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Halloween songs might not be as celebrated — or profitable — as Christmas music (though that’s changing a bit), but there’s no denying the grave reality that people go batty for spooky songs as Oct. 31 approaches. Simply put, folks who want to avoid spooky songs around All Hollows’ Eve don’t have a ghost of […]
Four years after he finished work on the final big-screen adaptation of the zeitgeist-y Hunger Games book trilogy, director Francis Lawrence got a phone call from producer Nina Jacobson, another veteran of the series. And she wasn’t looking to reminisce.
Suzanna Collins – the mind and pen behind the dystopian sci-fi series – had just rung up Jacobson with some news: “Hey, surprise! I’m almost finished with a new book.” Lawrence sums up their reaction: “Wow…. Okay!”
The Hunger Games scribe didn’t offer much information about her forthcoming novel, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, other than that it was a prequel — and it incorporated “a big musical element,” Lawrence recalls.
After reading the book in early 2020, not long before it arrived on shelves, Lawrence was officially in. “I love a villain origin story,” he says of Songbirds, which tracks the rise of trilogy antagonist Coriolanus Snow. The same went for Jacobson. “Suzanne trusting me with this series, we’ve had an incredible rapport and bond,” she says. “I was all in.”
Returning to the director’s chair for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes – which hits theaters Nov. 17 – served as a dual homecoming for Lawrence. Not only was he returning to the Hunger Games arena, but to the task of pairing songs with distinctive visuals. After all, he first cut his chops as a music video director, helming clips for Destiny’s Child (“Independent Women Part I”), Shakira (“Whenever, Wherever/Suerta”), Justin Timberlake (“Cry Me a River”), Britney Spears (“I’m a Slave 4 U”) and Beyoncé (“Run the World (Girls)”), even winning the best music video Grammy for directing Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” An impressive resume to be sure, but not an exact match for the musical milieu Collins imagined for this story.
Songbirds introduces us to Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), an itinerant folk singer thrown into the titular kill-or-be-killed battle – as well as an unlikely romance with Snow (Tom Blyth). “[Collins] told me about the history of Appalachian music of the ‘20s and ‘30s and how often they were based on songs or ballads or poems that had been passed down for generations and collected over time,” Lawrence says of the music that inspired the character of Baird. Collins advised the director to check out Ken Burns’ 16-hour documentary Country Music (“this was during the pandemic, so I had time,” he adds) for context, but both of them realized that finding the right musical collaborator for the film – someone who lived and breathed this music — would be essential to making sure Baird felt like a dusty, jagged diamond in the rough.
Enter Dave Cobb. A Nashville mainstay who’s produced albums for Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson (i.e., country singers who value grit over studio polish), Cobb’s contributions for 2018’s A Star Is Born and 2022’s Elvis proved he could work within the Hollywood system without sacrificing his musical ethos.
When his name came up during pre-production, the team got on the phone to feel out his interest level. The connection was immediate.
“Talking to him, he’s an incredible historian of music and has such a passion that rivals Suzanne’s for the origins of what we think of as American music,” Jacobson recalls of their initial conversation. Lawrence agrees: “It was his resume but also just the chat. He’s such a great, smart guy and has such knowledge of the country music genre; he fit the family and is supremely talented.”
Dave Cobb
Becky Fluke
As for the nine-time Grammy winner, Cobb tells Billboard that Collins’ vast knowledge of history – music, political and otherwise – made him excited to hop on board and write songs to accompany her lyrics from the book.
“One of the things that was so attractive about working on this film [is that] I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a more intelligent person in my life than Suzanne Collins. She’s an absolute genius, by any measure,” Cobb says. “Suzanne telling me the impetus of the story had me captivated. I’m a history buff, and everything in this film — everything she’s written for Hunger Games — is derived from real history.”
That, however, presented an additional challenge: “I had to make [the songs] feel like turn-of-the-century, timeless classics. That’s a very hard thing to do,” Cobb admits with a laugh. But it wasn’t entirely outside his sphere of experience, either. “My grandmother was a Pentecostal minister, so I grew up with hymnals my whole life,” he says. “I’m very familiar with this sound growing up in the South and it was really fun to exercise that muscle of things I’d heard growing up, and put it into melodies.”
