Song Exploder - Son Lux - This is a Life (from 'Everything Everywhere All at Once')

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a sci-fi comedy independent film that came out in the spring of 2022. It’s a huge hit that made over $100 million at the box office. It’s already been named the best movie of the year by several publications and awards organizations. The movie stars the legendary actress Michelle Yeoh, and was directed by the Daniels, the directing duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The score for the film is by the band Son Lux. In addition to the score, Son Lux also made the original song for the film’s end credits: "This is a Life," featuring two prestigious guest vocalists: Mitski and David Byrne of the Talking Heads. For this episode, I spoke to Ryan Lott from Son Lux, as well as the Daniels. Ryan tells the story of how the song was created, with his bandmates and Mitski and David Byrne and Daniels all adding to it and shaping it. For more, visit songexploder.net/son-lux.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a sci-fi comedy independent film that came out in the spring of 2022. It's a huge hit that made over $100 million at the box office, and it's already been named the best movie of the year by a bunch of publications and awards organizations. The movie stars the legendary actress Michelle Yo, and it's already been named the best movie of the year, and it's already been named the best movie of the year by a bunch of the year. And it was directed by The Daniels, the directing duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Shinerd. The score for the film is by the band Sun Lux. And in addition to the score, Sunlux also made an original song for the film's end credits.

It's called This Is a Life, and it features two prestigious guest vocalists, David Byrne of The Talking Heads and Mitzky. For this episode, I spoke to Ryan Lott from Sunlux and The Daniels. Ryan tells the story of how the song was created, with his bandmates and Mitzky and David Byrne and Daniels, all adding to it and shaping it. This is Ryan Lott from Sun Lux. So Sunlux is Rafiq Batia, Ian Chang, and me. We were in New York doing a bunch of recording for what was going to be our next record.

And our manager reached out and was like, hey, these guys, the Daniels, they're interested in you guys scoring their next project. Hello, this is the voice of Daniel Kwan. And this is Daniel Shiner. I don't sound that different. We had an initial call with Daniels, and they pitched the idea to us. It didn't really make a lot of sense, but it sounded super fascinating. It's a sci-fi action adventure where a middle-aged woman gets taken on a journey across the multiverse, but she mostly gets freaked out about the lives she could have led and about the overwhelming number of options out there. And the whole movie is an adventure trying to engage with what it feels like to be alive today and to be overwhelmed. And how do you figure out how to love in the noise?

So then after the call, they sent us the script. And there was no way to anticipate what was on those pages. I thought my PDF was broken. I'm like, this page can't come after that page. You know what I mean? So I like really thought it was broken or like something was weird. and I checked him with the guys. I was like, yeah, have you guys started to read this yet?

Rafi laughed his ass off. Like, he couldn't put it down. But, like, I didn't really get it at first. I couldn't keep up with it. By the time I made it through, I said to myself, it would have been cool to make a movie with the Daniels. Too bad. This movie is never going to get made.

You know, that was definitely my position. Nobody is going to make this movie. And really, it wasn't until they were like, guys, we got Michelle Yo. Then it was like, Wait, what? So this movie's actually going to get made. Like, we're going to actually do this. All right, let's go.

In the midst of it, we were staring down a cue sheet of over 100 cues, which is a really crazy amount of cues for a single film. There's an hour and 50 minutes of original music in the movie. And at some point, we knew it was time to start considering whether or not there was going to be a special song. for the end credits. More often than not, what happens with an end credits is that a music editor can create a montage of music from the film,

or it's a song from an artist, and sometimes it's an original song, but it's never the composer gets to also write a song for the end credits, but we wanted to claim that space, this very precious moment following this, crazy movie. Here's Daniel Kwan again. I was like, I want this to be sort of like the 90s end credit song,

the Celine Dion at the end of Titanic, but what is the Sunlux version of that? We gave him permission to be more emotional and more vulnerable and kind of turn it into like a pop ballad. And so we thought it would be really amazing to create a duet. It felt really consistent with the story of this film where there's a hard, fought and hard won reconciliation between two individuals that are coming from very different perspectives. And that was kind of my concept for the song. What if it was a duet that felt like two very different voices, two different perspectives on the same song happening at the same time?

I wasn't going to sing it. My voice just didn't feel like it was going to be right for the end credit song. And right around that time, Kwan sent us his little Spotify like screenshot of like his top artist that year that he had been listening to. And I was like, oh, Mitzky. Let's see if Mitzky would be interested in singing this end credit song. So we got on Zoom with her and Daniels and she was super into it. And then it was just like, man, it sure would be amazing to get David Byrne. You know, what if it was David Byrne and Mitzke?

That's so like not expected, but that would be so amazing. So we reached out to David Byrne, you know. I think we heard back within like 24 hours. He must have watched it that night. Maybe it was my excitement, but I had been imagining in my head like a party song. But when we got on that first call, David chimed in early and he was like, it needs to be a song that just lets you sit. It can't be fast.

It can't be loud. Can't be, you know, celebratory. it actually needs to be like a warm embrace and just give us space to resonate with this movie. And as soon as he said that, I was like, oh, he's 100% right. We always knew we wanted the very end of the movie to be that shot of Michelle and for there to be like a big hit, a big maximalist hit.

This was a song that came so fast. I have a voice memo sitting at my synth. I'm just playing and singing. Not only what we saw. There's a discovery that happens in the film that life is bigger than you could ever imagine. And so this is a life. That sentiment came out screaming at me right away.

