Interview: John Ottman, Editor and Composer of “X-Men: Days of Future Past”

Posted on May 27, 2014 at 8:00 am

I last talked to editor/composer John Ottman about “Jack the Giant Slayer” and loved hearing about his unique combination of roles, often working with his former classmate, director Bryan Singer. They collaborated again on X-Men: Days of Future Past and it was a pleasure to catch up with him to discuss the challenges as both editor and composer of working with so many characters and two different time periods.

You have so many characters in this film and some of them change their appearance a lot, either due to use of their superpowers or being played by different actors in different time periods. How do you as an editor help the audience keep everybody straight?

The hardest thing when you have many characters in a room in one scene is to basically keep their presence alive in the scene. If you spend too much time with one character talking, your mind inevitably wants to know what the other characters are thinking or how they are reacting. And if you spend too much time away from showing their reaction to the other character talking, the more I think you feel uncomfortable in the scene. So the challenge is sort of the keep everybody alive even if they’re not speaking.

What are some of the ways that you do that?

I just put myself in the mind of the audience. I’m watching someone speak and I as soon as I start to wonder what the other character or character being spoken of might be a reacting, I want to see them. I use my own reaction to cut to another character.

And there are different time periods in this film also.

Yeah, there’s a dreary future and then there is 1973. Logan’s consciousness was fed back into his younger self so that he can change an event that happens in the past so that the future might be fixed or not be so dreary.

How do you keep the audience constantly aware of where they are in time?

It’s pretty obvious where you are. Nevertheless, we did have internal debates sometimes where people were like, “Are you sure people know that we are in 1973?” “I think so.” But that wasn’t a huge problem. It was just basically the timing and keeping the storyline as clear as possible. It’s extremely convoluted and a very complex story.

You’ve got the young and old version of some of the characters, right?

Correct, yes. And the other biggest challenge of the film was the time travel aspect. It’s like the “whack a mole” game where you whack one mole and then you create another problem. It’s sort of like you have to keep whacking a mole until you can live with the smallest problem. But there will always be imperfections in time travel stories so that was a big challenge; sort of building consensus with everyone to try to accept what we were going to accept.

Did you once again do the editing first and then composing second?

Of course, yes. It’s overwhelming to actually deal with all of the management of the film to get it together. The editing is not just putting pieces together. At least for me it’s also storyboarding scenes, it’s designing the pre-visualization of the scenes with the pre-vis artists, it’s generating the shot list with the second editing director, visual effects issues, looping the actors and all that endless stuff. I have no hope of even starting to write the score until I have some sort of editor’s cut.

So do you work with a temporary music track as you are editing?

Yes, but people would be surprised to know that I don’t really use music to cut my scenes together. I wait until I get my full editor’s cut together before I put any temporary music in. And working without music, I know where the film is strong and it’s not reliant on the score. Once I get to that point, I spend about two weeks putting temporary music in so we can have screenings and show the studio.

I’d like to go back to that same challenge of two time periods and so many characters. How do you use the music to help the audience keep it all straight? You don’t have different themes for the characters, right?

In fact this has fewer characters themes than X-Men 2. It’s not so typically superhero-like when a character walks and you hear a motif for them.

This film is different so it does not really lend itself to have numerous character themes. There is the overall theme of the film; the X-Men world, which is my theme from X-II but then there are really three other themes in the film. The main one is Charles Xavier’s theme because it’s really his story about how his character has lost all the hope when we see him in the 70’s.

And it’s Logan really trying to get him to rekindle that hope. That’s the centerpiece of the score; at least subliminally, his music. And also he’s trying to fight for Raven’s soul so she has a little bit of a motif in the movie and then Magneto himself has a very simple very accessible motif. There’s not much time in modern movies to establish a beginning, middle and end theme for each character so you barely have time to do signature sound that you can recognize, so his is very simple but very sort of malevolent.

For lack of a better description, there’s a metallic sort of sound. And Mystique has her transformation swishy kind of sound. So I obviously left room for those things. I am very involved in the sound design so I think I surprise people when I am directing the dub as the editor, how I often bury the music or intertwine it with the sounds I use.

What about the time period differences? Are there different instruments or different time indicators?