Collins’ musical acumen was an asset, too. “Dave had long conversations with Suzanne, and she’d give him the history of where the song came from,” Lawrence says, adding that Collins even “had some time signatures in mind” for certain songs before Cobb began writing.
“They have a shared love of the same music and the history of music,” Jacobson says. “She was present virtually for a lot of the recordings and had a lot of conversations with Dave, but gave him latitude, too. She always gives artists an enormous amount of freedom to interpret her work.” Lawrence seconds that: “He wrote the full songs, and we barely did changes.”
When it came time to hash out those songs with a band, Cobb intuitively knew a recording studio wouldn’t cut it.
“The big thing for me was to get the ability to be completely unorthodox,” he says. “We had this crazy idea to come down to my hometown of Savannah, Georgia, and rent an old mansion and record in that.” Using the seminal recordings of 20th century folk archivist Alan Lomax as a guiding light, Cobb found a “200-plus-year-old house” and brought along a few ringers — including bluegrass wonder Molly Tuttle — to record the guide tracks.
“With all the creaks in the walls, you can hear the history in the recording — it wasn’t like a clinical studio,” Cobb says. “The old microphones we used looked like they’d been under a bed for 75 years. Molly Tuttle played a big part – she played the guitar of Lucy Gray, and I found this old ’30s Gibson that she played on. It wasn’t just a regular acoustic guitar – it has character.
“That was a big part of making this come to life. There’s bleed between the bass going into the fiddle going into the banjo — it’s just absolute chaos in a way that makes things dangerous.”
Making it sound dangerous was only half of the equation, however. Ironically, to find a real-life location that looked Appalachian, the film crew decamped to Duisburg, Germany, filming a pivotal scene at an abandoned factory to evoke District 12’s black market district. “It’s something they would never do in the States – they turned [the factory] into a publicly accessible park and let nature take over,” Jacobson says. “There’s all these places where you can go into gritty, grubby basements with the equipment still there.”
With that as the backdrop, Zegler delivers one of the film’s finest musical moments, forcing our emotional investment in her romantic relationship with a character we know grows up to be a monster – all while singing the hell out of a breathtaking song that could pass for a long-lost Carter Family classic.
“Rachel is such an incredible talent that she ended up singing everything live [on set],” Cobb says of Zegler. “She’s so naturally gifted – it was effortless for her.”
Rachel Zegler and Tom Blyth in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Murray Close
Despite being one of the first people in talks for the role (and a fan of the franchise), Zegler initially wasn’t able to do the film because of hectic scheduling issues. As the search for Lucy Gray Baird dragged on, Jacobson grew concerned. “We auditioned a zillion people and there are a lot of wildly talented people out there, but this is such a specific character. When she sings, it has to be jaw-dropping; anything short of that won’t deliver.”
Kismet came to the rescue, however, when Josh Andrés Rivera (who worked with Zegler on West Side Story) landed the role of Sejanus, Snow’s best friend. “He had this amazing audition,” says Jacobson. “I didn’t realize he was Rachel’s boyfriend – I just thought he was the guy who came in and gave us a great audition.” With Rivera set for a lengthy lockdown stay in Europe while filming the movie, Zegler and her team reconsidered the scheduling conflicts. “We got the call [from her team]: ‘Is it too late?’”
A chemistry test between Zegler and Blyth sealed the deal – even over Zoom, it was palpable. “We all wanted to be mindful of her musical theater background and make sure we got that authenticity in her singing,” Lawrence says. “As soon as she came on the Zoom test with her and Tom, I had her sing an a cappella version of ‘Wildwood Flower’ to Tom. And she just nailed it. It was slow, emotional and she had a little dialect happening. It was so, so good.”
“Rachel has this beautiful, almost ‘30s American pure voice,” Cobb muses. “She can sing anything.”
