Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan Talk Sqürl’s Debut Album, Collaborators, and Favorite Film Scores
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The post Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan Talk Sqürl’s Debut Album, Collaborators, and Favorite Film Scores appeared first on Consequence.
Sqürl is the musical outfit featuring legendary indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch alongside Carter Logan, a co-producer on Jarmusch’s recent movies. After releasing a series of soundtracks and EPs, the duo have just unveiled their first proper full-length studio album, Silver Haze.
Music has been an integral part of Jarmusch’s movies throughout his career, starting with his groundbreaking ’80s films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, and continuing in the ’90s with Dead Man and Ghost Dog. For his recent films (Only Lovers Left Alive, Paterson, The Dead Don’t Die), he and Logan have teamed up to compose the scores.
Now, the pair have unveiled Silver Haze, a guest-filled album that was just released via Sacred Bones Records. Among the notable contributors are Marc Ribot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Anika.
Consequence caught up with Jarmusch and Logan to discuss the new album, along with its various guest musicians. During the conversation, the pair also talked about their process of scoring movies, as well as the film scores and composers who’ve inspired them throughout the years.
Read our interview with Sqürl’s Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan, followed by a full stream of Silver Haze via the Apple Music and Spotify players below. Pick up Silver Haze on vinyl at this location.
While you’ve released EPs and soundtracks before, Silver Haze is Sqürl’s debut full-length album. What led you to release a proper studio LP this time around?
Jim Jarmusch: Well, we don’t have a master plan. We do things as they come. We had gathered a lot of material that we thought could shape into an album. Honestly, we could have made a whole album of just songs with lyrics or a whole album of instrumentals… We had a break in our filming schedules. We’ve been kind of waiting to do an album or at least a new EP. And then the real great factor was having [producer] Randall Dunn available and interested in collaborating. All the timing worked out and that closed the deal.
Carter Logan: Everything coalesced around this sort of moment where a lot of these songs were born of some guitar tracks that Jim recorded on his own in his small studio in upstate New York, and he had just given them to me. And I’d been in conversation with Randall Dunn for some years about doing something together, and he had the availability because of everybody’s schedules during the pandemic kind of getting scrambled and rearranged. So, I started doing some [tracks] in my home studio, as well, and then handed them off to Randall to just really evaluate whether or not he saw this as a record or something else that we might do together. He said, “There’s a record here. I can hear it. And I’ve got some ideas, let’s start working on it.”
Silver Haze features a number of cool collaborators, including Marc Ribot on two tracks — “Garden of Glass Flowers” and “Il Deserto Rosso.” Can you talk about his contributions?
Jim Jarmusch: Actually it was Randall’s idea to check with Marc. I’m old friends with Marc since the early to mid ‘80s. I’ve seen him play in many different configurations, and he played on the scores for Down by Law and Mystery Train, two of my films, but I’ve just known him a long time. Marc’s like this very intense hired gun fighter. We called him, he came in, and we said, “You wanna roll through this track first and check it out?” And he said, “No, I want you to just hit record and I’m gonna play. I know Sqürl. I know your music.”
Marc is just like some kind of, I don’t know, musical alien. He’s just incredible. So, that was really fun. And he is quite serious and cool, but funny, and I love Marc. So that was a real fun thing to have him come in, and then he was like, “You got any more tracks that I could play on?” [Laughs]
Another great guest you have is Charlotte Gainsbourg, who lends her distinct speaking voice to the track “John Ashbury Takes a Walk” …
JJ: Well, I love Charlotte’s music. I love her kind of style of the soft spoken female vocals that her father [musician and filmmaker Serge Gainsbourg] was very interested in and utilized with both Jane Birkin and, of course, Brigitte Bardot, as well, and those recordings he made — and with Charlotte, too. And so she’s kind of an offshoot of a certain style of her father’s, and yet she’s her own thing. And gosh, her voice is mesmerizing to me. She’s a super intelligent, amazing person. As an actress, she’s so naturalistic always. You can’t never see her on screen “acting” really.
I am just a big admirer of her and I’m a big fan, and so is Carter of her music. So, we had this instrumental track “John Ashbury Takes a Walk,” and I thought of this idea of [incorporating] these two early poems of Ashbury’s and asking Charlotte to recite them, in her style. And so I just called her up and sent her the stuff to see if she might be interested. And a few days later she calls back saying, “How do you want me to record it?” Like remotely, technically, not aesthetically. I wanted her to use that beautiful voice and accent, ‘cause she’s French and British and she’s just remarkable. So that was a real thrill to get Charlotte.
CL: The way that came together just seemed very natural. It all just sort of came naturally, as we were crafting these songs in the studio, and as we listened to what they wanted. … We had an incredible cello player on the record, as well, named Brent Arnold. That was an idea that Randall introduced to the process, as well. bringing him in to do some really wild and unconventional cello overdubs.
And the song “She Don’t Wanna Talk About It” features the singer Anika. The dueling vocals remind me a bit of Lou Reed and Nico in The Velvet Underground. Is it fair to say they’ve been an influence on your music?