The 70s gave me an excuse to use some analog synthesizers; we use some old keyboard synthesizers and electric piano and guitar, sometimes very subtly but it was fun to do that. And especially for the sentinels of the past, I was able to do some sort of electronics that were of the period. The score for me is unlike Jack in that Jack was a very pure orchestral swashbuckling score where you had basically everything emulated from the orchestra. This score was very synthesizer heavy with orchestral supplementation. So that was just our decision because every movie is different and that’s what felt right for this film.

If you could take one of the X-Men, which powers would you pick?

I guess I would have Mystique’s power so I can sort of… I can be really out of shape and morph into someone has a great body.

Yeah, I think we’d all like that one!

Interview: James Levine, Composer of “American Horror Story,” “Royal Pains,” and “Glee”

Posted on May 12, 2014 at 8:00 am

Composer James S. Levine worked on two of my favorite television series, so I was especially delighted to get a chance to speak to him. I love “Glee’s” fabulously curated choral selections. And I love the soundtrack to “Royal Pains,” which so perfectly matches the sun-drenched Hamptons setting and the slight humorous, outsider-y edge of the Lawsons. Levine has also worked on other hit series, including “American Horror Story,” “The Closer,” and “The Blacklist.”

What was the first instrument you ever played?

Piano. I had to ask for piano lessons. I was the youngest of three. I started asking for piano lessons when I was about seven and started when I was about nine. I had this great little local teacher, classical at first. Then I started bringing in pop songs that I wanted to play. My sister was a singer in high school and used to be in musical theater. I wanted to accompany her so I’d learn the song she was singing, show tunes, some pop songs as well.

When I was 13 I switched to a different teacher. I wanted to learn jazz and improvisation and so I switched teachers. He became a mentor to me and I studied with him through college.

What did you study in college?

I decided to get a Bachelors degree in American Studies. I really got into how music functions in society, so I studied music from that perspective. the function of music and culture and then the actual nuts and bolts of musical training I did with this fantastic teacher who I studied with until I was 23.

And when you thinking about music in society, where you very aware of music in movies and television?

Of course, yeah. Totally always very aware of that, sort of loved doing that or thinking about doing that while playing in bands or playing in shows and playing songs, writing songs, that sort of stuff. Sort of anything I could do I would do, that sort of thing.

Why is it that we no longer have the distinctive TV theme songs as we used to in the 60’s and 70’s?

I think that there is this sort of push to get to the show right away so you don’t lose the viewer. And there is a fear of making a definitive statement out of the gate. I think people are afraid that if you establish a tone that’s too specific immediately you might turn off a bunch of people.

One thing I love about Glee is the way it crosses so many categories with the music on the show — pop, rock, hip-hop, show tunes, songbook.

You can’t be afraid of that. I have worked with people, Ryan Murphy being probably one of the most well-known that is not afraid of making a statement and sort of making people uncomfortable and sort of redefining himself with each show. With American Horror Story, each season, we totally reinvent ourselves. So he trusts that you make something that’s compelling.

When you are working on a series like “The Blacklist,” where do you begin?

I think you definitely start with characters and the story and from there I think about themes for characters, I think about the overall tone of the show and sort of what components make up the show. On a lot of these shows like “Major Crimes” or “The Closer,” which I worked on for a long time, there is always the case and then you also have the specific character beats and character pieces and those can help define the character. You sort of ride the line between propelling the case forward in those shows and also getting and giving character information.

Going into a new season of a show, there is always an overall goal of the writers and the creator and producers like this season is going to be about fulfillments and so and so’s drives to find his long lost mother. Okay now within that we are going to have 18 or 22 or 13 episodes of different procedural cases but the overall arc is something that helps you think in a more global sense and sort of maybe grow the music forward a little bit and stretch it.

So just as the writers and the creators might want and usually need to like feel as though they are stretching their muscles and expanding the sort of mythology of the story, that composer can see like we have that opportunity too. You know you have to take chances to do that. So sometimes you might take the chance and be like, “This is not our show! This is unlike anything we do.” And sometimes too like, “Oh, that’s a really cool idea and it totally works!” And it feels like it’s evolving so it’s sort of a case-by-case basis.

One of the things I love about “Royal Pains” is that it has this very specific setting that is not like anything else on television. How do you think about adding the overall distinctive quality to the music?

