Nick Cave has worked with The National‘s Bryce Dessner to write a new song for the forthcoming Netflix film Train Dreams.
- READ MORE: Nick Cave: “There’s no metric that says virtuousness makes good art”
The song is titled after the film and will play during its end credits. Both Cave and Dessner are credited as co-producers on it alongside Luis Almau, while Dessner composed the film’s score.
It appears on the film’s official soundtrack, which will be released digitally on November 7 and on vinyl on November 14. Train Dreams will then premiere on Netflix on November 21.
Directed by Clint Bentley, Train Dreams is an adaptation of the novella by Denis Johnson and stars Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker who “leads a life of unexpected depth and beauty in the rapidly-changing America of the early 20th Century”.
“When we started thinking about making a song for the film, Nick felt like the perfect artist to do it,” said Bentley in a press release. “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.”
On hearing the song for the first time, Bentley said: “I was blown away. It surpassed anything I felt like it might be. It took all the feelings that I was trying to communicate at the end of the movie and expanded them into another place. I was so struck by how the song builds to the end when other voices start to drift in, as if on the wind. His lyrics are so evocative and there’s a deep mystery to the song, especially when thinking about Grainier’s story. Every time I listen to it, I’m more moved by it.
He continued: “I think that Nick and Bryce were able to collaborate so closely on the song just makes it fit the score so beautifully. They were both very open artistically in the process. The piano music that Bryce laid down as the bed of the song feels like an extension of the gorgeous score he created and then Nick’s lyrics just seem to grow organically out of that. It all just feels so natural and of a whole because of that collaboration they found.”
On Dessner’s soundtrack, he said: “Bryce is such an open and generous artist,” says Bentley. “This is our second film together and with Train Dreams, there was a lot of back and forth throughout the edit as he sent over different ideas and threads he was working on based on the footage and the script. It really helped shape the rhythm and the feeling of the film and lifted it to a whole new place. His music is transcendent.”
This isn’t Cave’s only film-related project of late, as earlier this month, it was confirmed that he and Warren Ellis are set to score the new television adaptation of his 2009 novel The Death Of Bunny Munro.