JJ: Well, we’re a New York group, so it’s Velvet land. It’s in our DNA, you know? I love the reference because Anika is kind of Nico-esque, in a way. She would agree, I think — but not in an imitative way. We had the song already written and lyrics and then saw Anika and her band at the Sacred Bones anniversary show that we also played at, and we were like, “Oh man, this is so beautiful and mysterious.” And I love how Anika sort of fuses trip-hop with rock ‘n’ roll with Kraut rock, along with being kind of Nico-esque. So, I just asked if she might be interested in making this song into a dual vocal. And she did it so beautifully.
Jim, your spoken word monologue in the track “The End of the World” is both foreboding and amusing. What was the inspiration behind those words?
JJ: Carter and Randall were constructing or shaping the music for that track, and it was gonna be an instrumental, as far as we knew. So while they were doing that, I just got this flood of images and started writing them down in the studio. I was writing things in this little notebook.
The war in Ukraine had just started or was under way… My daughter’s a teenager. Teenagers are like the guides culturally for me all my life — it seems like music and culture and clothes and these things come from teenagers, so they’re always very important to me. At the time, she had a kind of a boyfriend that had these kind of Euro muscle cars and was sort of drifting, doing these things with them that perplexed me.
I just wrote it and I’m glad you find it sort of funny and not just super dark and heavy. I like that the teenagers, the girls run off to abandoned box stores to scrounge for other fashion items to change their look each week or things like that. Or they had rewired the public address system so they could play their pop songs that are all about heartbreak with female vocalists, you know? Which most pop music is, most of the strong stuff now.
Sounds like you just described a Taylor Swift song …
JJ: Yeah, or Olivia Rodrigo or Billie Eilish, take your pick. So, yeah, it just kind of came out like that.
CL: It’s an incredible journey of perspective that Jim took into the minds of teenagers and what is valuable to them. And while some of those things might seem trivial on the surface, I think they speak quite universally to the human condition, and ultimately what we want is companionship, sort of creature comforts and a connection to culture, whether it’s through music or cars or clothes or movies. We long for connection through those things. And I think that all of those are things that took on a different resonance, especially in the past few years.
Sqürl’s music has soundtracked Jim’s recent movies. Can you both take me through your process of scoring a film?
JJ: Traditionally, I make kind of the equivalent of a mix tape of music I’m imagining while I’m writing the film. So, for example, when I wrote Dead Man, I took all these instrumental things from Crazy Horse, and the the guitar parts and stuff and made a kind of mixtape to write to. Or when I wrote Ghost Dog, I went out and bought all the Wu-Tang [Clan] vinyl I could find that had B-sides with just the backing tracks without the lyrics. So I made mixtapes of that. So, often, I know the kind of music and even the composers that I would love to have while I’m still writing the film. So it’s very integrated for me often, but then it’s a bit different when we make the scores ourselves. But I’ll let Carter continue ’cause he’s been very involved in the scores we’ve made together.
CL: I would say that each film has been a little bit of a different process. For example, the band formed around making music for The Limits of Control. We didn’t make music together at all prior to making the music that was in that film. We knew, starting Only Lovers Left Alive that we wanted to make Adam the character’s music. When it came to Paterson, we went in not thinking that Sqürl would make the music. And ultimately we determined that, in fact, we knew the film quite well, better than anyone else, and we had an understanding of what kind of feelings we needed to convey in the music for that film.
So, a lot of what is going into our creating a film score, especially when it comes to a film that we’ve made together — Jim’s directed and I’ve produced — he wrote the script and I read it very early on. We’ve had a lot of conversations about it. We’ve spent time with the actors, we’ve spent time with the production designers, we’ve spent time on the set. We’ve spent all of this time together in the collective effort of creating something that when it comes time to do that music, we have a level of intimacy already with the project that nobody else really could have. So that makes it really special.
Who are some of the film composers or what are some of the film scores that have inspired you?
CL: So many, but to name a few, Ennio Morricone, Tangerine Dream. People think of Morricone for his Spaghetti Westerns, but he’s made beautiful lush scores for romantic films, as well, or even The Thing by John Carpenter. Those are really inspiring just in their versatility. But to be honest, the template that we work from comes less from a conventional film scoring background. Some of them may be more like where Tangerine Dream came from in being a band. And so our approach comes from working in that idiom rather than classical music.
JJ: For me, I love the way [Martin] Scorsese scores his films, while also using existing songs throughout in a beautiful way. When I was young and first saw Easy Rider, it was just so cool the way they used psychedelic rock tracks as kind of the score. I love very many of the scores by the Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu, who did many scores for [Akira] Kurosawa, some for [Nagisa] Ōshima … And then I like the fact that Nick Cave and Warren Ellis make film scores that are not formulaic and predictable. Or Nine Inch Nails’ [Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross] — those two make interesting shit.
I like it going toward not the cliched, buy-it-by-the-yard kind of shit most commercial films just rely on, to an insulting degree, because there’s so many cool musical forms in the world. Why does everything have to sound like John Williams kind of stuff?
Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan Talk Sqürl’s Debut Album, Collaborators, and Favorite Film Scores
Spencer Kaufman
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