We keep it breezy and fun and then. The goal at the beginning was to make it light. There’s obviously the medical drama case stuff, which sort of exists in its own way and that’s sort of a procedural element that show so the music sort of functions in that way. But the rest of it is like placing characters. And I always wanted to feel like there is sort of a central core group of four or five characters, a small little breezy sunshiny Jack Johnson, James Taylor, rock band. It’s like sort of an acoustic rock sort of score but it’s evolved and we sort of drift in and out of more serious moments and pull it in either direction. We keep it like a beach party a little bit. To keep the sunshine and all of that. The story gets serious but sometimes you don’t have to play serious on top of serious to get the point across and often times it’s not necessary; because it’s a well-written show and they are good actors.

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Interview: Daniel Licht, Composer of “Dexter”

Posted on April 22, 2014 at 8:00 am

Daniel Licht composed the music for “Dexter” as well as two of the “Silent Hill” video games and films including “Permanent Midnight” and “Stephen King’s Thinner.” He talked to me about the difference between composing for thrillers and comedy and why he hit his guitar with a frying pan.

Tell me a little bit about where you grew up and your training.

I grew up in Detroit and my training has been a bit mixed. I’ve got quite a varied background. I started playing rock ‘n roll when I was 12 in a garage band, because basically I wasn’t good at football and that was the only way to get girls to like you. And then I got interested in classical music and jazz when I was about 14. Detroit was a great city for jazz. I would sneak out to clubs at the age of 14 or 15. I went to late-night jam sessions in Detroit City. And then I went to Hampshire College and I got into world music and started studying world music. Once I graduated I ended up traveling around the world quite a bit studying music. I went to Java and Bali and I spent some time in Europe traveling around and Japan. And I ended up back in New York and getting a job writing music for commercials, just as a way of making a living.

I came out to visit my friend Christopher Young in California and I saw he was having recording sessions and one side of the room was a Japanese percussion section and then there was a small string section and then there was a choir. It all clicked with my varied background. I realized that this was where I could put it all together.

I had been used to musicians in different categories not liking other types of musicians. If you hang out with the jazz musicians, they didn’t want to have anything to do with the classical musicians because they think they can’t swing. If you hang out with the world music people, they are like, “Oh, you have to do just this if you are true and pure.” I love being able to work in all categories and bring it together.

What did you listen to growing up?

I listened to a lot of music and there was a public station in Detroit called WDET with a late-night DJ who played the most interesting music imaginable. He would go between Herbie Hancock to Sleeping Giant to John Cage, to Sly and the Family Stone and I would go to sleep at night listening to this DJ. It really formed my musical interest. I really came to film music from a love of all music . The film music that I loved the most is the film music that was influenced by music other than film music if you know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, I love the classic film music and I love the classic John Williams orchestral scores. But my taste is more towards like Ennio Morricone, Gustavo Santaolalla, or Tommy Newman who bring in the world influences.

It seems to me as I look over your resume that you have really spent much of your time on — I’m going to say this in a nice way — kind of creepy stuff, scary, tense moods; is that fair? Is that something you really specialize in?

I definitely have done a lot of that; there’s no question about it. And part of that, that’s a combination of two things. One is that I’ve always been interested in 20^th century modern music and like when I was playing jazz, it was avant-garde improvisational jazz. So it’s making scary sounds in a sense and kind of out of the box sounds. So I found that working in that form was the most expressive and the least limited of the kind of music that you could do in the film music category; because I’ve always been interested in pushing the envelope in terms of what kinds of sounds and how you can make them. I’ve always been interested in trying to bend the kind of sounds something can make, playing instruments in different, with different kitchen utensils, even. I used to take my guitar and I would put it on my lap and I would bang it with a frying pan.

So that’s part of what drew me into doing the scary stuff. But it was also because a friend, Christopher Young, he had scored the first two “Hellraisers” and he kind of turned me onto my first gig out here. You get typecast very quickly here once you do one thing and people say, “Oh, that’s what he does.” And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; you want to be known for something because then hopefully people will call you for that thing but I made a conscious effort to get out of doing it because I started doing all horror and thrillers.

I moved towards doing dramatic, I started doing some A&E dramatic films. And then I actually did a film for Disney channel, a Disney TV film called “Don’t Look Under the Bed.” That sort of came out of my scary stuff but it was a Disney film.