Her performance is equally revelatory. In Songbirds, Zegler believably portrays a tough, charismatic survivor who carefully guards her inner life and moral code; as we watch her become vulnerable with a character “people have already decided they hate,” as Jacobson says of Snow, it’s impossible to resist getting caught up in this suspenseful, engrossing rush of a film. While Collins’ evocative lyrics and Cobb’s familiar yet fresh melodies do a lot of heavy lifting, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Zegler pulling off the balancing act demanded by the story.
“We knew it would be a challenge to adapt this book,” Jacobson admits. “But it’s also a sort of homecoming, having made so many of these with Francis and this creative team. It’s a rare gift.”
“[Collins] writes from a thematic foundation that gives [Songbirds] relevance and importance,” Lawrence says. And though he has no insight into whether the series ends here, he’s certainly up for another one. “If she came up with another book — whether a direct sequel or a standalone or a new series in this world — I would be really into doing it again.”
It’s almost time for 1989 (Taylor’s Version), and Taylor Swift has dropped another preview of what’s to come with a snippet of her re-recorded “Out of the Woods.” “Out of the Woods (Taylor’s Version)” is featured in the latest trailer for Illumination and Universal’s animated film Migration, due out in theaters Dec. 22. Explore Explore […]
“I’m Just Ken” got a funny new twist on SNL Saturday night (Oct. 14), thanks to host Pete Davidson. The former cast member performed his own version of Ken’s rock ballad from the Barbie soundtrack on the season 49 premiere, which finally arrived after the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture […]
Taylor Lautner was flexing like a goddamn acrobat to “Karma” at a movie theater for the opening weekend of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.
The actor, who happens to be married to another Taylor (Dome) and is an ex of Taylor Swift‘s, backflipped in front of the big screen at a showing of the blockbuster concert movie that’s headed for a $100 million domestic opening.
Tay shared a couple videos of her husband being the life of the party in front of their friends at an Eras Tour movie viewing via Instagram Stories, here and here. She posted the clips on Saturday (Oct. 14).
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Other Instagram Stories showed Tay singing along and dancing to Reputation‘s “Ready for It” and “Look What You Made Me Do.”
Before admitting they were experiencing “post-Taylor Swift show depression” after seeing Swift live in Los Angeles in August, the couple attended another show on The Eras Tour. In July, Lautner the actor made a surprise appearance onstage at Kansas City’s Geha Field at Arrowhead Stadium for the premiere of Swift’s “I Can See You” music video, in which he stars alongside Joey King. He entertained the sold-out crowd by impressively flipping down the catwalk toward the pop icon.
“He was a very positive force in my life when I was making the Speak Now album, and I want to say he did every single stunt that you saw in that music video,” Swift said onstage. “He and his wife have become some of my closest friends, and it’s very convenient because we all share the same first name.”
Swift and Lautner dated briefly in 2009. Their relationship is believed to have inspired the Speak Now apology track “Back to December,” which reminisces on what Swift missed after breaking up with a former boyfriend: “Your tan skin, your sweet smile, so good to me, so right.” Elsewhere in the song, she says, “You gave me all your love and all I gave you was goodbye.”
Swift’s The Eras Tour film already grossed $39 million Friday (Oct. 13), according to The Hollywood Reporter‘s box office update on Saturday, and has a shot at becoming the biggest October opening weekend of all time in North America if it surpasses Joker‘s $96.2 million. Swift called the premiere of her concert film “the most electric experience of my life.”
When it comes to the music of Sofia Coppola’s films, “There’s always a bit of impressionism,” says Thomas Mars, the lead singer of Phoenix — who also happens to be married to the director. Think of My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes” scoring Scarlett Johanssen’s taxi ride through late-night Tokyo in Lost in Translation, Kirsten Dunst cavorting through a decadent young queen’s wardrobe as Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” blasts in Marie Antoinette or the haunting chords of Air lending a foreboding tone to 1970s U.S. suburbia in The Virgin Suicides.
And in Coppola’s latest film, Priscilla (out Nov. 3 from A24) — about when a teenage Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) and Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) met — one moment in particular seems destined to join the canon of the director’s great needle drops: after Priscilla and Elvis’ first kiss, the resounding, viscerally recognizable trio of guitar chords of Tommy James and The Shondells’ “Crimson & Clover.”
