Five musicians were charged with adding music to Bob Dylan lyrics from the 1960s for a Showtime documentary; country singer Ty Herndon challenges Nashville conservatism; Lily Amirpour talks about her dark, quirky “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”; vocal lessons from a metal singer.
New music plus old Dylan lyrics in 'Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued'
When a trove of never-used Bob Dylan lyrics from the mid-1960s was uncovered by the songwriter's archivists, producer T-Bone Burnett went to work. After Dylan's permission was secured, Burnett invited five musicians — Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Sons, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Taylor Goldsmith of the band Dawes — to write music for the lyrics. Essentially, they were finishing Dylan's work.
It all took place over two weeks in a studio at Capitol Records and the process was filmed for a Showtime documentary, “Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued.” (Not to be confused with Dylan's "Basement Tapes Complete," a just-released CD collection of everything he recorded with The Band during the same era.)
The documentary's director, Sam Jones, and Rhiannon Giddens sat down for an interview with The Frame.
Interview Highlights:
First, Sam, let's clarify: The songs for your project were created from lyrics Dylan wrote, but never added music to?
That's right. There was a box of basically prose that had no chords or anything, there was just poetry that was probably lyrics on scraps of paper. So these artists got the chance to set not only chords and melody, but create brand new compositions from these lyrics.
Who found the lyrics, and where were they? Did Dylan actually give his blessing for you guys to use them?
All I know is that someone in the Dylan archive office found this box of lyrics as they were looking for the next Dylan "Bootleg" series materials, and Dylan gave his blessing for the artists to pretty much mix-and-match and do what they please with the lyrics, because he trusted T-Bone Burnett and he trusted the artists that were chosen.
Rhiannon, you say in the documentary that you didn't have a deep knowledge of Dylan and his work. So what convinced you to come on board with the project?
Well, anything T-Bone does is interesting and worthwhile. The idea of collaborating with the young Dylan was less interesting to me than the idea of collaborating with these other musicians — musicians that I didn't know very well, musicians coming from very different musical places than I was coming from. I thought that was a really intriguing opportunity of being able to collaborate with these people and being able to make some new music out of a pile of old papers, basically, and some old thoughts. I don't know if they were rejects or just lyrics that he never got around to finishing, but I thought that was a really intriguing idea.
Does country star Ty Herndon's coming out signal a sea change for Nashville?
Coming out as gay isn't so common in the traditionally conservative world of country music. So it was a big deal when singer Ty Herndon came out of the closet this week.
spoke with John Horn on The Frame about Herndon's place in the country music world and what this news means to that industry and culture.
Interview Highlights
Who is Ty Herndon and how big is this announcement?
Ty Herndon is something of a veteran artist whose career peaked in the early '90s, but he's definitely a well-respected guy in Nashville. And he's in his 50s now. He's not part of the current crop of bro'-country artists who are so popular now, but he's someone who Nashville cares about.
How is his announcement being received and has it had any kind of ripple effect with other artists?
Yeah, interestingly enough after Herndon announced that he was out, another country singer named Billy Gilman — who started out as a child star in the back in the early 2000s — also came out yesterday. Apparently he'd been thinking of doing it for a while. So it's a small ripple of one, but it definitely is having some impact.
Herndon had a really thoughtful interview in Billboard magazine and I'm curious what you took away from it?
Yes, it reminded me a lot of what pop stars who were once closeted went through. Ty Herndon had some tussles with the law. He was arrested for soliciting back at the peak of his career. It reminded me of what George Michael went through. So I guess the interview both made me think about what specifically happens in country music around homophobia and the closet, but also how this is a story that goes beyond country music to really include all genres of music— sadly, even in this day-and-age.
Another woman country singer and songwriter, Brandy Clark, has been out as a lesbian for a while. Can you talk a little bit about her career?
Yeah, Brandy Clark is one of my favorites. She was nominated for Best New Artist at the Country Music Awards this year and that's really a big deal because she's never been in the closet. And she is really representative of the changing attitudes in Nashville and in the country music industry about LGBTQ people.
Herndon is scheduled to perform on Monday at country music's shrine, the Grand Ole Opry. I'm curious what you think the reception is going to be like there.
It's going to be interesting for sure. Some people have noted that Charlie Daniels — never the most, shall we say, "progressive" person in country — is also at the Opry that night. But I think that Ty Herndon did a very smart thing by making this announcement several days before he's to appear at the Opry. That gives people time to sort of absorb it and it won't be a huge shock. So hopefully it will be received warmly.
Is country music going to become a little bit more progressive, a little bit more open-minded? Or is it a little bit like professional sports where there's going to be one or two people and the rest are going to be kind of quiet?
I think country music is becoming more progressive in many different ways. Nashville, which is the center for country music, is undergoing an explosive phase of growth. And country music now is incorporating hip-hop elements for example. I really think this is the future for the culture of the South in general. We think of the South as super conservative, but on the ground — beyond the strictly electoral politics realm — there's actually a lot of change happening on the ground. And I think country's reflecting that.
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'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night': The world's first Iranian vampire Western
It takes an ambitious person to make her debut feature film a highly-stylized blend of vampire horror with the moodiness of a Spaghetti Western. Add to that a film that's in black and white in Farsi with subtitles, and it might seem like an impossible feat to pull off for a first-time filmmaker.
But Ana Lily Amirpour's debut, "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night," is defying the odds and gaining accolades since it debuted in the "Next" category of this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Described as "the first Iranian vampire Western," Amirpour's film tells the story of a lonely, chador-cloaked vampire known only as "The Girl." She roams the streets of a fictional Iranian town called Bad City (the film was actually shot in the central California town of Taft), where pimps, prostitutes and addicts swirl together in a culture of violence.
When Amirpour stopped by The Frame recently, we asked about her history with horror flicks, the joy of designing characters, and pitching a "black-and-white Iranian vampire Western with a dope soundtrack."
Interview Highlights:
When did you first start getting into horror movies?
At 8 or 9 I started watching horror movies, and I consumed them ravenously for, like, five years. Everything. I watched "Faces of Death" when I was like 10. I don't think my parents knew what the hell was going on. [laughs]
"Faces of Death" was a compilation of people actually dying; it was basically a legal snuff film. So you have an obsession with death and morbidity?
I did, I did. My father was a surgeon, and, when I was 12, I went into the operating room with him. I watched him amputate a leg, which is really medieval, surprisingly, because you'd think they'd have a more futuristic way to do it, but it's just with a saw. So I saw my dad sawing off this guy's leg. But the thing that I've always really been into is fairy tale and fantasy. I like "The NeverEnding Story," [Richard] Donner's "Superman," "Back to the Future." You know, films like that.
If you took a lot of the images out of your film, it would look as if it were a graphic novel. How do all the images and ideas start to coalesce around a script?
For "Girl," I really started with the chador — the cloak or the cape that she wears. I put one on, and I felt like a bat, or a stingray, or some kind of creature. And then I thought, "Oh, yeah, of course, this is an Iranian vampire. That's her." It's a brilliant disguise. And I was really obsessed with this character, and the whole story grew out of her. I think designing characters is great, and the fun of that is seeing where each one leads; you know, the Persian James Dean, the prostitute, the pimp ... designing a gangster is so much fun.
Do you write visually? Because if you took all the dialogue in your film and boiled it down to a screenplay, it would maybe get 10-11 pages of dialogue. Do you write very specifically about the look and the visual composition of each scene?
I do that, and I reference other movies that moments or characters are inspired by, too. "Enter the] Ninja" from Die Antwood was one of the muses for one of the characters in the film, for the pimp. And just because there's not dialogue doesn't mean there's not a lot happening. I'm a huge fan of Sergio Leone's Westerns, where you have all this pregnant space, but there's something happening in that space. Actually, the best thing to me is tension; it's delicious, juicy.
This film is set in a fictional city called Bad City. You're also filming in a city that, in many ways, is kind of on the periphery of California: Taft, outside of Bakersfield. Does the city itself become a character in your movie?
Totally and completely. I think it's interesting to think about it in terms of the edges, because in the major cities in America, things are a certain way — we have our lattes and our appointments and our quinoa salads, or whatever. You drive one hour in any direction, and most of America is stuck in a past decade, and people look strange and talk strange, and the physics and laws of those worlds are very much unto themselves. And I think that's America. I think Taft is definitely one of those places. It's a small oil town, very economically depressed, and I got to know these people, and they're really lovely, warm, interesting, strange people.
You're the child of Iranian parents, you were born in England, and you grew up in the United States. The film itself is in Farsi, and set in ...
The Iran of the mind.
How much of your own ethnic background informs the place in which this film is set?