And the producer that I work for ended up going on to do comedy; In fact he is one of the producers of “Modern Family.” He kind of trained me to do comedy because I didn’t really have a clue about how comedy worked. Comedy is a completely different than dramatic. Working with drama, you really need to have a whole new tool box. I think that’s one of the things that helped me get the job on the Dexter show. I had experience with comedy and you have to learn how to kind of manipulate the audience but don’t take yourself too seriously at the same time if you know what I mean.

When you are working on a series, is it almost like jazz? Is it improvisational because you have the themes that continue from episode to episode but the cues are different, the characters are different?

Yes, it is a bit like improvising and jazz. Working at “Dexter” for eight years, I was definitely rearranging the same themes. So it’s like when you work on a film or video game, you are putting 50 percent of your effort into writing the themes and designing the sound world. Then the other half is executing it.

And then as time goes on, less of your effort is designing the sound and more is kind of filling in the spaces or building the structure from what you’ve already developed. So there’s a little difference in that you are doing a lot more content for television, if that makes any sense.

How do you balance between keeping it familiar and keeping it fresh?

Well, sometimes people want the comfort of a sound, of a particular cue that they have heard before. It is like a touchstone. But like with Dexter, there’s always new characters and new situations that call for new themes. I also always try and rearrange stuff even the same theme. I’ll do a CD every season of Dexter and I’ve always had a different version of the blood theme on that, for instance.

Tell me more about what’s different about scoring a comedy.

Well, this is going to sound a little hackneyed but it is true. What’s the secret to comedy? It’s about timing, right?

Music is very precise rhythmically and comedy is also very precise rhythmically . So you have to learn to make your music dance with the comedy.

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Interview: Stephen Endelman, Composer for “Rob the Mob”

Posted on April 3, 2014 at 8:00 am

“Rob the Mob” is a fact-based story about a couple named Tommy and Rosie who thought they had a foolproof way to make some money. Since Mafia members were not allowed to bring weapons into their social clubs, why not rob them there?

Yeah. It does not sound like a good idea to me, either. But what is a good idea is making a movie to tell their story, starring two exceptionally gifted and charismatic young actors, Michael Pitt and Tony-winner Nina Arianda. I spoke to the man who composed the film’s score, Stephen Endelman.

How did you get involved with this project?

I worked with Raymond first on “Two Family House.” That was a very pleasurable experience and then there was another one in between that I couldn’t do which was “City Island,” which is actually a really good movie. This is the best of all, this is I think, well not just me, a lot of people are talking about what a great movie it is and it is. I got involved with Raymond, he showed me the script, I read the script and I said, “Raymond, I have to do this movie.” He said, “I want you to do it, it’s not a question, you don’t have to tell me that”. And I said, “Great.” Then he came to my studio and he said “Stephen, I have got an idea. I said, “Fire away.” He said, “How about I come here with David Leonard and I’ll set up in your other room, and you be in your room, I’ll be in this room and you write music and I’ll cut. I’ll do this for six weeks and then I’ll go back to New York for the last three weeks.” And I said, “You make that happen, I’ll be thrilled. What a creative way to work.”

And so that’s what happened. And so he came here. I had seen a lot of footage as they were shooting. And I was writing, there was never any temp score at all. Five weeks after Raymond got here, the producer got here, we showed him a cut and it was like seeing the movie, all my music, all we needed to do was to refine it at that point, cut the movie down and refine it.

That’s very unusual, isn’t it?

That’s deeply unusual and it shouldn’t be. It should be the only way to work.

Tell me what the benefits are of doing it that way.

The problem with a lot of films today in my opinion and Raymond’s actually is that they are so used to doing things with a temp dub that by the time they hire a composer they are married to the temp score. So 80 percent of the time if not more composers are really just copying the scores with a few modifications. I have made a career of not doing that from day one. “Household Saints” — I saw the movie I wrote the score then the next movie, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain, there was no score. Chris Mundell didn’t want to temp the movie at all and so when I got that job I just got a blank canvas. Raymond’s was the same. David Russell’s Flirting With Disaster was the same. What actually was not the similar way from working with Raymond was that he was downstairs in the film station editing and I was writing. But it’s the only way to work. And actually when I think about it, you know what at A Bronx Tale they brought me into the Brill Building six weeks so we’d build it together.

When you’re doing a crime story, how do you begin to think about what tone you want to achieve and how you want to set the stage?