“Sofia is really attuned to the grand majesty of popular music,” says veteran music supervisor Randall Poster, who shares music supervision credit on the film with Phoenix. “In a sense, ‘Crimson & Clover’ is as epic as Mozart or Beethoven — it encapsulates every adolescent emotion possible.”
In adapting Priscilla from Priscilla’s 1985 memoir, Elvis & Me, Coppola did use some of the historical music cues mentioned in it, such as a cover of Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” (which Phoenix plays variations of as the score throughout) and Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s.” But for the rest of the soundtrack, “I didn’t want it to sound corny, like some music of that era can to me,” Coppola says. A fan of producer Phil Spector, his sound “became a way to tie things together. I wanted to embrace the melodrama of strings and big production.”
Sometimes that meant nodding to Spector in unexpected ways: As the film opens, the orchestral psychedelics of Alice Coltrane’s “Going Home” fade into Spector’s trademark kick drums and lush strings — and the joltingly nasal voice of Joey Ramone covering The Ronettes’ “Baby I Love You” (a track from the Ramones’ Spector-produced End of the Century).
But many times during the film, silence is used to striking effect. As Mars points out, key synchs like “Crimson & Clover” needed some quiet preceding them. “We felt this will be a big moment, so we can’t have too much music before. To make sure these moments are highlighted, there’s a bit of negative space.” And silence was, in fact, a big part of the discussion among Coppola, her longtime editor Sarah Flack, Mars and Poster about how music would inform the telling of Priscilla’s story. Coppola has always been drawn to illuminating the interior lives of young women, and Priscilla, for much of the film, is alone — left at Graceland, away from her family, while her husband is off in the military or on film sets.
“She’s trying to fit in; she’s not sure where she is,” Mars says. “It takes time for her to get her life back, to make her own choices.” Emphasizing the stillness of her life without Elvis, and the noise and parties when he returns, was important. “I think those silences push you deeper into the movie, ultimately,” Poster says.
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Although Elordi magnetically portrays Elvis, the film is centered in Priscilla’s experience, and his music is almost entirely absent from it. Authentic Brands Group, the majority owner of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which controls approval of Elvis song usage, did not grant it to Coppola. But that meant “we had to make a weakness a strength,” Mars says. “In the end, it’s better that it’s more focused on Priscilla’s perspective.”
And it seems the film’s subject was pleased. At the movie’s Venice Film Festival showing, Priscilla embraced Coppola and wiped away tears during a standing ovation. “We haven’t talked specifically about the music, but she said, ‘You did your homework,’ ” Coppola says. “She felt it was authentic, which was so important to me.”
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
“Are you guys doing something?” Taylor Swift asked the members of *NSYNC on Sept. 12 while onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards, where the reunited boy band had just arrived to shrieks and presented Swift the best pop trophy. “I need to know what it is!” *NSYNC was back, and even pop’s biggest superstar was amped.
Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Lance Bass, Chris Kirkpatrick and Joey Fatone demurred at the time, but soon after the VMAs, *NSYNC announced “Better Place,” its first new song together in over two decades. The shimmering, falsetto-heavy disco-pop track was created for Trolls Band Together, the third installment in the hit animated film series in which Timberlake voices a main character, Branch, and has contributed hits to each of the first two Trolls movies.
“My excitement started way back in the early part of the year,” says Gina Shay, the producer/music supervisor for the films. That was when Timberlake sent her a demo of “Better Place,” designed to follow his Billboard Hot 100-topping smash “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” from the original Trolls film in 2016 and his SZA collaboration, “The Other Side,” from 2020’s Trolls World Tour.
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Shortly after sending the demo, Timberlake texted Shay that he felt inspired to reunite *NSYNC to record “Better Place.” “It was like dynamite was going off inside my brain,” Shay says. After all, *NSYNC — whose four studio albums have sold 27.9 million copies, according to Luminate, and scored turn-of-the-century smashes like “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me” — hadn’t released music together since 2002.
And while Trolls Band Together focuses on a boy band reunion, Shay says that the plot had been locked in long before any talk of an *NSYNC comeback. “The movie’s story has been solid for about four years,” she says, “so it was just that perfect confluence of a song to reunite *NSYNC and to carry the narrative.”
