Meg Remy is a music-making machine. The Toronto-based artist always has something cooking; her most recent album as U.S. Girls, Scratch It, came out last year. Her latest is from her first foray into film scoring. She collaborated with filmmaker Grace Glowicki on her new surreal horror-comedy Dead Lover. It's about "a lonely gravedigger who goes to morbid lengths to reanimate her dead lover through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love." Today, Remy shared "You've Got Everyting - But A Smile," a sleepy synth-waltz co-written with Jack Lawrence.
In a press release, Remy also shared a detailed comment on how the composition came together — mostly collaged from her old work that she dug up on old hard drives. She said:
Director Grace Glowicki and I approached the score for Dead Lover by working largely with music that already existed…public domain recordings, fragments from my dusty hard drives, and compositions from my first three deeply lo-fi home-recorded albums. We gathered these sounds into piles we called "scraps" and collaged the score from them, passing the timeline back and forth, adding or subtracting scraps until it felt finished.
Even the main theme, "You’ve Got Everything – But A Smile," was a scrap of sorts. It was an incomplete song Jack Lawrence had living on his computer that got unearthed, polished up and put to use. With all that in mind, it felt intuitive to take a similar collage approach to this music video. Instead of cutting a traditional trailer from the film, I went through all the footage that was shot and edited together "scraps" that weren’t used in the final cut. To paraphrase Kurt Schwitters, when everything has broken down, new things can be made from the fragments to create connections, ideally between everything in this world. Collaging never fails.
Watch the video for the song below.
