Marlon Soundtrack
In which we all get to hear some of the MARLON soundtrack.
Eclectic music. Fucked-up, weird, sad, angry music, across all genres. He would love metal, because that's what made him famous, but he would also be into blues, since that's pretty much what he's trying to record, out in his cabin in the woods. Nate listens to country, but Marlon hates country, so we'd need country and rockabilly (Marlon's compromise between country and rock). And he would, of course, listen to sad stuff, because he's depressed and drunk a lot of the time.
(He was a lot more fun to play than he sounds.)
It started with "Killing Jar"
I wrote a horror film in 2013. You can read all about it here. During preproduction, I reached out to a lot of different local musicians, mostly cellists and pianists. I emailed back and forth with a local guy who basically mixed horror movie scores: his reel was all creepy, ambient electronic soundscapes and eerie low-frequency squalls. I already had a lot on my plate, directing and shooting and acting, so I was shopping around for a composer.
Then one sunny winter day, I was sitting in the living room with my acoustic guitar, and I wrote a sad, simple little song called "Killing Jar." Bird was working on some art by the window, and she said, "That's creepy. That should be the closing credits for Marlon." And that was that. After shooting wrapped, I sat down with Dan Zini (the sound designer for Marlon) and we talked about how best to score this weird little indie horror flick we had in front of us, and we decided that, as a musician, Marlon would listen to a lot of music...
That's a lot of music to license, and as it turns out, buying the rights to use a lot of music in a movie is really, really expensive. The whole point of Marlon was to make a movie with my friends and basically no money at all. So I started writing songs. Dan I decided that, rather than a standard score, where music plays in the background and the characters don't really interact with it, we would put the score into a series of radios throughout the film. There's a few bits where "Score" comes in, to accentuate things that are happening on-screen, but for the most part, the soundtrack is characters listening to the radio. Let me tell you: if the radio accentuated your day-to-day life as much as the radios in Marlon do, you'd go crazy too.
Recording the Soundtrack
Recording the rhythm parts for the Marlon score, and Sam's middle finger. A lot.
The soundtrack was recorded at a studio in Escanaba. My brother Sam and I drove all the gear over in a borrowed truck. We spent the first day setting up and getting recording tones figured out. The album itself was recorded in two marathon sessions: Metal tracks the first day, everything else (Rockabilly, Blues, Country, 90s) the second day. Sam only knew one drum part when we got there, writing drum parts as we went along, and (somehow) everything sounded excellent. Lead guitar, bass, and piano were recorded at Dan's home studio, and now? Now Dan is editing, phasing, and mixing the soundtrack. There's been a long run of general bad luck that's hindered process up for awhile (including, but not limited to Bird and I moving to Maine, Dan taking a leap of faith and restructuring his life to chase his dream, and a long series of family emergencies and illnesses), but as of this writing, the way ahead looks clear: the album is coming.