Boombox Serenade

Midnight Snack: Another Taste of the True Blood Soundtrack

A few days ago I wrote about the True Blood soundtrack, but failed to mention the great theme song, "Bad Things" by Jace Everett, a Hoosier by birth and Texan by nature (he moved there with his family at the age of six and describes himself as a "born-again Texan.") He's not foolin'. You can hear a lot of the Lone Star state in his work; Everett has a big, cavernous voice and lists encouraging influences like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and gospel music. His music is a little rowdier and earthier than these though, as well as the artist to which he is probably most often compared--Chris Isaak. Everett manages to be kinda swaggery and sincere at the same time, so he's a perfect fit for our favorite seriocomedy about the bloodsucking bedfellows of Bon Temps.

When you came in, the air went out.
And every shadow filled up with doubt.
I don't know who you think you are,
But before the night is through,
I wanna do bad things with you.

"Bad Things" by Jace Everett is available on iTunes and Amazon, and I just found this excellent guide to True Blood contains every known piece of music used in the series.

The editing on the opening credits is, of course, brilliant. I'm sure many others have gone on and on about that, so I won't, except to say that it contains all the sinning of a Saturday in Louisiana, and all the saving of a Sunday morning too. These credits are also a testament to how powerful visual sequences can be when they're edited specifically to fit the music, something I wish happened a lot more than it does.

What I will go on and on about is True Blood's soundtrack most interesting soundtrack quirk: the vampires' taste for far-flung world music, which gives Alan Ball's team license to create all sorts of deliciously unpredictable moments, like the perfect affinity they found between the saturated sound of Tuvan throat singing and a hot summer night in Louisiana. It makes sense that the longer you were around, the more rarefied your tastes would become, so I think this is a detail about the vampires' nature that rings true. In tonight's episode, "The Fourth Man in the Fire, " Bill Compton walks into his bathroom to find the vampire Eric Northman in his bathtub listening to some incredibly strange Swedish folk music...a reminder of home, he explains. 

On another TB topic, how excited are we that the wonderful Stephen Root has joined the show? He wants to do bad things with Lafayette.

In Search of a Midnight Kiss

I feel better about my lukewarm review of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist now that I've seen In Search of a Midnight Kiss, which offers a more honest and poetic portrayal of what it's like to spend an entire night wandering around town with someone you don't know very well. It also contains a sense of the true danger and uncertainty of youth, instead of Nick and Norah's faux quandries such as "Do I go to Brown or do I go to Harvard?" so it's got real dimension, and real tension between the two, very different lead characters.

The film's budget is estimated $25k, which also makes Midnight Kiss my new poster child for proof that you absolutely can put together an excellent and extensive non-score soundtrack for an utterly reasonable amount of money. Director Alex Holdridge and Music Supervisor Roanna Gillespe (who also worked on Itty Bitty Titty Committee) did a fantastic job of compiling a soundtrack that brought out the wistful, western side of Los Angeles through use of Okkervil River, The Mendoza Line, and most notably Shearwater. The tracks have a quiet, fragile beauty that make L.A. seem as low key and pensive as Portland, but suffused with that dirty-blonde glow of sunshine and smog.

Now don't get me wrong: this isn't wildly original indie fare and is somewhat tonally inconsistent for a director's third feature. Instead of adding depth to the soundtrack, for instance, some hot jazz selections by bands like the Asylum Street Spankers seem like over-borrowing from Woody Allen (already being paid tribute through many visual allusions to Manhattan). A truly great choice, however, succeeds completely when one of the characters jokingly breaks out into a chorus of The Scorpions' "Wind of Change," and his roommates can't resist joining in. For the credits, Holdridge caps things off with an excellent cover of the same by Austin band Sybil.

Soundtrack available for download on Amazon.

Rachel Getting Married

Having just gotten married myself, I was wondering how Rachel Getting Married would strike me, and it packed quite a wallop. Standout performances include Anne Hathaway, who plays a difficult, often unlikeable person with fierceness and fearlessness, and the beaming Bill Irwin, who bursts off the screen with fatherly love and concern and made me love my own father all the more, in fact, for being so recognizable in his unvarnished devotion. Debra Winger's performance too...just...wow. She manages to be secretly icy and a million miles away, even as she offers up all the outward signifiers of maternal warmth. As an actress, it's a trick she seems to pull off effortlessly.

