A “TASK” WELL DONE

An Interview With Composer-Performer Dan Deacon

Dan Deacon is an American original. In musical lineage, he’s in some ways a descendant of the Downtown Sound of the 1960s, the matrix of minimalism associated with other American originals like La Monte Young and Terry Riley, also sometimes dubbed the “New York Hypnotic School.” By dint of his studies with artists like Dary John Mizelle at the State University of New York at Purchase in the aughts, there’s also an avant-garde pedigree and bona fides as a “serious composer,” and to fill out the picture, he’s toured with Arcade Fire and released five solo albums of what I can only call ecstatic jams, mostly pulse-driven electronic instrumental tracks flavored by his idiosyncratic vocal stylings (I told him that his jubilant trance-dance tracks made me envision a throng of Hare Krishnas on DMT, dancing in saffron robes in a field of purple daisies). He also co-founded Wham City, the art and performance collective associated with the Copycat Building in Baltimore, where he now makes his home. But it was his film score work that first drew my attention, specifically his efforts on the exceptional HBO Max-Mark Ruffalo crime drama, Task. As the end credits rolled on Episode 2, I said to myself, “I have to talk to this man.”

AH: There’s a quality in your music…especially your solo album tracks…that I can only describe as ecstatic. And although you don’t try to be a rave DJ, you do get people to dance.

DD: I do like to evoke that feeling of something overwhelming washing over you, so all-present that you almost forget it’s there. A lot of the reason I got into electronic music was that you could use the loops to build and build and layer and layer until it became this…this-

AH: Like a musical continuum…

DD: Right. 

AH: When I was jotting down random notes while listening to your stuff, I wrote that your film scoring took a “LaMonte Young” approach. [Young was a founding American minimalist in the 1960s Downtown Scene in NY and along with Terry Riley pretty much invented the form. Riley was about musical cells in motion, and so he led to Reich. Young was all about drones and trance, and so he led to people like Brian Eno. But all were influenced by Indian and Asian music]  Does that mesh with your own intentions?

DD: Absolutely. Years back, I read a book—I think it was just called ‘The Minimalists.’ There was a chapter on LaMonte Young that opens with him talking about growing up in a big, old, drafty house where every sound was amplified and you could never turn off the howl of the wind or the buzz of the electrical transformers, and being fascinated by the fact that even though they were constant sounds they kept drifting and changing…

AH: They were being modulated by the house, and probably other things.

DD: Yes. So I read this while I was in college, but I keep coming back to it. This idea of a musical sound that’s engulfing. I was living in New York City at the time—loudest place I’ve ever lived—up in Washington Heights right near an emergency vehicle dispatch—the whole urban cacophony--but the thing was that I loved it. I could hear them approaching and receding with the Doppler effect and I understood what he meant about turning sound into music. So yeah, La Monte’s a real hero, and I would love to see a TV series scored with his sensibility.

AH: Now, the fact that you say that…that you were turned on by that…says something about your own sensibilities, and probably about why I responded to your music. So I want to ask you, if I can without delving too deeply into the personal…does your approach to music come from any sort of spiritual practice? Such as meditation?

DD: I think that before I even knew what a meditation practice involved, my writing was a meditation practice. It needed to be. I jump from thought to thought, it’s hard for me to latch on, I have multiple streams going simultaneously…if I were born today I’d probably be diagnosed with something—

AH: You and a few dozen other significant composers. Ravel, for example.

DD: But it works for me. I can meet deadlines, I can deliver the goods. But I do need the leveling influence. When I’m writing, it’s very immersive. I relate it to the beach. I love the beach. Stimulus everywhere. The sand underfoot, the warmth of the sun, the constant shifting gradient of the waves and the hiss as they crest, and this amazing ultra-wide stereo of the shoreline. And that’s what I try to bring myself to when I write. Back in 2019, I told myself I could never meditate. Attention was too fragmented. But then I realized I’d been doing it all along, but instead of “turn off your mind and float downstream,” it was “trance out on the modulated pulse of the bass groove and let it take you somewhere.” And that’s what I want. I want to be transported.

AH: You studied at SUNY at Purchase, which has a great little conservatory, and you’ve got some avant-garde bona fides. You’ve written for Kronos Quartet, the New York Ballet, you’ve even played Carnegie Hall. Is there any sense of a road not taken? That you could have stayed in that rarified world?

