Dear John Darnielle...

Anyone who's talked to me in... I'd say the last two or three months has probably heard me talk about "The Mountains Goats" a sort of folk/folk rock/lo-fi band I found through Adult Swim's "Moral Orel", as some of the last season featured the band's music. Said "band" is actually, mostly, John Darnielle, this prolific singer/song writer who's put out 17 albums [!!] since 1991. I sort of fell in love with his music right away, as he likes to play with words and language, and has a very natural story-teller's aesthetic to his songs. They're also pretty often sad, and to paraphrase a television show I've been fond of lately, "Sad is like happy for deep people." So in other words, right up my alley [he also does some strange covers sometimes. Listen to him reclaim "The Sign" for those of us who can't bring ourselves to go back to that scratched up Ace of Base CD].

It's taken me awhile to work through all of Darnielle's discography, and even though the albums have a pretty permanent place on my iPod, I'm always finding one or two new favorite songs out of the bunch. Recently, I happened upon this gem, "Collapsing Stars", which I really wish we could use for "Nova."

Of course, I should point out I couldn't afford to buy the album the song was released on in the first place [Re: Come, Come to the Sunset Tree], let alone expect our little upstart film production to be able to afford the rights to a real song. But a man can dream, I guess, and on the off-color chance Darnielle manically Googles himself, maybe he'll find this blog, be flattered, and want to help us out. Or sue me for passing this one song out to all of my friends. Either/or.

And since this is likely the first my director, Kyle, will be hearing about this, no, I'm not that serious about using the song. It just had a fitting title, and sort of captured the feel I had in my head as concerned the attitude of my protagonist to his previous girlfriend.

I guess the real point to this post is that I've just been trying to figure out a way to illustrate how important music is to my process, and how much I tend to think about it while working. I think about music a lot, actually, and there are times when the right or wrong tunes have really impacted my work. "The Mountain Goats" are one of those bands that I've been listening too nearly the entire time while I've been working on "Nova" and I can't help but feel the music has shaped what I was thinking about as far as the feel and ambiance of the finished film would sound like. Kyle and I have talked at length about music for the movie, but it's very much a post-production concern, so a lot of this is just me trying to integrate an aspect of writing that I can't quite convey by...well, just writing about it.

Enjoy. I'll probably be back to talk about the comic I mentioned last time soon.

For now, join me in thinking how cool it'd be to have this song in the movie.