It's interesting. There's this question of authenticity or something, like how Iranian is it, or how American? I think, really, the film as a whole — it's kind of an epiphany I've had over the time of talking about it so much — is a very accurate depiction of just how Iranian or just how American I am. It's a mashup, truly.
One of the shorthands that's been used to describe this film in at least one review is "Middle Eastern feminist vampire romance." When you were trying to get this movie going and you were trying to attract people to back you, did you run into difficulties getting people to believe in this movie?
The word "feminist" was never my word. Somebody else put that word out after the movie came out. When I was planning the movie it was a "black-and-white Iranian vampire Western with a dope soundtrack." That was my elevator pitch. I think what happened was, because I kind of really fully packaged this film myself — I had all the cast, I had all the music, I had this town, I had the '57 T-Bird, I had the cat — it's so weird and freaky, that it very quickly and efficiently made it clear who was "Team Girl" and who was not. You're either in or you're out.
And didn't Elijah Wood come in at one point?
Elijah heard about the film when I was raising money and getting it going. He heard from a friend, Sheri Davani, one of my producers, and she [told] him, "My friend's doing this black-and-white Iranian vampire film." And he got really excited and wanted to read the script. He read the script and was like, "I love it." He was starting SpectreVision, his own production company, and he wanted to make freaky, awesome, weird, next-level art films.
So did he end up investing in the film?
Yeah, because of him we were able to raise the rest of the money to make the film.
Your movie has been incredibly well-received. Now that it's about to come out, what do you want to do next? And how has this movie helped you present yourself as a filmmaker who has great and other interesting ideas?
Knock on wood. [laughs] That's really the point: I just want to keep exploring myself, what's inside myself, and take a look at it. It's a constantly changing thing. I think the first film is a very, very fragile and important place, because you don't really exist as a filmmaker yet, and your first film becomes this outward identity to audiences and the industry and all the people— so your first film is really like picking a fragrance. You see who it attracts, and you want to attract the right people, the people that get you and get the freaky stuff that you want to do, the people who want to see more of that. And that's happened, so I'm shooting my next film this spring, and I'm really excited about it.
How the singer from the metal band Deafheaven keeps from destroying his voice
The San Francisco metal band Deafheaven is known for its aggressive drum beats, 14-minute-long songs and intense, screaming vocals. So it's no surprise that it's a challenge to bring those songs to the stage.
The Frame recently talked with singer/screamer George Clarke during the band's Converse Rubber Tracks stop at The Echo about how the band keeps the energy up at a concert and how Clarke keeps from blowing out his voice.
Interview Highlights:
How do you keep from losing your voice on tour?:
I think with screaming and aggressive vocals in general, it's like any other type of singing. You have to train your voice. It takes work. When we first started, I'd blow out all the time. Like, our first tours, when we were really young, I'd have to spend days in the van not speaking. But you learn control and I can do ranges and things like that now, whereas before that was sort of difficult for me.
Do you get physically worn out from playing aggressive shows?:
When we're on stage, vocally I don't really get tired, but physically, yeah, absolutely. We play an hour, hour-plus now, and there's not a whole lot of breaks. We have these short interludes between songs, but I like our shows to be as physical as possible and that typically involves a lot of crowd interaction. They are forcing themselves against the stage and they are jumping on the stage and there's stage diving and there's people singing along and there's people reaching up. It's the only time you feel on top of the world. It's cool, and then when the show's done I completely deflate. I'm just, like, slumped over in a corner backstage trying to dry off.
What is the worst show you've ever played?:
A lot of the recent shows that we've played, at least in the last year, have just been phenomenal. But worst shows are also very strong in my memory. We played this festival which is really well-run and cool. It was called "Sound & Fury." It's entirely a hardcore festival. So we were the odd man out going in, but. wow, we played at like 3 p.m. on a Sunday and I was really nervous. So actually, to combat that, I got really drunk. So I'm hammered at 3 p.m. in front of a crowd of people who couldn't care less about us, who know I'm drunk and probably hate me for it. And we're playing and it doesn't sound good and it was, like, just ... I mean, blank stares that turned into a slow walk-away. Like the slow backpedal, and I could feel it. I was looking at my bandmates, like, We've got to get off the stage.
What's the best show you've played?:
On the opposite end of that, great shows ... I mean, we played the El Rey Theatre [in Los Angeles], which was a goal of mine and it sold out and I was more than excited. And there were so many good people and such a beautiful venue. It's either everything doesn't connect and it's total hell, but when it does ... there's no greater high. Again, a cliché, but it's really true.