Although Shay says that coordinating all five members’ schedules with their individual teams “took a little time to sort through,” “Better Place” came together rather seamlessly once the quintet was fully on board. After *NSYNC announced its reunion at the VMAs and unveiled “Better Place” on Sept. 29, Shay hopes that the song will become ubiquitous prior to the Nov. 17 release of Trolls Band Together — but however high it climbs, she’s glad that the film franchise could play a role in the reformation of a pop behemoth like *NSYNC.
“I’m so glad we were able to do this for the fans,” she says. “It has been a mix of love, pandemonium and wish fulfillment.”
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The Hunger Games films are no stranger to haunting musical moments that produce real-life hits, with six singles from four movies hitting the Billboard Hot 100 — including top 20 hits for Taylor Swift and even Jennifer Lawrence. When the prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes hits theaters on Nov. 17, a batch of new songs will take center stage thanks to Rachel Zegler, who delivers a nuanced portrayal of a nomadic balladeer thrown into a dystopian fight to the death.
Almost two years after winning a Golden Globe for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, Zegler is preparing to show audiences she can deliver gritty country-folk just as deftly as Broadway classics. To ensure the music of the film convincingly conjured her character’s Appalachia-esque milieu, Lionsgate tapped Nashville mainstay Dave Cobb to put melodies to lyrics penned by franchise author Suzanne Collins. Cobb, a nine-time Grammy Award winner, is primarily known for working with country artists including Brandi Carlile and Chris Stapleton. But he has produced music for major films along the way such as A Star Is Born and Elvis — and his latest Hollywood project presented a new challenge.
What about this opportunity made you say yes?
One of the things that was so attractive about working on this film [is that] I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a more intelligent person in my life than Suzanne Collins. She’s an absolute genius. Suzanne telling me the impetus of the story had me captivated. I’m a history buff — I would teach history if I wasn’t in music — and everything in this film, everything she has written for Hunger Games, is derived from real history. She sent me the lyrics, and I had to make them feel like turn-of-the-century, timeless classics. That’s a very hard thing to do.
The songs have a lived-in rawness to them. How did you achieve that?
The big thing for me was to get the ability to be completely unorthodox. We had this crazy idea to come down to my hometown of Savannah, Ga., and rent an old mansion and record in that. So we went to this 200-plus-year-old house, and the sound is very Alan Lomax. Lomax, whom I’m very influenced by, used to go around and capture people on their front porch. It was the real, genuine, authentic article of whatever he was [recording], so we went for that. With all the creaks in the walls, you can hear the history in the recording — it wasn’t like a clinical studio. The old microphones we used looked like they’d been under a bed for 75 years.
Dave Cobb
Becky Fluke
And what about the band?
I brought in ringers who I thought were great musicians. Molly Tuttle played a big part — she played the guitar of [Zegler’s character] Lucy Gray. I found this ’30s Gibson that I brought down, and she played on that. I showed it to [director] Francis [Lawrence], and he used it in the film: It’s the one she’s actually playing in the film. It wasn’t just a regular acoustic guitar — it has character. That was a big part of making this come to life. There’s bleed between the bass going into the fiddle going into the banjo. It’s just absolute chaos in a way that makes things dangerous.
Did you work closely with Zegler, coaching her on how to approach the material?
I made the music before the film was made, and Rachel is such an incredible talent that she ended up singing everything live, which we were hoping she would do. She’s so naturally gifted — it was effortless for her. She can sing anything.
Do you have a favorite musical moment in the film?
There’s a song on [the soundtrack] I love called “Pure As the Driven Snow.” Rachel has this beautiful, almost ’30s American voice. The way she sings the last line of that song is so stunning.
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Enter the National Arts Club, a Victorian Gothic Revival brownstone off Manhattan’s Gramercy Park; climb four winding flights of stairs; pass the Pastel Society of America; and there will be the offices of director Wes Anderson’s longtime music supervisor, Randall Poster. And though in summer 2023 Hollywood is at a strike-induced standstill, Poster, creative director of Premier Music — the advertising-focused music supervision agency — is as busy as ever.
