When Doobious.org asked me to write a song for the Atlanta Film Festival's closing night highlights video, I thought it sounded like a fun and easy way to contribute to the event. So I got together with bandmates from Eureka Failure(Courtney King, Billy Craig Meers, and Lee Reese) and we recorded a cowboy-themed jam because I thought it was a quintessentially cinematic sound. I took the project home, and we got together a few times to figure out what we wanted to do about lyrics. This is where the process became interesting and difficult. Did we want to tell a story? Did we want to thank people for coming? Should it be a love letter to cinema as a whole? Or maybe a boy-meets-girl story that takes place at the film festival? How do we write a song that feels like an actual song, but also functions as a thank you to sponsors, while also maintaining at least a little bit of our subversive-rock'n'roll-attitudes about corporate sponsorship? It turned out to be more difficult than I thought, so every other day I would send Imoto a new version so that she would at least have something to start editing with and thinking about while the Doobious crew went out to shoot their video. At one point I had to ask why Keith Brooks, who had written and performed the closing night song for the last 2 years, wasn't doing it again this year. Imoto told me that they didn't think he'd have the time, but that I should find a way to incorporate him anyway. I thought every movie/sponsor/tie-in song needed a third act rap in it, and Keith said he could and would bring it. And obviously he did. The ideas flowed freely with Keith-- I was told that he was a master of making up lyrics on the spot, and it's true. He probably could have written in an hour what took us a week. And if you'd throw him a challenge he didn't blink. I'd say, "can you say something about Video Rahim?" and suddenly it was there.
We were pretty late delivering the final mix of the song, mastering it late on Friday night for a Saturday evening screening. The irony is that I was barely able to attend the festival this year because I was working on a song about the gluttony of things to do at the fest. And due to our schedules, nobody that worked on the song was able to actually attend the closing night film to watch the video screen.
It was a fun (sometimes frustrating) challenge, and made with a lot of love for my fellow creators. There were a lot of cool ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor-- entire alternate verses, and other guest appearances that we just didn't have time to realize. I've always wanted to make a "We Are The World" of the Atlanta independent creative scene, but that may have to wait for another day.
We were pretty late delivering the final mix of the song, mastering it late on Friday night for a Saturday evening screening. The irony is that I was barely able to attend the festival this year because I was working on a song about the gluttony of things to do at the fest. And due to our schedules, nobody that worked on the song was able to actually attend the closing night film to watch the video screen.
It was a fun (sometimes frustrating) challenge, and made with a lot of love for my fellow creators. There were a lot of cool ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor-- entire alternate verses, and other guest appearances that we just didn't have time to realize. I've always wanted to make a "We Are The World" of the Atlanta independent creative scene, but that may have to wait for another day.