When you think of crime movie, there are going to be robberies. From day one Raymond and I said, “No, we’re not going to do it like that because this is not a conventional mob crime movie.” This is about two young people who are madly, hopelessly in love, right? They are hopelessly in love and they have decided to rob the social clubs when they learned from Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, there were no guns in clubs.

Wise guys and guns in clubs don’t go together. So Tommy thinks it will be easy to rob them. Tommy takes their money, he humiliates them. Because his father was basically tortured to death, there’s a kind of vengeance level there. And the crime involved was just palpable so I said look we have to write a very memorable love scene. So that basically takes care of them. Element number one, their love scene. We hear snippets of it throughout the movie and at the end you get the big impression of it, that’s one level.

Then the other level, what do we do about the scary wise guy? So the biggest and the scariest of the wise guys is Andy Garcia who plays Big Al. Big Al isn’t scary anymore. Big Al is coming to term with the fact that his son is dead, what he’s got is his grandson. All he wants to do is make food in the kitchen, look after his little boy. That doesn’t need action. That needs a delicate touch because really you want to feel for Big Al, you wanna feel his relationship with his grandson, and then his dead son and you do feel that. Then you have those robberies, and in order to get the robberies where we want then Raymond had a song and we decided to, he wanted an Italian style, an Italian pop song from the 60’s. He thought the guys would be listening to that and it would be an Italian. And Raymond said “Why don’t we just write it?” So I said, “Fine.” e came up with the lyrics and I wrote the music. We have three songs in the movie. When they go to do the robberies, then you have the level of the robberies themselves and that’s the only tense music in the movie but even that is not really that tense. That’s kind of percussive with a lot of other stuff going on. It’s very rhythmic, it’s not angry, there’s no anger. It didn’t need that and the score didn’t need that. The score needed to be beautiful, and it needs to let you inside the inner voices of all the characters. The wise guys are sad, they are sad and they are old, and Rosie is crazy in love and silly and that’s kind of the tapestry there I think.

So it’s really a love story?

It is a love story; I think it is a love story.

What’s the best advice you ever got about writing for films?

The best advice I ever got about writing for film didn’t come from a film composer. Morton Feldman was one of great American classical composers, somebody who taught me for a little while. He said, “Stephen, there’s no such thing as funny music.” I thought about that because you know, of course there’s cartoon music and can you imagine that’s funny but of course he’s right, there’s no such thing as funny music.

So what did I do? I translated that as you’re building a score of funny theme or if you’re gonna try then you have to think about timing completely and less about what’s funny in the music. Because there’s no such thing as funny music, that’s nonsense and so that idea was really important because I never really studied song composing, I never really went to school, I studied with composers to be a composer. I saw myself doing film because I always loved films.

I became really interested in film music when I saw the uncut version of “Once Upon a Time in America.” Just watching that I realized, “Wow, that could just as easily been written for an opera.” The whole structure of that score is very operatic. That’s when I really started to think about the relationship between music and drama in the cinema. It should be of a whole. If you look at this movie “Rob the Mob,” I could actually almost piece it together as if I was composing a symphony. Each theme is very well constructed, the score is well constructed, things return, change come back but in quite an organized fashion. I happen to believe that’s important.

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Interview: Nicholas Britell, Composer of “12 Years a Slave”

Posted on December 23, 2013 at 8:00 am

One of the most powerful moments in the extraordinary film 12 Years a Slave has its main character, Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) joining with the other slaves to sing a spiritual. It was a great pleasure to speak with the talented young composer, Nicholas Britell, who wrote “My Lord Sunshine (Sunrise)” and “Roll Jordan Roll” as well as three traditional fiddle tunes on the soundtrack. He painstakingly researched this lost form of music, which was never recorded and in many cases never written out, in an effort to bring the most accurate musical representation and help to tell this story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PGeyMfdGag

Tell me a little bit about the research that you did to create music of this period.

