For some reason, Nick Cave contributed to the Joker: Folie à Deux soundtrack last year. Now, he's back with music for (presumably) a much better film: Clint Bentley's Train Dreams, based on the 2011 Denis Johnson novella of the same title. The song was made in collaboration with Bryce Dessner.
Per the Hollywood Reporter, Cave was inspired to write "Train Dreams" after the movie premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival. It was co-written and co-produced by Dessner, with additional production from Luis Almau. The track now plays over the end credits and has been added to its soundtrack, which comes out on Nov. 7, the day of the film release.
“When we started thinking about making a song for the film, Nick felt like the perfect artist to do it,” Bentley told the Hollywood Reporter, continuing:
It turns out that Train Dreams is one of his all-time favorite books, but he initially feared there wouldn’t be time to do something because he was getting ready to go on tour. Then he watched the film and was inspired to write something and the whole thing came together really quickly.
I knew he would craft something beautiful and resonant, but the film has such a delicate tone at the end, one that was really hard to get right, and I didn’t want a song that would push the audience in another direction emotionally. But Nick and I were very much on the same page from the outset. He read some early lyrics to me that he was working on and I was just really a bit overwhelmed with the whole situation — I’ve been a fan of his for such a long time and there I was, not only having a really lovely conversation with him about life and art, but he was also reading lyrics to me that he was writing for a film I made. It was a really special moment.
He’s a very rare artist and one I admire immensely. There’s no one thing that defines a Nick Cave song — sonically, lyrically, or otherwise. He’s got songs about everything, all the varieties of our experience here. There’s a deep poeticism alongside rock and roll. And that just felt like the perfect fit for a film like this that’s telling the story of this person who lived a beautiful resonant life, even if it did include heartache and pain.
Hear a preview of it below.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNWD8WbxV1U/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading
