Music from the Film

The making of the music

Sound and Image, in Conversation

When I’m making a film, the music is never something I go looking for at the end. It grows alongside the images and the story, and by the time a scene comes together I usually know how it should sound.

I’ve been writing and producing music since I was a kid, and over the years my songs have found their way into films including The Internship, Meet Bill, and When the Game Stands Tall. Until this film, though, I had never scored one of my own.

The Powers: A Life in Art was different. The story was personal to me in a way few projects are, and I could hear the score clearly from early on, so I decided to write a few cues myself. A few turned into more, and by the time we finished I had written over a dozen.

The music needed to feel organic and spare, leaving room for the audience to look. John’s question was always “What do you see?”, and the score had to make space for that rather than tell anyone what to feel. I wanted instrumentation that was distinctive without being whimsical, and I knew it couldn’t be straight symphonic. I was drawn to arrangements that felt tactile and handmade. John played saxophone and clarinet, so wind instruments run through the score, though rarely where you’d expect them.

These are some of my favorites.