By Tomasz Ludward
Son Lux, the trio of Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia, and Ian Chang, earned an Academy Award and BAFTA nomination for their score to Everything Everywhere All at Once. The band is about to release the album Out Into and the score to Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother. We spoke in Wrocław, where Son Lux performed at the WROSound festival.
Beyond your work with the director, you’re also collaborating with mixers, soloists, engineers, entire studios. Two things I’m curious about: does the music ever feel like it leaves your hands, like you’re handing your ideas over to people you don’t know? And did any part of it end up becoming something you hadn’t expected?
RAFIQ: No, the intention doesn’t ever leave, but the music does become something we couldn’t have quite imagined. Both of these things can be true at once, because music doesn’t exist in the world separate from the way in which it comes to life. We’ve been lucky, in our work in film, to choose our collaborators carefully: the mixers, the studios, the featured artists, the soloists, the editors, the directors. With Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Daniels [directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert] had already built a collaborative family over successive projects; they kept bringing the same people back. For us, it was our first time working with them, which was a little unusual for the core team, but we were welcomed into that family quickly. In sports, people often focus on the star player. But we’ve all seen an all-star team lose badly, and the lesson is that great players don’t automatically make a great team. What you learn working with people like the Daniels is that collaboration yields something stronger than any of us could build alone. One example that comes to mind, especially with the new film: we’ve worked with the same music mixer Satoshi Noguchi, on all three projects. At this point we can say almost nothing to him, and what comes back is a version of what we intended that we ourselves could never have manifested. It’s the kind of relationship where you finish each other’s sentences. The music wouldn’t be what it is without that broader context.
The film moves through a multiverse of genres: Debussy and classical music one moment, Disney, opera, slapstick comedy the next. How did you actually approach the research? Did you sit down with Alan Menken’s Beauty and the Beast, or work with someone from the Philharmonic to get the Debussy right?
RYAN: We’re all omnivorous listeners, and have been for a long time. So in a sense, we’ve always been researching. That was one of the rewarding things about the film: tapping into skills and affinities we’d developed over the years, but never had a real outlet for (certainly not in a single project). Usually, a project calls on one or two things you do particularly well. This one asked for things we’d never done before, and things we already did well, all at once: the full spectrum. A lot of the specific genre references came from the Daniels directly. “Clair de Lune” was written into the script. For the Chinese opera sequence, they’d researched what they wanted and found a specific Chinese folk song. We studied the recording they found, and the brief was: recreate this faithfully, but transform and orchestrate it as the scene progresses. So we got to honor an established tradition, and also bring ourselves to it at the same time. I’m glad the movie gave us an opportunity to do something like this!
You were brought onto Everything Everywhere very early: two or three years before release, which isn’t standard in Hollywood, where composers sometimes get two weeks, or get replaced outright. What would have happened if you’d only had a year, or six months?
IAN: It would have been hard. Ryan already had experience scoring films; Rafiq and I had never scored a picture before that one. The long runway gave us room to learn as we went. With just a year, it would have been a very different score, and probably a different movie. The prolonged timeline was a factor for everyone, partly because of COVID. The whole production got that unusually long runway, which this film really benefited from, given how dense and detailed it is. I’m glad we had the time, especially to learn the craft while scoring what’s essentially three movies in one.
It’s interesting you mention density, I think that even years after the premiere, the film hasn’t dated, because the world it’s speaking to has only gotten denser since: social media driving more of our decisions, more information to sort through, less clarity about what to do with any of it. Do you agree?
RYAN: Something about the film feels very new, very singular: in how it was made, what it looks like, what it sounds like, how it’s put together. But the themes are timeless: intergenerational conflict, the immigrant story, the cultural disconnect that gets heightened when one generation finds a home in a different world. There are plenty of films that take on those universal themes, but none quite like this one. I’m proud to say I don’t think that score sounds or feels like anything else, but we have the Daniels to thank for that as much as each other.
You said yesterday, Ryan, that you prefer to start with a light motif or theme and build outward from there. Is that always the process: start with the core sound, then build the world around it?
RYAN: We were talking about the score’s role in making each universe quickly identifiable, then weaving them together with melodic themes. But no, I wouldn’t say that’s how we always start a score, and I hope there’s never a version of us that starts a score the same way every time. I think of every film as an opportunity to discover, and to stay open to whatever’s available to support the story, rather than falling back on habit. That’s one of the things I love about film work: it makes you rethink your process every time, based on context. As a band, we’re always trying to do something we haven’t done before, and every scoring project gives us that chance.
Something else you mentioned yesterday: on Thunderbolts*, you didn’t agree to use a temp track. Is it ever easy to tell producers that? Normally it’s not: a temp track is common, easy, faster.
RYAN: It depends on the trust you have with your fellow filmmakers, and on the logistics of availability. With Thunderbolts*, we made a point of getting involved much earlier than composers usually are. The same was true on Everything Everywhere All at Once. That early access is a luxury: it gives us room to shape the emotional sound of a film from scratch, instead of following pre-established musical ideas. But it’s also a lot more work: the fun kind, discovery and trial and error. There’s real risk in it, too.
IAN: The trial-and-error part is worth highlighting, there’s a real risk you build an entire sound world, and either the director says it’s not right and you need a new direction, or everyone’s excited early on, and then once it’s actually cut together, they come back and say it needs to change again.
RYAN: So, you don’t really know going in, but you commit to the risk anyway.
With Out Into coming out: after a few years mostly focused on film work, does going back to the band require unlearning any studio habits, or is that not really how it works?
RAFIQ: Not really: release order and creation order aren’t the same thing. We were actually working on Out Into while scoring these films at the same time. In a lot of ways, this album feels like a reaction to scoring film, or maybe more precisely, there are certain energies we now have an outlet for in the scoring format that we didn’t feel we need to bring into the album. We love D’Angelo, we love Bob Marley and the Wailers, we love J Dilla: music that doesn’t need a million elements, a million sudden turns inside every track. It can be surprising and fresh, but also just a simple cycling fragment, something sparse you want to live inside. That’s something we got to explore on the album that we’re not usually asked to bring to a score; I still hope someone wants that for a film one day. Since we were making the album at the same time as we were writing film music, there’s almost an oppositional, counterweight energy between the two.
What can you tell us about the score to the upcoming film Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother? There’s a sense it could follow Everything Everywhere’s path: limited release, awards conversation, and hopefully a big audience.
RAFIQ: We genuinely have no idea how it’ll do; even with Everything Everywhere, as much as we loved it, we didn’t expect what happened. Musically, it’s a very different score from the other two. Expect a lot of vocal writing: it’s the first film with all three of our voices on the score, which we’ve never done on a record before, plus a group of singers far better than us. It took a lot of exploring to land on the right vibe: some very tender, beautiful material, and some very intense, violent-sounding material. Bassam Tariq, the director, kept coming back to the mercy of God and the majesty of God as a reference point while we worked, and I think both of those (the soft side and the harder, more visceral side) come through in the music. People have described it, as an elevator pitch, as a ‘Muslim Samurai Western.’ I like that description, because it tells you this isn’t a film you can pin down easily. We were chasing it the whole way, trying to figure out how to serve the vision. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen, and I’m excited for people to experience it as a whole piece of work. One thing Bassam talked about a lot, and that really landed with us, was mystery in sound, the idea of struggling to communicate, which to me ties back to an idea I’ve encountered in the esoteric practice of Islam: the poetics of yearning and yet ultimately failing to be able to fully communicate the unknowable. Historically, we’ve leaned toward clarity in our music: contrast, surprise, but ultimately clarity. This score asked us what it would mean to embrace mystery instead.