(Update: A tentative deal has been reached between screenwriters and the studios, streaming services and production companies.)
Poster’s film projects in the next several months include music supervision for the fall’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (with Anderson), Priscilla (with Sofia Coppola), Killers of the Flower Moon (with frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese), as well as Joker: Folie á Deux (with Todd Phillips) and Hit Man (with Richard Linklater).
And that’s just his day job. Amid the pandemic, an unlikely new passion became a calling when Poster started the Birdsong Project, enlisting his diverse group of artist friends to create music inspired by or incorporating birdsong in an effort to benefit avian life. The result: For the Birds, a 20-album box set containing 172 new pieces of music and 70 works of poetry (all proceeds go to the National Audubon Society) and has led to a growing global community that’s still evolving under his leadership, one in which he hopes the music industry will take a real interest.
How has the strike affected your business?
There are some movies I’m working on that we can’t get finished because we can’t get the main actors to do [automated dialogue replacement]. And then there are movies that were meant to start in the fall that are pushing. I think everyone’s unclear about how it’s going to play out. I don’t really talk to a lot of other music supervisors, but for people who are just scraping by in music supervision, the shutdown of shows is brutal. In terms of music departments, there has been constriction at the streamers, but I’m not sure that was borne out of the strike, at least to this point. But in the short term, I’m busy. And our company, in terms of doing a lot of advertising work, thankfully, that has been very active.
A sampling of Poster’s extensive collection of musician paintings by Dan Melchior, part of an ongoing series, alongside a ceramic bird by Ginny Sims.
Nina Westervelt
Even in the music industry, I think few understand very well what a music supervisor actually does. How would you explain it?
I view my work as a filmmaker, not just a person who deals with the music — using music to best tell a story, to compensate where the story needs a bit of help and having a really candid and fluid relationship with directors and producers. People always say to me, “Oh, Randy Poster’s the guy who picks the music for the Wes Anderson movies” — but I don’t pick the music. I don’t want to be the one who does. Directors pick. I may present, we may have a conversation borne out of months of musical dialogue, but ideally, it’s the director’s medium. When people come out of the movies I work on and say, “Oh, the music was the best part,” that’s not really a victory. When people say, “I don’t really even remember the music,” sometimes that’s the best service you can do to the film — that it feels like the fabric of the movie.
What does a normal day of work look like for you?
Making sure rights are coming in; working on scenes of a movie and putting different songs up to it; making calls to record companies and publishers to see if I can narrow a price differential in terms of what we have to pay and what they’re asking us to pay; reaching out to artists and managers to see if people are interested in recording new music; looking at cues that are coming in from the composer on the movie; putting together a playlist for a director — like when starting a project, using the music to establish a dialogue. Describing what music is doing is very difficult, and words don’t necessarily mean the same things to different people, but if you can relate to songs, it gives you a sense of tempo, vibe, instrumentation they like. And then getting feedback from directors and editors: “This is working. This isn’t. Is there too much music in the movie? Is there not enough?” Sometimes it’s my role to protect the silences.
From left: A painting of country artist Jim Reeves by artist Henry Miller; a ceramic bird sculpture by Joseph Dupré; a painting of Buck Owens’ band, The Buckaroos, by Ashley Bressler (one of many artists Poster has discovered on Instagram).
Nina Westervelt
Has the catalog sales boom affected your bottom line?
When certain catalogs were held by the artist or the artist’s camp, there was a little more flexibility. If a company pays $500 million for an asset, they can’t license something at what they would say is a sort of embarrassing rate. Like, “We’re only licensing this for $10,000 a use; it’s going to take us 200 years to recoup our investment.” On the other hand, I always feel, especially with older catalogs, a movie use is going to open up a new audience to that artist, whether it’s “Oh, that’s Rod Stewart?” or “Wow, I had an idea of what Janis Joplin was like, but I’m surprised by this.”
Does it feel less personal than working with publishers and songwriters?