The music in this film is like an English garden: abundant, and not so much about individual sights and sounds as it is the ecstasy of profusion. Music is an overflowing presence in the lives of these characters, and a balm to the still-open wounds of a family haunted by old tragedy.

Embodying this sweetness of music is Tunde Adebimpe (of the band TV on the Radio), who plays the groom. He doesn't have many lines yet he projects a benevolence and a certain abiding quality that is almost antagonistically nice, in fact: it works on the pain of his still-grieving in-laws despite their desire to dig in their heels and remain clenched in grief. But weddings, like funerals, rearrange peoples' relationships to one another and Adebimpe's sweetness (and that of his family) is a transformative force in the film; it helps to change—credibly—the entire event from something catastrophic into something wonderful. True to life, his character is a musician.

Despite the fact that the soundtrack isn't really about specific music moments, I do want to give a shout out to reggae artist Sister Carol's moment in this film, because it's fantastic. One of many performers at the wedding reception (including Robyn Hitchcock!), she's no typical wedding singer: she has stage presence to burn, and exactly the kind of grounded, dignified presence that the film's pivotal characters most desperately need in their lives (and one most strongly represented in the film by Anna Deveare Smith's character). Demme cuts in and out of Sister Carol's performance abruptly, as he does many others in the film, as if he was just the wedding videographer.

Perhaps Demme's most brilliant musical strategy, however, is the ever-present, ever-rehearsing acoustic ensemble in this film. They serve as the Greek chorus of Rachel Getting Married, and their tentative rehearsal of the Wedding March is the very first thing you hear in this film. The melody, in fact, is still very much in mind when a short while later Kym (played by Hathaway) walks into her long-deceased brother's bedroom and the ensemble, still practicing in the living room downstairs, shifts to an uncharacteristically eerie piece. The effect is layered and points out that our most potent sorrows are mysteriously connected to our greatest joys, each informing the other as mutually pivotal, heightened experiences.

Another great film-music moment comes later, when beyond-tense Kym suddenly snaps "Are they going to play all weekend?!" At this point the ensemble is politely asked by the mother of the bride (played by Anna Deveare Smith) to "give it a rest."

Of the people Demme thanks in the credits, I do believe that Robert Altman would have most appreciated the subtle genius and self-parody of Demme's approach. Rachel Getting Married owes a lot to Altman's A Wedding, in fact, including brilliant diagetic music, sophisticated portrayals of race, and a kind of intense individuality that is allowed to shine forth from each and every character in the entire ensemble. Really nice work.

Mark Mothersbaugh Makes Me Eat My Words with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Ah crap, I hate it when I'm wrong. On this blog I'm always going on about how licensed tracks tend to create more memorable film-music moments than score, and yet last night at a film that had an oh-so-of-the-moment hipster soundtrack and the word "playlist" in the damn title, the one truly brilliant film-music moment came courtesy of Mark Mothersbaugh, who did the score.

It was a funny little scene in which the drunk best friend (played by scene-stealing Ari Graynor) has locked herself inside a car with the keys, not realizing that a crowd is standing outside it, all yelling at her to unlock the door. Sollett crossfades to some cotton candy synth confection by Mothersbaugh, and it perfectly brings out the absurdity of the situation. (You can hear the track, or at least a variation on it here, see "Nick and Norah's Theme").

Ultimately, Nick and Norah is pretty weak sauce though ("thin as an iPod Nano," said the New York Times) but there's a lot to like in it, including Kat Denning's pre-Raphaelite beauty, Michael Cera's low key charm, a roving band of merry gay boys, and the aforementioned performance of Graynor, who somehow makes an overprivileged trainwreck of a character seem downright irresistible. What's a little less likable is the film's depiction of New York as little more than a giant playground for suburban teens, or Sollet's tendency to use licensed tracks in a perfunctory way...a kind of sonic name dropping.