It was a really unique challenge because the main character is a violinist and the movie itself, we knew, was going to have so much music in it, literally onscreen in the world of the characters. And it’s interesting because the 1840s is such a long time ago that we don’t have recordings, obviously until 50 to 60, 70 years later. And then on top of that, the spirituals themselves in the 1840s, there was really no music notation that was ever done of those songs. We only started getting people attempting to notate the songs of the slaves around the Civil War time. And even then, all the notes that they tried to write down, they all talked about how difficult it was, and how Western notation wasn’t really able to notate the sounds that they were hearing, people singing in the fields. Today, we can imagine that it was because of the unique rhythms, the syncopations, the African rhythms, all of the different cultural influences of those people who were there in the field. On the one hand, there is much as possible about whatever there was to be known but then we had to attempt to, essentially, recreate and re-imagine the sound because we’ll never really know what it actually sounded like in the 1840s. So I went to the library, I read everything I could, I looked at primary source texts. And there were two angles of the research: one was figuring out what was the music that Solomon would have played, and then what the slaves’ music would be. So the first question is really “What would an African-American violinist have played in New York in 1841?” Very interesting, very specific question.

What I discovered was there is much more research on the string music traditions certainly that goes back many hundred years so I was able to ascertain pretty well that the music that he probably would have been settling was very influenced by Scottish and Irish folk tunes. He wasn’t playing Beethoven but, interestingly, by way of re-imagining that world because it was so close to that era, this was within 12 years of Schubert’s death, essentially. That’s where we’re talking. Mendelssohn was still alive in Europe. Schumann was composing in Europe so some of the music that might have been coming over was some of this classical music and I imagined Solomon was a very accomplished violinist.

That was the starting point of mine. And because of that, I imagined that he might have had knowledge of a lot of different music potentially. So, on the one hand, while he was playing some of his Irish and Scottish folk tunes, I actually worked very hard with the violinist Tim Fain, an amazing violinist. We worked very hard to sort of imagine a unique sound for the violin that actually had elements of almost classical technique but not really. We wanted it to have a different feel than what we imagined fiddling sounds like today just to really kind of re-imagine that sound and give it a unique quality so we even did things like, there’s research that indicate the fiddlers would have held the violin more low-slung on their shoulder, the tuning would have been different. So we really tried to incorporate all of these thoughts into the way that, not only, the music was arranged and written because some of those are actually totally new songs that I wrote, some are arrangements of traditional songs that the research indicated might very well been played by Solomon.

But then the big thing was the sound. We really wanted to make sure that it had a very interesting quality to it.

Where is this research? Where do you go to look that stuff up?

I went to the library, I went on the internet, I spoke with people. We spoke with many on the violin side. I worked with Tim, the violinist, very closely. We know a lot of people in the string music world so there were many different angles on the question but, frankly, a lot of it is just going back to very old books and history books. It’s interesting because, actually, not that much was written on the music of the 1840s specifically. There’s a lot more music history written, it seems, on the Colonial Era. And then on the Civil War Era.

But the 1840s was an interesting period where, certainly, there was a lot of music going on in America. This was a world in America where every town had its own sort of like brass band. It was a very unique and fascinating musical world but, again, there just wasn’t much specifically on that decade so it was interesting. The more challenging side was really with the spirituals because the spirituals themselves and the work songs are something that, just by their nature, weren’t being notated. I think one thing I tried to be very conscious of was how much music changes in very short periods of time. Even 20 to 30 years can be a long time stylistically in music. It’s basically 20, 30 years between what the classical era of music and the romantic era of music. It’s 30 years between the height of Jazz and then Rock ‘n’ Roll really. So if you then imagine how different music would be a hundred years apart that I try to be very conscious of the responsibility of it. I tried to balance and really come up with very strong rationale for why I was thinking in a certain way but interestingly, there is a lot that you can find.

There’s a lot of research on the lyrics. It’s a lot easier to find information on the lyrics than the music itself. So lyrically, certain things are true that there was definitely quite a bit of Biblical influence and also, lyrically, every culture has work songs going back to the dawn of time where these were songs that were sung to get through the day and actually to functionally sort of help you do your work. So the work songs in the fields are like the song I wrote “My Lord Sunshine.” I spent a lot of time, not only lyrically trying to get it right and musically imagining it but rhythmically to figure out even just the tempo of it so it matched the swinging of the cane chopping which was another sort of variable to think about. There were a lot of different sort of variables to get right and that song lyrics really were there’s Biblical influence. And while I was writing, I felt like I tried to put myself in the mind of if you were working 10, 11 hours a day under the hot sun, what would you have been singing to get through that day. I think that I imagined the Biblical influence of “my Lord.” But also the sunshine is such an omnipresent element to that so the lyrics, things like “it’s late, it’s hot, my Lord Sunshine” things like that so it all felt very true to life to what might have been like.

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