DD: I did try to do more “traditional composition,” if we can call it that – like I got really into George Crumb’s notation and flirted with doing everything by hand, but I couldn’t keep my focus on it. The computer was the method for me. Maybe in a different generation it wouldn’t have been. But it was there, beckoning, and it was natural for me. It allowed me to dive right into all that immersive density I wanted. And I think this density might be why my music’s pretty polarizing. It can be overwhelming for some people. There’s this one reviewer Anthony Fantano who did a piece on my last album and said, basically, “Finally, Dan chilled out a little bit.”

AH: Well, yeah, you are sort of a maximalist-minimalist. There’s a ton of stuff going on in those beds, but it’s all organized in repeating cells and motives. And…most importantly, grooves. In- fectious grooves that actually get very reserved white people to let down their hair and and dance, and they seem to love you for it.

DD: That release is happening because it’s communal. It’s group catharsis. That’s obviously everything in live shows. But that’s the potential I saw in film music, too. You’ve got these people gathered together in one place, like a church, and they’re there to experience catharsis.

AH: You want a film audience to have a taste of what your club audiences do…

DD: Francis [Ford Coppola] heard me talking about this on a podcast and then wrote me to say, “Do you wanna score my film?”

AH: You didn’t know each other…

DD: No. Not at all. I thought it was a scam at first. Some phishing thing. But he was persistent, fortunately. I jumped right in and found that not only was I out of my depth, I couldn’t even swim. Music for music’s sake and music for picture require two completely different sets of muscles, and I hadn’t developed them yet.

There I was , working with one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I was terrified.

AH: The film was called Twixt. With Val Kilmer. Re-released in 2022 as B’Twixt Now And Sunrise. Your co-composer was Coppola stalwart Osvaldo Golijov, who I have a lot of admiration for.

DD: So do I, which is why when Francis told me he wanted me to chop up and reconstitute Osvaldo’s music, I stepped back. We did some good work, but like I said, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t even know what a cue sheet was. I needed to get into film music the same way I got into touring. Everyone knowing the same amount of nothing, but sharing this immense desire for discovery. Learning as you go. I got attached to a documentary by a filmmaker in Baltimore in 2016, and we figured out how to do it together. And every project since then, a little bit more, and a little bit more…

AH: Starting from an admission "not knowing” is good. Composers who come into film over-educated often struggle to give up the reins and let the story speak to them. If they get over that hump, they might experience that liberating “Ah-hah” moment when they realize, “Oh, I get it. I don’t need to lead. I need to follow.”

DD: It really is liberating. The whole “nothing is precious” approach to composition. Writing to picture trains you to see what’s necessary. Often the best music I write on a project turns out not to be right for the film. But that’s okay. They’re making a cake, and I’m supplying the eggs, and you never want to take a bite out of a cake and taste the eggs. But wow…if it’s a good cake, that’s an experience I would never be able to make on my own as a solo performer. And the music is good for a different reason. Just to take one example, a different camera position and angle shifts the point of view, which then the music has to respond to. And that’s really cool.

AH: Right, perspective. Music can move it around the room sometimes even more fluidly than a camera can. This is why I’ll sometimes say that music makes film 3D instead of 2D.

DD: Yeah, and music can express things that can’t be said or shot. When you nail one of those, which is hard, it’s uniquely satisfying.

AH: All this makes for a great segue to the show that brought me to you, which is HBO’s Task with Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey, created by Brad Ingelsby and directed by Jeremiah Zagar, who you worked with on Hustle. It’s extraordinary crime drama—maybe the best I’ve seen since something like The Sopranos. But more than that, it’s a story about family, and it has the gravitas of great tragedy. And your score contributes massively to that gravitas. So here’s a big question: how does a guy whose music is so much about the pursuit of joy deal with the deepest kind of sorrow? Is it somehow about “inverting” the joy that these characters like Tom, and Robbie and Maeve have been denied?

DD: When I signed on and saw the scripts, I saw immediately that there was a really wide range of emotion in the story…

AH: All of it cranked up to 10.

