who grew up on Alcatraz Island while the prison was still in operation. His father worked at the prison. I played piano on this track, and played all the instruments on subsequent tracks unless otherwise noted. I also engineered, mixed and produced the recordings unless otherwise noted.
The Corner Store Suite (Tracks 2-5)
2. The Corner Store… This bittersweet documentary by Kristen Nutile captures a piece of Americana that is rapidly disappearing. Fountain City, WI is one of the last authentic river towns along the Mississippi, and Francis Lettner’s Corner Store is one of the last remaining gathering sites for the local town members. Listen closely and you can hear the train passing by and the sun setting on an antiquated way of life in this small town. I played the keyboard guitar on these tracks and was thrilled to be joined by the great Nathan Rubin on violin. Working with Nathan was a career highlight for me (he also played on the My Oyster album). He is a brilliant musician. This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written and recorded, and I would never have done so without the inspiration of this poignant little film in front of me. Nathan’s violin recordings were engineered by Bill Hare in Milpitas, CA.
3. We Got Married… This track underscores a fantastic senior couple reminiscing about their wedding.
4. Everybody Shopped In Town… We hear Nathan’s solo violin at the start, underscoring both the former Wild West nature of the town and the sense of longing for a time gone by. Then we travel deeper into the town as it is evolving now.
5. Haven’t Changed Much… The title of this track refers to a comment by the narrator, who says that she understands that the world around her is changing, but that she herself hasn’t changed much. We then hear her whisked back to her dance hall days, with an old-fashioned semi-professional band playing behind her. The track closes with the train once again going by and the sun setting on another day, and soon this very way of life.
6. Air Force Vectors… This adrenalized track was written for a United States Air Force training video. They requested something “masculine but technological.” And you know I’m all about that. It gave me an opportunity to play with sounds through various production techniques and effects. As an example, listen to the drum tracks and how their sound evolves and morphs over time. I had a lot of fun with this commission.
Secret Mechanisms Suite (Tracks 7-9)
7. A Particular Order… This experimental film explores issues of control, anxiety, and fear intertwined with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Designed as a cinematic poem, the film creates a mental landscape through abstract imagery and disassociated voices. The filmmaker, Kristen Nutile, had a clear vision of the sound she wanted, and I wrote and recorded three complete drafts of the score until I got it right. The final version is much more subtle and scaled down than my original version, and Kristen was right — it serves the film well. Next year, I will release an album called Soundtrack Sessions that will include some of the musical drafts from this film that did not ultimately make it into the final cut. The initial drafts were more interesting, rich and compelling musically, but they did not serve the images in the film as well as these final versions did. It was an interesting lesson for a relatively new film composer.
8. In My Head… Due to the film’s subject matter, the musical themes here are intentionally repetitive and structured in a simple upwards/downwards chord progression that is barely functional harmonically. It is as if we are inside the narrator’s head and experiencing the repetitive, only slightly evolving thoughts there.
9. Secret Mechanisms… This is the final section of the film, leading to the credits. We hear a simple and repetitive two note theme, with the chords underneath occasionally venturing in unexpected directions, but ultimately always returning to the same place. We also hear cold and sparse percussion.
10. Green By Design… Greatly contrasting the previous suite, this soundtrack has a light and fun groove that keeps the film progressing in a buoyant direction toward a greener planet. While discussing serious issues and ways to conserve energy, the filmmaker wanted a musical vibe that prevented the film from feeling like a lecture. Essentially a series of interviews of one environmental designer and his clients, the music is intended to bring some levity to a subject that sometimes scares people off or simply bores them with technological jargon and seemingly insurmountable issues. Fun stuff to compose and a good idea for the musical style by the filmmaker.
11. Police Blotter… This film is an experimental documentary that humorously and insightfully explores crime in two neighboring communities. The first community is a wealthy gated community in Silicon Valley, CA. The second community is directly next door, but one of the poorest and most crime-ridden in the state, with a completely different demographic. The film passes by the neighborhoods through the window of a car as we see different entries into the police blotter on the same day for the two communities. The mood is supposed to be ethereal, detached and otherworldly, but with a touch of the absurd. The twangy guitar over the top and the pizzicato strings represent my goofy commentaries on the serious and respectable music underneath. Ironically, I was paid in full for this soundtrack and told it was what had been requested, but the filmmaker ultimately decided to license the temp music, which by that time had become intrinsically imbedded into the film for its maker. But I really love the goofy but insightful mixed message of this track and the film, so I included it here anyway.
12. (The) Sound Of Courage… This was commissioned for an animated short film called Razzle Dazzle by Christian Lowe, Doctor Noize’s artist and animator. He specifically requested “’80’s Power Cheese,” with laser and thunder sounds. He also requested that the lyrics be a string of inspirational masculine clichés. Undaunted by groupies, I channeled my inner Whitesnake and yelled the vocals really loud. This was one of the funnestest things I’ve ever recorded, and the whole thing was written and recorded in a few hours — leaving me longing for more work to do. Perhaps a big haired “cheese rock” album is in my future? God I hope so. My two little girls insist on playing this song over and over again when they hear it — they get the joke and think it’s hilarious. They like to dance to it and sing really loud along with the high parts, then break down giggling. It would be impossible for me to love this track any more than I already do. Somebody please commission me for another one.