I had spent so many hours with this film. Hundreds. Maybe that's why the lyrics came really fast to me because it wasn't like I needed to spend time discovering the spirit of something that is emanating from it. It was like, I'm already in its glow. You know, I had been listening a lot of Mitzki, so I was like thinking in her range and like some of her phrasing and stuff.

So when I send it over, I said, here's a file of just like a piano demo without my voice. So you can, if you want, you can write your own lyrics and your own melody, whatever. Because I, I mean, I wrote it for her, but that doesn't mean I got it all right. But she was super into just singing it. I wrote it. This is a life. Which was like a very big compliment. Free from destiny.

That is the piano stem from the recording, which is basically a note for note replay following the voice memo. Because part of what made that initial voice memo special, right, is that it gives and takes and it feels kind of messy in the way that the movie does, frankly. And so in order to preserve the feeling of that one moment, I actually created a click track that speeds up and slows down

where I sped up and slow down. And this piano in the recording is one I designed virtually. Usually I like to accentuate the mechanics of the piano because I have such an affection for spending so much time in front of the instrument. You can hear the hammers and the key releases. So the half of it before David's part just kind of came fully formed. But I left space in the vocal.

Because I really did want this sense of like two melodies having their own space to intersect and alternate. you know and then David can just go to town this is a life every possibility from destiny it's a very specific task what David had to do which is like I can only sing here

and if I do it has to be kind of on this note but pretty quickly I think probably within a week or so he came back with the demo and it was like so great. Not only what we show. My bandmates are my favorite musicians. Ian played to the craziest pocket

because it's all built on me just sitting at the piano that one late night or whatever. It's not based on how a drummer would play and yet he made it feel like completely natural. That's like a real intangible art. And then Rafiq played to Ian. That's layers of Rafiq's prepared guitar. He puts things like between the strings.

He's got a great technique for creating a sort of papery muted sound. And then I took recordings of him doing these like little fluttery prepared guitar things. And then I created an instrument out of those recordings using a software sampler to play back little fragments of recordings at different speeds. When we first started working with them, we went to Ryan's house, and he gave us a tour of some of his gear where he would take a sample, he'd pull it up in the software, he'd program it to his keyboard, and he was demonstrating to us the ways that he can take a sound effect, then warp it and shift it and shrink it and grow it. He feels like an alchemist. It's really fun. We left, and Dan was like, he's like a sound magician. And I remember that being the moment where I was like, I'm so excited to

work with these guys. One of the things I love to do is work in the virtual realm because it means you can capture something about an instrument that is truly unique and truly beautiful and can only express itself acoustically, but then harness it to achieve something musically that wouldn't otherwise be possible. We call those trembleums. They feel like these things that are trembling but blooming at the same time. They are Rafiq playing acoustic guitar strumming through a chord and then doing like finger-picking, wrestling, combined with harps, and then the playback speed has been adjusted to create a sort of like crystalline array

of feathery, like shards of light. Rob Moose on strings. Rob has a really cool way to make pizicado feel not like pizicado. Like it doesn't really sound like you're listening to violins and violas. And then when you add, if you play those and Rafiq's bass, That is just such a magic combination. The Daniels did have one note, and it was super important. If you listen to the early demo, I'm like, blah, and then I immediately start singing.

Their insight was like, let's just like, let's let the song slip in. And so what we did is basically take the pitticado violin and violas and Rafiq's bass, just take a cycle. And it just lets us, like, slow our pace of our heart a bit. As they kept adding to it and adding to it, you could feel that it was very small and then allowed the space for it to become very big. And that to me is exciting because that's what the film is all about. It's about the smallest things and the biggest things. And then Mitzky came up with this beautiful background vocal.

She sings, sucked into a bagel, which has nothing to do with the song, but is a note for note. quote of Stephanie Shue's character in an iconic moment in the movie where instead of speaking her line sucked into a bagel, she decided to sing it. It was just like a zany choice that she made on camera. If nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away. Sucked into a bagel. Mitzki picked up on that and had the crazy, beautiful, amazing idea to sing those lyrics in this apex of the song. And that, to me, was like, a master stroke. Because this was an end credit song, it had to be done, done, done when the film is mixed.

So that was like summer of 21, right? But the movie didn't come out until March 11th, I think. It was the opening film at the South by Southwest Film Festival. and it was a big theater I think it was like a 1,500 people watching this movie together gasping, laughing, crying.

And in the wake of that movie, as the credits came rolling and the song started playing, I was so relieved because for years, I protected my heart from having two high hopes because I believed in it so much.

And like the most heartbreaking thing would be if people didn't get this movie or if nobody saw it. But when we saw it together with all those people and felt the impact, I knew people were going to get this movie. And I knew people were going to see it. And so I started to let myself celebrate. And now here's your story.

This Is a Life by SunLux, featuring Mitsky and David Byrne in its entirety. For more on SunLux and everything everywhere all at once, visit songexploder.net. You'll find links to buy or stream This Is a Life, and you can watch the trailer for the movie. You can also find Mitzki's own episode of Song Exploder from a few years ago. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career

and then for over a decade I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music talking to other artists and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs and this album is the product of all of that

it features contributions from some of my favorite artists including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast like Iron and Wine Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fenlily and the producer Phil Wine rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat,

Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs were out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.cash.c-o. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's song-exploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder and the show's theme music were created by me. I produced this episode with Craig Ely, with artwork by Carlos Lerma, music clearance by Kathleen Smith,

and production assistance from Mary Dolan. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hirway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi-Kesh-Hirway.

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