While I don’t recommend reading the entire book in one rainy night alone, as I did, The Roadby Cormac McCarthy is certainly a riveting, visceral work from one of my favorite authors. My friend Ben started reading it on a Kindle on our drive back from SXSW, and we lost him for the rest of the trip (with a headlamp after dark, even). It is a formidable book, all-absorbing and astounding.
I am quite curious for whatever I can learn about the upcoming film adaptation, featuring Viggo Mortenson and directed by Australian John Hillcoat. The musical score for The Road is being written by one of my other favorite Aussies, Nick Cave.
The two previously worked together on a few features — from Cave contributing writing and acting in Hillcoat’s 1989 movie Ghosts of the Civil Dead, to Hillcoat directing the 2003 music video feature for Nick’s song “Babe I’m On Fire.” Cave also wrote the screenplay and soundtrack for Hillcoat’s 2005 film The Proposition.
The recent 4-minute BBC clip below unveils some of Nick Cave’s musical score for The Road for the first time – elegiac and stirring piano, which is an interesting choice. In my mind, the story in the book is accompanied by a deafeningly vacant amount of pure silence.
Even though some of my favorite moments from Nick Cave are of the rocking variety, he undeniably does the pretty stuff so well — evocative and sad. Check this live video of “Into My Arms,” also from the BBC:
I don’t believe in an interventionist god
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Oh, not to touch a hair on your head
Leave you as you are
If he felt he had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms…
Ben Nichols of Lucerohas a gravelly, urgent voice full of hard wilderness. I cannot fully tell you how excited I am by the fact that his new solo album The Last Pale Light In The West is inspired by the Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian, which I coincidentally just started reading last week. McCarthy is one of my favorite authors, and Nichols has the chops to compose the perfect atmospheric soundtrack to his writing.
The seven song “mini-LP” was recorded this past summer with Rick Steff (Cat Power, Lucero) and Todd Beene (Glossary), and will be released January 2009 via Liberty & Lament / The Rebel Group.
In full band news, the formidable Lucero [previous lavish Fuel/Friends love] has signed to Universal, and they’ll be heading into the studio to record music for their 6th studio LP at the end of 2008, which is scheduled for release in summer 2009.
This past weekend, Into The Wild finally trickled down to those of us not located in big glamorous cities. I promise not to wreck it for you if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, these are just a few of my thoughts after having done both this past week.
Components of McCandless’ grand Alaskan adventure tug relentlessly and almost perniciously at some loose threads inside me. I suspect that elements of following your passion with such unbridled drive and joy touch many of us on some level, which is why the book sold so well, and why the movie was made. I was glad I had read the book first, shading the characters, the motivations, filling in the missing chunks, but the movie was very faithful to the book.
The movie review in our local paper said that McCandless was “sanctimonious and arrogant,” and that sat so wrong with me. I surely didn’t know McCandless, and it’s easy to forget after the book and the film and a big-name soundtrack that he was actually a real person. But more than anything to me, he seemed sincere, even if the misguided optimism about his odds of success in the wild ended up fatal.
As one interviewee in the book named Sleight said, while relating Chris with another wilderness wanderer who was profiled named Everett Ruess: “Everett was strange, kind of different. But him and and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That was what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.” That, for me, was the core of the story.
I noticed that McCandless seemed to deeply affect everyone whose lives he came into, like a bolt of lightning. Everyone interviewed for the book remembered him well, much better than your standard vagrant who enters your life for a few hours or days, for a meal or a ride. But you know, I found myself empathizing with the people that McCandless left behind at every stop along the way, after he took what he needed from them — be it conversation, a father figure, travel advice, a laugh, a discussion of literature, the bouncing off of ideas and philosophical concepts. Like a blue-green bolt of ephemeral electricity he lit up their skies for a moment. But very soon, the wanderlust inside him compelled him to travel on. Everyone seemed to feel a gaping void there after Chris left, something you see especially vividly in the movie. Maybe he’s one of those shooting stars that you almost wish you’d never crossed paths with at all because everything seems dimmer in their absence, the afterglow they leave behind radiating off the otherwise dull grey walls around you.
How does the music complement the film? Very well, as I suspected. Vedder’s scoring is bittersweet and powerful, especially a memorable scene with “The Wolf,” where Vedder sounds his barbaric yawp over the roofs of this world (or actually the treeline of the Alaskan wilderness) as McCandless stands with arms outstretched on top of his bus-home, feeling the pull and glory of the wilderness. Vedder’s unselfconscious animal cries made the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
One specific lyric on the soundtrack that I keep rolling around in my mind is found in the song “Guaranteed.” Vedder sings “Circles they grow and they swallow people whole…” I keep thinking of what he may have meant by this line. I come up with more than one circle. Anyone who has ever found a certain idea hard to leave behind knows the exhaustion that comes with continuing to revisit it, as it soaks up the attention and the circle gets stronger in our minds. I wonder if McCandless escaped the beige circles of mediocre daily living, only to find himself pursuing a more savage circle of Alaskan wilderness. Both will swallow you whole.
Now that I am done reading Into the Wild, I have moved on to Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road and it is currently scaring the absolute bejesus out of me with its incinerated post-apocalyptic vision. More on that later but sheesh.
Name: Heather Browne Location: Colorado, originally by way of California Giving context to the torrent since 2005.
"I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part..."
—Nick Hornby, Songbook
"Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel." —Hunter S. Thompson
Mp3s are for sampling purposes, kinda like when they give you the cheese cube at Costco, knowing that you'll often go home with having bought the whole 7 lb. spiced Brie log. They are left up for a limited time. If you LIKE the music, go and support these artists, buy their schwag, go to their concerts, purchase their CDs/records and tell all your friends. Rock on.
Name: Heather Browne