DD: Right. And I’ll say that Brad got into the weeds with me in a way that was really beneficial. I started to demo right away, and because I write pretty dense, I’d give him a mix and all the stems. And I mean all the stems. So I go down to the set one day and Brad says, “Let’s sit down and talk about the music.” And I see that he’s got like four-hundred tabs open on his browser and it’s every single stem I’d sent him for three different cues. And he’s like, “I really like the bowed vibes thing there and the alto flute thing here,” and he’s toggling back and forth, basically D.J.ing my stems! And he found these two interior voices that I didn’t think of as primary but he recognized as important, and they became core motifs. Now that’s a man who recognizes the impact of music on drama, and seeing how into the details he was made me excited to try new things. There’s a very tense cue in Episode 2 in the parking lot—it has to be bursting with tension—and going back to your question about tragedy being the inverse of joy, I discovered something. Anyone who has anxiety knows that it’s kind of the dark twin of euphoria, and that they’re both all-consuming. My music aims for all-consuming. So maybe that’s how I found my way there.

AH: Not every showrunner or director who gets this much into the weeds is welcome, but it sounds like you were very fortunate the have a guy with great musical instincts.

DD: Absolutely.

AH: I made some notes on my second look at Episode 4--which knocked me flat, by the way—and when I reviewed them I saw instantly that part of what makes the score so effective is the way it’s spotted. Not one false entry or premature exit. No “TV-style” needle drops.

DD: Brad, Jeremiah and the team knew exactly what they wanted, but they were also incredibly open to trying new things because they wanted it to be great.

AH: How did Brad come to you? Was he aware of your music? Maybe even a fan?

DD: I think he was aware of my albums. But it was Jeremiah, who was the director of the pilot episode and who I’d worked with on Hustle, who brought me in. We go back to…maybe 2010? We have a shorthand vocabulary now. Anyhow, he pitched me to Brad, and luckily they were going to a basketball game in Philadelphia and earlier on the same night I had a ballet being staged at the Mann Center, and we got together backstage. It was a ballet definitely in the minimalist style, so right away it gave us a jumping off point to discuss the musical imprint of the show. And we—Brad and I—were the same type of crazy. We could have been roommates. That was evident from the first meeting. And that helps.

AH: How soon after that did you have the gig?

DD: We kept in touch, and I was probably overly annoying about how much I wanted to do the show.

AH: I doubt it. I think directors and showrunners want to know how much you want it.

DD: I’d never done a big, dramatic narrative for HBO, so there were a lot of people who needed to be convinced, a lot of hoops to jump through.

AH: Do you think, in hindsight, that it was the shared chemistry of that first backstage meeting that sealed the deal?

DD: There’s no shortage of incredible composers out there. But finding collaborators that you know won’t undermine the project—willfully or just through a certain attitude—you really want to have the trust that leads to camaraderie, because, look—the job is fun, but it’s only fun because of the people you’re making it with. And it only takes one person to poison that, usually someone who just has trouble rolling with the love and good feeling. There’s a Bill Murray quote I love. He says “you’re only at your best when you’re truly relaxed.” Now there’s nothing relaxing about huge professional pressure and deadlines and everything that goes with making a show, so to be able find that calm space in your head in the midst of that…you know, as an aside, this is something I’d say to young composers hoping to get into the game: go to film festivals and just hang with filmmakers as much as you can. Learn how to be relaxed around them so that later, when they’re losing their minds over some crisis on the set, you can be the calm, reassuring voice.

AH: Amen. Back to the show, there’s something rare and precious going on there--in the writing, the direction, the performances, and the editing—Task manages to make even the worst of its characters sympathetic, or at least human in a way that mirrors us. And your music supports that.

DD: We talked a lot about that very thing. Especially with the Dark Hearts, the badass, murderous, drug-running motorcycle gang—there’s a reason we scored them with the softest strings, solo alto voice, the gentlest instrumental timbres. We didn’t want to do, “BIKERS!” Sure, they’re bad. But they’re a family, and within their circle, they’re actually one of the more loving families in the film. They have picnics! So, no, we didn’t want to portray any character as black & white good or evil. That was for the character’s actions to bring out. We wanted the music to score the emotions that the characters were feeling, not the bad or stupid things they were doing, and those emotions are universal.

AH: Right, they have no positive or negative moral “valence,” as the academics like to say. That focus on the universality of these emotions—grief, remorse, family love and loyalty—is a big part of what gives the show that tragic weight. I mean, that’s what The Godfather had, too.