It's a weird and wonderful truth about film music: no matter how hot the track, you can't just stick it in your movie and expect it to resonate. The music has to be deeply felt and at least sometimes, allowed to shape moments rather than just comment on them (Gus Van Sant is the master of this).

The Juno soundtrack may have annoyed a lot of folks, but there was a tenderness in it that worked well for the subject matter, and a greater overall loyalty to mood than trends. There was also a little hypocrisy in it, however, in how radically it diverged from the protagonist's supposed taste in music (The Stooges). That same kind of posing is present in Nick and Norah's, where the protagonist is in a queercore band, but also somehow likes to listen to weepy singer-songwriter fare in his bedroom. If you're going to use music as a shortcut to character development, you have to make more of a commitment than that. 

It's just a harmless teen movie though, and a pretty sophisticated one in the grand scheme of things, so I should probably just relax. The Times lightly criticized Nick and Norah's for not having even a "touch of danger" in it, but with a friend lost in the city and key relationships on the line, the stakes were probably plenty high for the intended audience.

Jesus Is Calling: The Delicious Draw of the True Blood Soundtrack

HBO's new series, True Blood, shows a lot of promise so far, and not just because of the white-hot chemistry between Anna Paquin and her vampire boyfriend, played by Stephen Moyer. For one thing, the soundtrack is absolutely fantastic thanks to music supervisor Gary Calamar (Dexter, Varsity Blues, Brothers and Sisters). Nathan Barr, too, deserves a lot of credit for his moody score work on cello; it's somber and strong and heavy, like the old black walnut tree at the end of the road.

(Ok, so there's no old black walnut tree at the end of the road, but it's nice imagery, right?)

This baleful score also serves as the perfect counterpoint to numerous licensed tracks, which favor a wickedly playful strain of Southern rock but also frequently draw from a rich tradition of Southern female vocalists along the lines of Cat Power, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams as well as Christian hymns.

The result is a hugely dimensional soundtrack, one that reflects both the rich cultural heritage and the complex present of the region and also helps to make the show so evocative and real.The last episode, "Cold Ground," contained a particularly graceful chain of selections, beginning with the strains of the Dixie Chicks' gorgeous "Lullaby" spilling out over a wrap-around porch at night, where it linked seamlessly in the next scene to an acapella rendition of "Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling," during a funeral.

It's shortly after that one of the series' most beautiful music moments comes: the show's main character, Sookie (played by Paquin) is sitting alone at the kitchen table, carefully eating her grandmother's last pecan pie, and as she does, she begins to cry for the first time over her grandmother's death, after days of shock and numbness. In the ballad that plays while she does this, the Irish roots of bluegrass music are unmistakable.

In the sweet light of the valley
When the sun falls on the vine
I shall lay down all of my troubles
I'll lay down this heart of mine

Sookie doesn't stop seeking comfort there though. In the next scene she literally runs into the arms of the vampire to whom she's been drawn for months, and it's such a credible pay-off to a long, and relatively chaste courtship between the two of them, one that would have culminated in sex anyway, but which practically explodes with passion for Sookie's want of reassurance in that moment--a relief from grief that easily overtakes her fear and virginity both.

It's a scene that precisely captures the relationship between death and sex, and no finer music could have been chosen than "Half of You" by Cat Power, a song containing all the languid sensuality of Louisiana itself. You can practically smell the Jack Daniels on Chan Marshall's breath as she sings it, and it's though it represents the near-oblivion she nearly achieved a couple years back, it is the sound of the desire for absence of self, so it's perfect. 

Way to be truly dark True Blood. We're hooked.

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Ed. note: Intrepid reader John W. did some research and found the following info about the pecan pie song:

...it was composed for the show, by Nathan Barr and Lisbeth Scott (who seem to have worked together on a few films in the past). And the single is available as an mp3 download for a dollar on CD Baby, which is splendid: http://cdbaby.com/cd/lisbethscott7

There's also, apparently, an acoustic version on Kosmic music, but the site is a terrifying clutter of new age nonsense that doesn't accept Paypal or Google. So I gave up on that.

I'm really stunned by the job they did with the song. I'd easily believe it was decades old. And thank goodness, a new episode tonight!

Thanks so much John!