With the weathered voice of a man forty years his senior and a backstory that includes stints riding bulls and pouring concrete, Ryan Bingham is hardly the typical Hollywood songwriter. But maybe that’s why “The Weary Kind,” the song the 28-year-old singer-songwriter co-wrote with T Bone Burnett, sounds like exactly what it’s supposed to be as the centerpiece of the film “Crazy Heart”: a plaintive bit of soul-searching from aging singer Bad Blake (played by Jeff Bridges) who’s spent the last couple of decades playing in dives and knocking back whiskey shots in dingy bars and cheap motel rooms.
If there’s a better song written for a movie in the last year, or a song that serves a crucial function as ably as “The Weary Kind” does, I haven’t heard it. It marks a career detour for Bingham, who’s released two fine albums (“Mescalito” and “Roadhouse Sun”) but hadn’t envisioned getting into the music business until his agent sent a tape of his songs to “Crazy Heart” director Scott Cooper, who sent Bingham the script and asked him to join the team of musical talent assembled by producer and music supervisor T Bone Burnett.
On Tuesday, Bingham came off the road after a tour with his band, the Dead Horses. On Wednesday, he spent the day in Beverly Hills talking about his participation in “Crazy Heart” – and, at a press event, taking the stage for a performance of “The Weary Kind” that I captured in an admittedly low-tech manner. The cameraman may be a little shaky, but the performer is true:
Not long after the performance, Bingham talked about the song, and the film, in which he also has a small role as the leader of a bar band. (The band, naturally, is played by Bingham’s own band.)
What triggered “The Weary Kind”?
I read the script while I was on the road with my band, and that just made everything click. I could really relate to the story of this guy, Bad Blake, seeing the road that he was going down. And it didn’t take really long to write the song. I was thinking about the struggle of this guy, how he hits rock bottom but gets a second chance. And it just kinda came out. “This ain’t no place for the weary kind” – this isn’t a place for people that don’t have enough strength to get back up on their feet and give it another chance.
Did that phrase come early in the writing?
I don’t even really remember when it came to me. I had “crazy heart” to go off of, because it was the title of the script, but I felt like it would mean more to put the phrase into the song but not make it the title. (laughs) I wasn’t going to write a chorus where I was singing, “my crazy heart, my crazy heart.”
