Thomas Van Der Ree Soundtrack Retrospective

Hello there

As we continue our musical festive break (grumpy puppets yesterday notwithstanding), today I bring you a little pot pour of stuff from Thomas Van Der Ree, the (bound to be) award winning composer of the soundtrack.

I originally asked Thomas is he would send me a paragraph to include in my liner notes, but he was so thorough that I decided to give him his own post, and put my liner notes tomorrow.

Before you think I have just gotten somebody else to do a post for me, I will point out that the pictures he has sent are of my original instructional notes to him, that he has annotated, so I did loads of work on that bit.  I can't take credit for his first bit though, that's all his writing from this week.

Shall we?  Over to TVDR:

Over the years I've done several little pieces of music for Ian's various shows and podcasts, but nothing could prepare me for the task of scoring this movie. Searching through my e-mails, this is the first thing Ian's told me about the soundtrack:

"Oh and the final thing, the movie. Clearly a much bigger job than anything before but also clearly want to give you first refusal.  I’d really love to keep continuity through the podcasts into the film but know you may be too busy or it may be too big a job, but you are my go-to music man. i suspect it will mainly be for establishing shots and credits etc as it is mainly a documentary."

So that all seemed well and good, and it was only until I saw an early cut of the movie I started to panic. Ian had clearly lied to me. This wasn't just a collection of sketches or some sort of shot-on-an-iPhone documentary that just needed some funny tunes, this was a real movie with real drama and real stakes, and it needed a real score. Of course I wanted to do it justice but I was completely unsure if I could, since I'm basically just a guy with a couple of instruments and a laptop. Whatever this score was going to be, it needed to deliver on a musical level, on an emotional level but also on a technical level and I was worrying about all three. Still am, actually, but there's nothing I can do about it now.

After some back and forths over e-mail about the style of the score, Ian send me his detailed cue list. There were a lot of cues and I panicked even more. In the end, the only way to dispel my panic was to just start working on it, recording lots and lots of demos and sending them off. Ian picked his favourites for every cue and I tried to make them sound as good as I could. He tends to pick my first try but not always, so there's still lots of little themes and cues on my laptop you'll never hear. Well, I'll probably re-use them for a new podcast Ian is doing that will turn out to be the new Marvel movie or something, I'm not falling for that again. Anyway, I hope you enjoy listening to these tracks.

It's me again now.  Fancy slagging me off on my own patreon...

There's a great thing hidden in there amongst the abuse, which is that ethos of "stop worrying, start doing".  It's a far easier thing to say than actually do, but it's about the most important lesson any creative can ever learn for my money.  I'm as guilty as anyone of procrastination, but it's almost always all ok when you actually pull your finger out.  And even if it isn't...does any of that really matter?  Better to fail greatly than just not bother right?

Luckily, Thomas didn't fail on this soundtrack.  He delivered something well good, and far exceeded my unreasonably high expectations.

He sent over some pictures of my original notes to him (responding to his original demos - which I have safely in stock and we will get to hear them one day...perhaps a double vinyl...), along with his annotations on them (including some actual music notes that you can almost see the trembling hand of dread in).  Here they are for you to have a look at, if you fancy? There's some back and forth between us but it's all in the same font, so hopefully it will be a fun game for you to decipher which is which...

There we go - a great big slice of behind the scenes Hollywood.  Glamorous isn't it?

The last time I saw any of this stuff was when it was happening in the eye of the storm, so it was really enjoyable for me to look back over at it now all the stresses and pressures of the movie are off. Fascinating for me in fact.  The sheer amount of stuff that was being juggled for so long.  A bit crazy to be honest.

My liner notes might not be half as interesting tomorrow, but they'll be here in the interest of completion.

Hope it was of interest to you and that all is joyous whatever you are up to there.

Much love as always

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