The lyrics to Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner’s “Train Dreams,” the end-credits song in the movie of the same name, offer a chain of images that seem dark and confusing: a grizzly “big as a house,” a screaming locomotive, an elk with twisted antlers and “a boy called Elvis something / whose voice could drive young girls insane.”
And yet Cave has fashioned those images into an elegant, haunting ballad that perfectly captures director Clint Bentley’s gentle but earthy fantasia and Joel Edgerton’s restrained performance as a man who lives out a quiet life of both beauty and loss in early 20th century America. Like the movie, “Train Dreams” the song is a quiet explication of the beauty of a life, albeit one marked by tremendous pain.
The sadness that undercuts the song’s images – which can seem random if you haven’t seen the film or read the spare, strange and beautiful Denis Johnson novella – is typical of Cave, the Australian rock icon whose work has long found a mixture of darkness and grace. In recent years, he’s mined that territory with particular fervor in the wake of the death of two of his sons, much as Edgerton’s character finds his life irrevocably altered after a wildfire in which he loses his wife and young daughter.
Cave and Warren Ellis have co-written film scores to more than a dozen movies, including “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” “The Road,” “Wind River” and “Blonde,” but for the new song he used part of Dessner’s “Train Dreams” score to set his lyrics. In a recent conversation with TheWrap, Cave explained how he came up with the song, which is one of 15 compositions on the Oscar shortlist in the Best Original Song category.
You’ve been a fan of the book “Train Dreams” for years, haven’t you?
Cave: Yes. I frequently put “Train Dreams” at the top of my list as one of the greatest American novels. It’s short book, but it’s unbelievably beautiful and I’ve read it many times. I love Denis Johnson, anyway. Love, love, love. When they came to me, I hadn’t seen the film, so I was worried about that. You don’t know what you’re going to get.
How did the assignment come about?
I was on holiday in Italy. It was basically a forced vacation by my management, because I just wouldn’t stop working. I was sort of lying around a pool in Italy somewhere, and I think Joel got in contact with me. He has my number ’cause we’re both Aussies, and he just asked me if I would be interested in writing a song for the end of “Train Dreams.”
I was full of misgivings about the whole thing. I mean, I knew that Joel would do an amazing job as the Robert Granier character, but I hadn’t seen the film. And I didn’t want to kind of just hijack someone else’s score, so I was pretty reluctant about it. Plus I was on holiday, right? (Laughs) And it takes me a long time to write a song, especially if I’m having to write the words and the music.
But they sent me a link to the film. Quite late that night I sat up in bed and watched it and liked it very much . I fell asleep and had vivid dreams and woke up in the morning with what was pretty much a fully formed lyric in my mind. And I just wrote that down on a piece of paper that was next to me.
Really, this just never, ever happens to me. My muse is the least generous. (Laughs) It requires a lot for me to write a song. So this was good. I had these lyrics, and in the hotel I was staying at, there was a piano in the breakfast room. So I woke really early, went down and started playing some chords to it. I felt like it could be a song quite quickly. I think I contacted Joel and read the lyrics, and he really liked them, and then I got Clint’s number and read them to him and he liked them.
And finally I approached Bryce and apologized to him because I didn’t want to be interfering in his score in any way. But he was very excited to have me do something. I watched the film again and thought I could just sing the lyrics on the top of his music. It’s really beautiful, the credit sequence that he’d already written. And so I asked him if that was OK. And took that piece of music into the studio when I got back to London and just chopped it up slightly so that it could accommodate the song. It sat really beautifully.
The whole thing was weirdly effortless, which is not normally the case for me. It was a gift from a dream.
Some of the images in the lyrics are straight from the movie, but others are from the book. You’re not just sticking to the film for inspiration.
That’s right. I mean, it’s generally disastrous to write a song that tries to sum up the film. Especially attempting to be so explicit about the imagery. But this just seemed to work really well. The book is kind of in my bones, so I remembered things from the books – the story of Elvis on a train and that sort of thing. Those images were there for the taking, in a way.
Was it easy to find the right tone? It’s tricky, because there’s a sense of wonder, but it’s undercut by this tremendous loss.
It’s kind of what I do. (Laughs) It’s not my first rodeo, shall we say. I think my ballads are often that, you know? They’re melancholy songs. But there’s a line in the movie from William H. Macy when he is staring out at things and he says, “Beautiful, isn’t it? Every bit of it.” Or something like that. And that feeling of a life that’s had its troubles, but you still have the capacity to be able to see the world as a beautiful place – that’s something that I tend to write about quite a lot. This is where beauty actually comes from: Loss and longing and melancholy moods give forth to a kind of weird joyfulness at times.
In a certain way, it feels as if you’re singing in the voice of Joel’s character – but he’s somebody who doesn’t say much, so it’s appropriate that many of the verses end with the line, “I can’t begin to tell you how that feels.”
Yeah, yeah. That’s right. It’s a lovely last line, and there’s a piece of music that rises up with a sort of sonic explanation of that feeling. Bryce’s piece of music’s absolutely gorgeous.
When you went to record it, did you have a sense of the arrangement you wanted? It’s a beautiful arrangement where it seems very sparse, but with the voices in the background it sounds as if there are ghosts in that song.
Yeah. The score is all that anyway. We took Bryce’s end-credit piece of music and made it a little bit more structured. We added a bass and an arpeggio acoustic guitar and some kind of wailing from me in between the words. (Laughs) And that’s pretty much all we did.
I don’t think I would’ve been able to write in the same way if it wasn’t for Bryce’s having already done the work. I remember talking to him about it on the phone, sitting by a river in my bathers because I was still trying to be on a holiday with my wife. (Laughs) Making quiet surreptitious phone calls so that she wouldn’t think that I was getting embroiled in some new sort of creative thing.
Are your vacations usually so creatively fruitful?
(Laughs) No! Well, I don’t go on many. They have to sort of pack me off and send me away.