13. Go West, Young Man… The Soundtracks album closes with four tracks from the most intensely personal film — for both the director and the composer — I worked on. Kristen Nutile’s film Loss is an intimately emotional and autobiographical tour de force that examines grief and memory years after the death of her father. This track is from a section in which her father (who narrates part of the film through old cassette recordings he occasionally made to record his thoughts) moves to the west coast to pursue a better life. The fine Bay Area guitarist Tim Roberts plays guitar on this track; I play the piano. It was engineered and recorded by Jay Kadis at Stanford University.
The Nutile Sonata (Tracks 14-16)
14. Memories Fade… The music, emotions and ideas this film brought out in me were so intense and personal that, after completing the film’s soundtrack, I arranged the themes from the film into a three movement piano sonata roughly corresponding to the start, middle and end of the film. Kristen wanted a solo piano score for Loss, probably to emphasize the intimacy, loneliness, and delicate beauty of the film. This is the first movement of the sonata and film, exploring an idea that’s often unspoken: As the years progress following the death of a loved one, it’s often hard to remember exactly what that person was like in detail. The image becomes… hazy. The music for the first movement is dreamlike, sweet, but doesn’t completely grab you emotionally — it is beautiful but distant, like the memory it represents. Appealing but amorphous and hazy. The Nutile Sonata was engineered and recorded with assistance from Jay Kadis at Stanford, and I am grateful to Stanford both for the use of their studio and their fine piano.
15. Loss… Unlike the first movement, this section won’t allow me to bathe in vague dreamlike emotions… It grabs me and does not let go. The emotions are heartfelt and very present. For me personally, this piece is one of the most intense I’ve ever written, and I hear this every time I listen to it. One day I will write a much longer accounting of the intense events and ideas surrounding the composition of this movement, but here it is in a nutshell: My brother died of a brain tumor when I was in high school. My father became very depressed about this and killed himself less than a year later. One of my closest friends died of a brain tumor a few years later, leaving a six month old child behind. Eventually I had children, and I love my girls — my two daughters and their beautiful mother — more than anything in the world. One sunny day I went to a doctor for a slight case of tinnitus who (incorrectly and rather incompetently) told me I might have a brain tumor. I was crushed, thinking of leaving my family behind without a dad, like my dad did. The next day, I opened the film I’d been hired to write the music for — Loss — and it was about a filmmaker grappling with the difficulties of losing a father to a brain tumor when she was still a girl. An intense coincidence, to put it mildly. I spent the next few days composing this music, hearing about the difficulties faced by the family this man left behind while watching sections of the film over and over again, and simultaneously getting tests done myself which confirmed that I didn’t have a brain tumor. False alarm. But a totally freaky convergence of things. So you could say I was really locked in to the subject matter of this film while composing the music. This piece reflects my feelings of sorrow and my realizations of the fragility of life — both my own and that of Kristen’s father. It has become one of my favorite pieces — forging something meaningful out of real loss, potential or permanent.
16. Here’s To Life… This movement is drawn from the final act and credits of Kristen’s film. I remember she said she wanted it to evoke the same kind of feelings and emotions as parts of the score from Kiera Knightly’s Sense And Sensibility. To me this piece sort of represents the triumph of the human spirit — Kristen’s, her father’s, my own, my brother’s, everyone who experiences a loss and ultimately forges on with real passion — over hardship, loss and fear. Considering that, while composing this piece, I was as melancholy as I have ever been due to the above strange sequence of events, I sort of wear this piece as an emotional badge of honor. It sounds truly uplifting to me, and composing it helped me focus on positive energy in a time when I needed it. The optimism of the piece sounds effortless, but it was not, and as clichéd as this may sound, it reminds me that there will always be a well of optimism in me — and anyone who chooses to dig for it — no matter what the situation. This is one of the beautiful aspects of Kristen’s film as well. She essentially achieved triumph over turmoil by making a poignant tribute to a fine man who died early. And it’s a tribute from the one person any father would want a tribute from most — his child. Here’s to the hope that we can all be so lucky in defeat. Kristen is not a sentimental or sappy filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination, but if one steps back from this film and looks at the big picture, it’s not too hard to reach the fulfilling conclusion that in the end, love conquers all. And so with this piece I close both my Soundtracks album and my career — at least for now — as a film composer. Writing the music for Loss left me emotionally drained, yet inspired and ready to go out and devote my full attention to Doctor Noize — a musician and author for children in a world whose characters all have an indomitable spirit. After completing The Nutile Sonata, I have not sought or accepted a film commission since.
Thanks for listening and reading, and I hope you enjoyed my Soundtracks. For more info on Kristen Nutile’s fine films, visit Soft Spoken Films — and send my regards.