Red Stewart chats with Graham Reynolds about Sister Aimee….
Graham Reynolds is an American composer who has been working in the film and television industries since the early 2000s. He is best known for his scores for movies like A Scanner Darkly, Bernie, and Before Midnight.
Flickering Myth had the chance to interview him about his work on the independent drama and Sundance selection Sister Aimee, and I in turn had the honor to conduct it:
Mr. Reynolds, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. You’ve worked on some of my favorite movies like A Scanner Darkly.
Oh that’s awesome, yeah, very happy to.
I know it was just a couple of years ago that you said you were starting to heavily study synthesizers. You’d of course used them in your past compositions, but having done this deeper learning, have you found your music to have changed at all in the time since?
A lot of my friends in college, or even people today in certain circles, saw a line between “real” instruments and fake instruments, real instruments meaning acoustic instruments. So I have tried more and more to not have any line – if it sounds good it sounds good, and it doesn’t matter where it came from.
There was also a bit of prejudice growing up against synthesizers. It dominated commercial music, pop music at the time, and a lot of the musicians I knew were hesitant about synthesizers. Now it seems they are here to stay, and so it’s been fun to dive into that world.
That’s cool to hear, and I’m glad that it’s expanded upon your original musical craft. Do you conduct your own scores?
It depends on the situation. If it’s a medium to even a big-sized band, I’ll lead the band from the keyboard. If it gets too large, though, then sometimes I will hire a conductor – it depends a little bit on the situation.
I know that’s what Hans Zimmer does too- he usually just leads from keyboard, while having another conductor do the conducting. But I ask because I remember reading in an interview that you said you always encourage your players to improvise. I was wondering how that affected you as a composer, if you’re writing something that may end up being significantly altered by someone’s improvisation. How does it impact you as a writer?
Well, as a writer it impacts me quite a bit. I tend to write some kind of hybrid between like a chart, which would be more bare bones, melody and chords and things like that, to a fully-meditated score, like classical music or something like that. It really depends, project to project, player to player. You know, within one piece, people might be reading different kinds of charts. One might be simple, one might be country, like Nashville notation which is numbers instead of letters for chords.
It impacts me through the whole time. Then when we’re doing a recording project like a film score, I’m able to encourage the players to improvise, ask them to improvise, and then edit from there. So I guess it’s the best of both worlds where I have full control over the final music, but at the same time we bring out ideas from the players that I wouldn’t be able to think of because I don’t play that instrument.
Oh wow, that’s amazing to learn about. Composers obviously have to be adept in multiple instruments, but I hadn’t thought about how, when it comes to instruments that you aren’t familiar with, it’s necessary to rely on other players as they add to your understanding.
Yeah, and then it’s one thing to have a basic proficiency or understand the basics of all the instruments in the orchestra or in a rock band or in a jazz ensemble, but it’s a wholly different thing to specialize and focus on just cello for your whole life. That person is going to know more about cello than any composer who is not a cellist ever could really. It’s totally normal in the classical world if you’re doing a concerto, that composers have always collaborated closely with the concerto soloist.
Credit: Impact PR
That’s interesting, and gives me something to think about as I research this field more. Speaking of compositions, let’s talk about Sister Aimee as this is the movie that put us together. This a biopic about Aimee Semple McPherson, who was an evangelist who became very popular in the United States, sort of like an earlier Billy Graham. This is a different project from your usual past works. I know you try to do as much research as possible before taking on a project, especially if it’s based off of true events, so what was it that led to you taking on Sister Aimee?
They approached me with the script rather, and the subject was immediately pretty interesting- a 1920s celebrity who then disappeared and, in an era where gender equity was far from being a normal topic, was able to gain so much power. It’s an amazing story.
The opportunity to dive into 1920s instrumentation and chord structures and voice reading and the approaches and techniques that were used then – that was really fun. Including, learning about the early evolution of drum kits, which I knew something about. I knew that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no such thing as a drum kit or a drum set. But by the 30s, it had become somewhat normalized, and then by say the 60s it had become very standardized.
But in the 20s they were evolving, and people would cobble together you know a marching bass drum and Chinese cymbals and various things that they had and jerry-rig a kick drum pedal. These were in the early days – you couldn’t just go to the music shop and buy a bass drum pedal. So we cobbled together a drum kit of our own. It’s not quite legit ‘20s, but it at least gives you a sense of that sound.
That’s intriguing that you limited yourself to the time period to prevent, I assume, anachronistic sounds from popping up in the compositions and recordings. Talking about the ‘20s, reading Sister Aimee’s overview reveals that she gained a lot of prominence beginning in that decade, which also happened to be the start of the Golden Age of Jazz. I know jazz is one of several genres you specialize in, so were you able to tap into that for this film at all?
Yeah, quite a bit. There’s a big song at the end of the movie that the lead actress sings, and it’s sung on screen and all that, so we knew that it was going to have this prominent place, the most prominent tune in the movie by far. That song became the basis for the whole score. It was arranged for a 15-piece big band based on a picture, because [Sister Aimee] goes to Mexico in the movie, and I had a picture of a big band in Juárez, Mexico from the mid-20s.
I essentially recreated that band- it had a couple of strings, a couple of trombones, a timpani. It was weird; it was not what we think of a standard big band, but it was kind of close. So we recreated that band and recorded that for the song.
Oh wow, the climax of the movie ended up shaping the score. I’m curious, because this is based off of a pious subject, did you use any religious or choir music as inspiration for the score?
There were a couple of times. Not so much for that main song that provided quite a few of the cues, but there are a bunch of cues that are supporting her while she’s preaching, and so I had a whole big stack of hymnals that I had back when I did Bernie with Richard Linklater and Jack Black. Jack had sung a whole bunch of hymns in the course of that movie. So I pulled that and started studying those chord progressions, and then used those as inspiration for a few of the cues.
It’s nice when composers are able to tap into past works and create a musical connection between the two, while also constantly reinventing their music. I had one last question for you Mr. Reynolds: what are 3 pieces of music that have had the greatest influence on you as a composer? They can be a band album, movie score, anything.
Oh, it’s hard to pick any single influence that’s been the most influential. Maybe The Jimi Hendrix Experience? There was a balance between raw and virtuosic; intense but also gentle, in a way that later bands, whether punk rock or metal, that got heavy had a harder and harder time being the heaviest around while also playing beautiful music. And Jimi was able to do a little wink and then was able to rock as hard as anybody for his time. The way he was able to cross lines, and the looseness and the jazz influence on Mitch Mitchell’s drumming. The hybrid nature of so much of the way they played together.
Absolutely, Jimi Hendrix was a gem- his legacy more than speaks for itself. But thank you again Mr. Reynolds, this has been a complete honor. I wish you the best of luck in your future career!
Oh thank you so much, and yeah, the Experience was his first band- those three albums are truly worth listening to.
Yeah, we’re seeing a surge in older music, thanks to movies like La La Land and Bohemian Rhapsody, so I hope that there’s surge in interest in Mr. Hendrix as well.
Cool, well thank you so much!
Flickering Myth would like to thank Mr. Reynolds for sitting down with us. Sister Aimee premiered January 26 at the Sundance Film Festival and is screening at the upcoming SXSW festival.
Special thanks to Stephanie Pfingsten of Impact24 PR for making this interview possible!
Red Stewart
