Johnny Jewel's synths were dropped from Drive but make perfect Symmetry
One day in September 2010, Johnny Jewel arrived in Los Angeles, chiefly to play a show with his bands Chromatics and Glass Candy, but also to make an appointment. Attending that evening's concert were the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and the actor Ryan Gosling. Jewel and Refn were already familiar – the Dane had used the Glass Candy song Digital Versicolor on the score to 2009's Bronson – but now the director wanted to talk to Jewel about a new collaboration.One day in September 2010, Johnny Jewel arrived in Los Angeles, chiefly to play a show with his bands Chromatics and Glass Candy, but also to make an appointment. Attending that evening's concert were the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and the actor Ryan Gosling. Jewel and Refn were already familiar – the Dane had used the Glass Candy song Digital Versicolor on the score to 2009's Bronson – but now the director wanted to talk to Jewel about a new collaboration.Ultimately, it wasn't to be. Drive turned out to be a bigger deal than anyone involved imagined, and while Night Drive's nocturnal tone supplanted the sun-baked aesthetic of the novel, the studio brought in veteran film composer Cliff Martinez to complete the score (two Jewel-produced tracks, Chromatics' Tick Of The Clock and Desire's Under Your Spell did, however, make the final cut). "That's Hollywood, all the cliches are there, and they're even worse than you already think," he says. "I know it's not a nice thing to say, but my score was superior: it was the director's choice, Ryan's choice … but in movie production, there's a money side and a creative side, and they don't always meet in the middle."
Keen not to let the music go to waste, Jewel set to work shaping the lost Drive score into a new project, one he nicknamed Symmetry. Increasingly, though, the soundtrack material seemed to be dovetailing with a new strain of his music, an instrumental, less song-tethered sound that he had been pursuing with the help of studio collaborator and Chromatics drummer Nat Walker since 2008. The material now collected on new album Symmetry: Themes For An Imaginary Film is spacier and darker than Jewel's diva-voiced pop material, its pulsing synths and deep atmospherics echoing work of film music greats such as John Carpenter and Goblin's Claudio Simonetti. "When I'm achieving a real moment with a pop song, I have this almost religious feeling of joy, almost to the point of tears," says Jewel. "With the Symmetry music, the overwhelming feeling was of paranoia. I'd find myself in the studio gritting my teeth."
Jewel insists that while some Drive material is scattered around Symmetry, it should not be regarded as the film's lost score (for one, its two-hour duration exceeds the movie's running time by a half-hour). It is, though, an epic piece of work, and evocative of Drive's sense of tension and release. "I sweated over the sequencing for almost a month," says Jewel. "There's no obvious point that's trying to be made, or story to be told. It's supposed to be open, so your life kind of creeps in."
Post-Drive, a number of movie offers are on the table. Gosling has asked Jewel to score his forthcoming directorial debut, and Jewel is in discussions around Refn's forthcoming remake of Logan's Run. "They're going to be shooting in 2013, and they're working on the screenplay right now, trying to work out what direction to go into," he reveals. "But you know, timing is everything."
Right now, though, his priority is the new Chromatics album, Kill For Love, due out on Valentine's Day. "If I'm going to take time away to score a film, it needs to be worth it," he says. His full-time job, he insists, is working further with the bands of the Italians Do It Better roster – Chromatics, Desire, Glass Candy – plus a number of new projects still in the pipeline. "We've been talking about everyone relocating to California, to a beach town, and getting a compound going," he says.
That sounds almost … cult-like? "Yeah, well that's who we are," he laughs. "We're a family! That's why you never see us on other people's records. It's very much like a cult. But we're OK with that."
Keen not to let the music go to waste, Jewel set to work shaping the lost Drive score into a new project, one he nicknamed Symmetry. Increasingly, though, the soundtrack material seemed to be dovetailing with a new strain of his music, an instrumental, less song-tethered sound that he had been pursuing with the help of studio collaborator and Chromatics drummer Nat Walker since 2008. The material now collected on new album Symmetry: Themes For An Imaginary Film is spacier and darker than Jewel's diva-voiced pop material, its pulsing synths and deep atmospherics echoing work of film music greats such as John Carpenter and Goblin's Claudio Simonetti. "When I'm achieving a real moment with a pop song, I have this almost religious feeling of joy, almost to the point of tears," says Jewel. "With the Symmetry music, the overwhelming feeling was of paranoia. I'd find myself in the studio gritting my teeth."
Jewel insists that while some Drive material is scattered around Symmetry, it should not be regarded as the film's lost score (for one, its two-hour duration exceeds the movie's running time by a half-hour). It is, though, an epic piece of work, and evocative of Drive's sense of tension and release. "I sweated over the sequencing for almost a month," says Jewel. "There's no obvious point that's trying to be made, or story to be told. It's supposed to be open, so your life kind of creeps in."
Post-Drive, a number of movie offers are on the table. Gosling has asked Jewel to score his forthcoming directorial debut, and Jewel is in discussions around Refn's forthcoming remake of Logan's Run. "They're going to be shooting in 2013, and they're working on the screenplay right now, trying to work out what direction to go into," he reveals. "But you know, timing is everything."
Right now, though, his priority is the new Chromatics album, Kill For Love, due out on Valentine's Day. "If I'm going to take time away to score a film, it needs to be worth it," he says. His full-time job, he insists, is working further with the bands of the Italians Do It Better roster – Chromatics, Desire, Glass Candy – plus a number of new projects still in the pipeline. "We've been talking about everyone relocating to California, to a beach town, and getting a compound going," he says.
That sounds almost … cult-like? "Yeah, well that's who we are," he laughs. "We're a family! That's why you never see us on other people's records. It's very much like a cult. But we're OK with that."
