The Seattle-based producer/musician discusses pugs, Courtney haters and co-writing the recently released film score for Kurt Cobain: About a Son with Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard.
So where are you now?I'm at home, mixing. (
Turning away from the phone, "Can you get the dog out of here?")
What kind of dog is it?
Oh, she's the love of my life. Her name is Sarah and she's a pug and she's defending me from the outside world. She's great, she's 8 yrs old. And there are pictures of her on my
MySpace page. We're just complete pug jerks, that's all you need to know. Me and my wife are pug jerks, it's embarrassing.
What brought you and Ben Gibbard together?(Director) AJ Schnack wanted to use Ben, and (co-producer) Michael Azerrad wanted to use me, and I think it was Ben who actually said, "Well, let's do this together." The music was written around what the film needed, but it was definitely lots of problem solving, working around noisy, deteriorated cassette recordings and segueing in and out of other music. There are sections where there's a bunch of Bruce Springsteen playing in the background, so one of the tricks was to write a bunch of music that was so far away harmonically from what he was doing, all of a sudden Bruce Springsteen sounded like a Kwali singer in the middle of a bunch of bells and stuff.
Where did the Cobain source material come from?Michael Azerrad did 25 hours of interviews for the
Come As You Are book, many of which were conducted at the Cobain residence out here in Madrona. The only voice in the film is Kurt. Michael would show up around 12 o'clock and they'd talk all night and hang out on this one porch. It had a real interesting middle-of-the-night kind of quality.
How did you approach the scoring process?One of the things that makes the film a cohesive package is that it was edited after the soundtrack was done. They made the 90-minute version of the 25 hours, and then made an audio soundtrack and inserted various songs throughout the film that had been important to Kurt, and then Ben and I scored to the narration or text and rode our way into or out of the Butthole Surfers or Half Japanese songs.
Did you also work on song selection?They asked me stuff here and there, but Michael and AJ did all of that by themselves and when they ran into problems, they'd call. We couldn't get Ozzy tracks because Sharon didn't trust the idea of the film. She thought it was going to be sleazy, which was kind of the idea I got. Others said yes within 30 hours — David Bowie, REM, The Replacements — and that really encouraged us. People assume that since there's no Nirvana music that another round of Courtney-bashing will start up. It's like, wow, that's a little telling. You love Nirvana so much you're gonna go beat up his wife one more time?