By now you probably think we have a man-crush on Brian Reitzell we’ve written about him so much (he recently just composed the score to the horror flick “30 Days Of Night“).
What can we say dude has good taste – Sofia Coppola knows this, she hires him to be her music supervisor on every film (think the excellent soundtracks of “Lost In Translation,” The Virgin Suicides,” “Marie Antoinette”)
In the liner notes for the “Stranger Than Fiction” soundtrack album, Reitzell wrote:
“When I was approached to do the music for ‘Stranger Than Fiction,’ I thought it might be the perfect occasion for Britt Daniel and I to collaborate…I was basically scoring the film with Spoon songs – it created a kind of sonic thread that had just the right amount of nervy melody and rich, simplistic tone I thought suited Zach’s story and Marc’s vision of the film. The actual ‘job’ of scoring that Britt and I were so excited about doing together became a much easier task since the existing and newly remixed music worked so well.For this soundtrack album, it seemed appropriate to include the full vocal versions of the songs so you can hear them in all their glory as the band originally intended.”
Download: Britt Daniel & Brian Reitzell – “Writer’s Block”
Download: Britt Daniel & Brian Reitzell – “Flours”
Download: Britt Daniel & Brian Reitzell – “Audtior”
Download: Spoon – “The Book I Write”
i once saw jon brion talking about his work on huckabees. he used songs that he’d written before he’d even seen the film and ‘they worked great.’ ditto on kimya’s comments re juno. i’m a huge jon brion fan AND a huge moldy peaches fan AND a huge brian reitzell fan and KILL THE MOONLIGHT is like my favorite spoon record but i couldn’t help but feel a little let down by britt & brian’s ‘score’ work. besides a couple cues it was, like, spoon songs without the vocals. i’m a composer and a rocker and scoring to picture is super precious to me. song placement called score feels cheap, no matter how obscure or neato those songs might be. do i need therapy?
Brion actually started just playing his own unreleased songs as a warm up when he was going to score ‘Huckabees’ and the director O. Russell loved them and wanted to use them immediately.
They coincidentally had lyrics that also fit into the existentialist, “what-does-it-all-mean” vibe of ‘Huckabees.’
He said he was planning on eventually releasing the vocal versions and people would see the connections, but that was years ago and he never has.
I know cause i did the interview. Love the Brion, talked to him many times, but a bit of a flake when it comes to various projects.
Not entirely his fault though, he just gets offered good work which pushes his own work to the margins.