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Gimme<br />
Strange<br />
Fiction<br />
Talkin’ Movie Music with Britt Daniel<br />
BY BRYAN CHENAULT<br />
IF YOU’VE SEEN THE LATEST Will Ferrell-as-lovable-dolt flick, Stranger Than Fiction (or even the trailer),<br />
it’s about as hard to escape Spoon’s signature sound as it is for the protagonist to escape his literary fate. You can<br />
thank ex-Redd Kross drummer/music supervisor/Sofia Coppola secret weapon Brian Reitzell, who scores the film<br />
with four Spoon songs (including one original) and three instrumental collaborations helmed by Spoon master<br />
Britt Daniel himself. The Guide caught Britt in the studio in Austin to discuss movie music, the genius of Solaris<br />
and the weird science behind the Gimme Fiction follow-up, tentatively titled Stroke Their Brains (one must<br />
imagine Daniel saying this in depraved Igor voice).<br />
So what makes a good soundtrack?<br />
Usually I actually don’t want to listen to them, because they<br />
seem like a thrown-together batch of songs that don’t have<br />
any relation to one another and don’t have any pacing. It’s<br />
like, for financial reasons, these songs are going to need to<br />
be collected. A good soundtrack has to be a consistent<br />
batch that you want to hear together, like any album.<br />
How did you become involved in this project?<br />
Brian got in touch with me maybe three years ago and<br />
we talked about at some point working on some instrumental<br />
music together. We discovered that we were<br />
both obsessed with the Solaris soundtrack—a film most<br />
people can’t stand, but I thought was amazing—and I<br />
think the music had a lot to do with that. The score to<br />
Solaris is really unique, emotional and affecting, but it’s<br />
slow, just like the movie. I tried to turn my girlfriend<br />
and my bandmates on to the soundtrack, and everybody<br />
that heard it was like, “Eh, yeah…it’s fine, I<br />
guess.” But Brian was equally obsessed with it. Once he<br />
started working on this movie about a year ago, he<br />
asked if I could come down. He had already put a<br />
bunch of Spoon songs in the movie, so it was like being<br />
in charge of a big chunk of the music.<br />
How was the writing process different?<br />
Instead of just a free-form, totally abstract situation<br />
where you’re writing a new song that has no anchor,<br />
there were very specific things that needed to happen<br />
with the music, so it actually seemed kind of easier<br />
than writing a pop song.<br />
So is there a post-Spoon career for you in<br />
scoring films, a la Stewart Copeland?<br />
[Deadpan] There is no post-Spoon. [Laughs] Yeah<br />
maybe, I don’t know. It was really fun to do, but my<br />
main concern is rock and roll.<br />
Was “The Book I Write” a leftover from Gimme<br />
Fiction or something new?<br />
Brian wanted a new Spoon song on the soundtrack,<br />
and I played him several old sketches and that was<br />
the one that worked best for a kind of end-of-movie<br />
tune.<br />
So the title is just a coincidence?<br />
Yeah. We both were a little weary of using something<br />
so literal: Is it going to be too goofy or is it perfect or<br />
what? In the end we just decided to go with it.<br />
Is this the first time you’ve done any composing?<br />
For a big thing, yeah. I think I tried composing once<br />
before for a friend’s film, but it didn’t work out.<br />
And this time around?<br />
I had read the script, and then when I went to visit<br />
Brian in L.A. the first thing I did was watch a rough<br />
edit of the movie as it was at that time. He just<br />
pointed out which scenes still needed music or<br />
instrumental cues, and then we went through one by<br />
one and talked about what each scene needed. We<br />
had our direction: this one needs to make you feel<br />
like this, this one needs to make you feel that.<br />
If you were acting in a film, and could have your<br />
own bit of theme music playing every time you<br />
entered a scene—think Shaft or Superfly—what<br />
would it be?<br />
Maybe the first few seconds from Sketches of Spain.<br />
That first song, with the castanets going…that would<br />
be so cool.<br />
What seems to be influencing the new record?<br />
King Tubby. And there’s this Swedish band called<br />
Peter Bjorn & John; I really like their production.<br />
Mid-period Prince records. And Johnny Mathis, of<br />
course. F<br />
Britt Daniel’s Five Favorite Soundtracks<br />
AUTUMN DEWILDE<br />
Solaris<br />
(2002)<br />
The Harder They<br />
Come (1972)<br />
Marie Antoinette<br />
(2006)<br />
Urban Cowboy<br />
(1980)<br />
Rushmore<br />
(1998)<br />
8 <strong>FILTER</strong> GOOD MUSIC GUIDE<br />
GOOD MUSIC GUIDE <strong>FILTER</strong> 8
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