I wish things were more human and less corporate, but I’ve seen it throughout my whole career. You used to have 12 companies you’d license music from, and then two companies would merge and they’d cut half the staff. They’d have the catalog, but no one would know whom to talk to. A lot of times, what we have to do is convince these companies they actually own something or help them make a connection. That can also be fun — the detective work that goes into figuring out who owns the rights to something. I just wish the music companies had more of an understanding of the process of filmmaking. Oftentimes, it’s not just needing the price to be right — it’s also getting a timely answer. Name the price; just give me an answer.
A cardboard replica of the police car from the Blues Brothers movie by artist Richard Willis.
Nina Westervelt
On the flip side of that, the synch business is so huge. Do you get pitched often?
Yeah, people are pitching nonstop. There are people whom I respect and trust, and my response is always I want to listen to anything you think is great, but I just want to find the right music. This is going to sound horrible, but I don’t do anybody any favors. I’ll do you a favor in life as my friend, but I will not put music in a movie because I’m connected to somebody. I certainly do file things away for the future. I may love a song but not have the right movie for it. At the moment, I’m working on things in the ’20s, the ’50s — period pieces.
How do you seek out new music?
Every way — through social media, through traditional music press, recommendations. I have two daughters who are very into music. Artists lead you to artists a lot. I’ve been very reluctant to use an algorithm to find music. Probably at certain points I’d benefit from that, but I like to discover it myself.
A beaded African tribal hat Poster bought from a street vendor on Manhattan’s Houston Street. “As we started reaching out to artists we loved to make album covers for the box set, I found myself looking at all sorts of bird- centric pieces, and I couldn’t resist them.”
Nina Westervelt
Speaking of discovery, how did you get the idea for the Birdsong Project?
I’m a New York City kid; I’m not really a nature boy. But during the pandemic, we were all somewhat soothed by the way nature seemed to be doing its thing, unperturbed by the virus, and a lot of my friends were noticing there were so many birds. A friend I work with, Rebecca Reagan, who lives in California and is much more involved in nature causes, was like, “You should get all your musician friends to create music around birdsong. That would be a great way to joyfully draw people’s attention not only to the beauty and variety of birds but also the crises facing birds. It would be a nonpolitical way to draw people to protect the birds.” For the most part, I’ve found, no one wants to see birds die. It’s a way to bring together people in community, which seems to be so difficult otherwise. The response from artists was very positive, and it just kept going.
What do you get out of it that you don’t from your day job?
I’m usually the person who has to be a very strong editorial hand in getting what we need for a movie. Here, I just said [to artists], “Thank you.” It was very much a broad invitation to do what they feel. I didn’t really give notes, other than maybe, “Hey, this is beautiful. Can it be nine minutes versus 23 minutes?” It was liberating. I had to allow a certain kind of randomness versus how you sequence music for a movie.
What are your ambitions for the project with respect to the music industry?
I would like to see us adopted by the music community like they have the TJ Martell Foundation. But that may be a longer road. So we’re just working away. The label Erase Tapes has 10 artists on the compilation, so in 2024, they’re going to do a Birdsong album by taking their artists and remixing them, and I’d like to do collaborations with other labels so it spreads. That way I’m not the record company — we work with your artists, we curate with you. I think we’ll be ready in 2025 to hopefully do a big Birdsong concert maybe in Central Park.
At this point in your career, you’re a bit of a music supervision legend. How do you advise young people who want to do what you do?
I encourage them to find their contemporaries who want to make movies and throw in. It has never been easier to make movies. I wanted to work on movies where that one kid in the movie theater thinks, “I want to do this” — Wes and I were that kid. Do whatever you need to do to create and be creative. When people ask me the difference between how I work now and how I worked 25 years ago — well, I probably cry a little bit less, in the sense that when a director does not choose a song I feel is so right, I have more of a balanced [reaction]. I still am up for battles, though. And hopefully, people want to work with me because I’m not just a rubber stamp. We have to fight for every cue.
The premiere of the documentary Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero was delayed after a bomb threat was called in at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Saturday night (Sept. 9) premiere of the film at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall was delayed by about 20 minutes while authorities verified that the threat wasn’t credible. Lil Nas X was kept […]