I want to talk before we close about a particular scene at the end of Episiode 5, when Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) takes Tom (Mark Ruffalo) into the woods, presumably to kill him but, in the end, to secure a promise of safety for his niece. Powerful stuff. The sort of scene Bruce Springsteen writes about. I mentioned how good the spotting is. Well, when you entered the scene, with something that sounds like bowed vibes or the like--sounds like maybe you had a dark pedal steel or an E-bow in there, too--I just completely fell apart. My eyes welled up with tears. When you can do that to a guy who’s heard as much film music as I have, you know you’ve done something right. Yes, it’s about the writing and arrangement, but it’s a lot about the spotting. 

DD: It was a tricky and very important scene. We knew we had to nail it. I think at one point we did have the music coming in a lot earlier, and there was indeed a difference of opinion about what the music should do and how and when it should do it. The difference of opinion was pretty diametric. And the composer’s job is to take someone’s idea that’s way over here (he extends his right arm) and someone’s idea that’s way over there (he extends his left arm) and find that sliver of the Venn diagram where they overlap.

AH: Without compromising the dramatic power of the music. I’m going to guess that “over here” was the writer-producer and “over there” was the director, but in any case, you solved the problem! You could have played—and a lot of directors might have wanted you to play—Tom’s fear that he was going to die. After all, he’s the show’s protagonist. But you stayed with Robbie, and that’s what makes it so heartbreaking, because he’s a fundamentally good man who’s made terrible choices, and this time, he makes the right one.

DD: Yeah, we considered using Robbie’s little brass chorale, which is his “terrible choices” motif, but not this time.

AH: You come in when Robbie says to Tom, “I want to ask you a favor,” and then makes the plea for Maeve’s (his niece’s) safety…

DD: Right, when he speaks that line, the audience knows there’s some kind of future beyond this scene for both characters, and the music lets them imagine what that might be. But it’s left open. And I think that’s what makes the music in these really intense scenes work. We wanted it to be one color in the bouquet, but not the brightest flower in the bunch. Even the way it’s mixed…

AH: Yes, you feel it more than hear it. And that’s part of why I think it’s so moving. It’s embedded. But that only works because the right music is embedded.

DD: The mix is a big part of that. Sometimes when music is mixed too low, I find myself leaning in and thinking, “Did I hear something or not?” and that’s a distraction. But this is just right. You can hear all the environmental sounds—twigs breaking, birds chirping, movement through he grass—and the music is still there at the heart of it. It doesn’t get lost.

AH: No, not at all. It’s a Terrence Malick mix. Everything in its rightful place. And you’ve kind of exemplified something I’m always trying to get across to my students, which is about writing from the inside of the story. Not outside-in, but inside-out. And while it is a spare, “minimalistic” score, and very contemporary in that sense, it never feels like one long pad. It’s always an equal player.

DD: If it could be just a pad, we didn’t need it. There had to be intention behind every cue. Because we understood how music could blow up a scene like the one we’re talking about. So we were like a bomb squad, wanting to make absolutely sure we cut the right wire.

AH: I only wish that every production took the effect of music that seriously and wielded the wire clippers that delicately. Because there’s a million ways to fuck up a scene like that.

DD: And we probably tried all of them!

AH: Getting a scene right is all about trial and error, isn’t it? Nobody knows anything until it works. What counts is that you and your collaborators knew when it was working. Before we wrap, Dan, any words of wisdom and experience you want to lay on people who want to do what you’re doing?

DD: If you can—even if you have the worst stage presence in the world—find a way to perform the music you write in a live setting. Even if it’s a monthly piano recital in your living room. And if you can get into a venue, a house party, a club, an open mic night, it’s an incredible musical education to play your stuff in a room where you don’t know a soul. And it isn’t just musicians who come to these places. Playwrights, choreographers, filmmakers are out there, and you’re as likely—maybe more likely—to attract their interest with a live performance than with a demo reel.

AH: I’m guessing that that might have been what the scene was like with Wham City. Yes, you create these art spaces, and look what happens: artists show up. And not just musicians, but the artists you want to work with. That’s really good advice, Dan. And it’s clear that it’s worked for people like Daniel Hart and Mica Levi, as well as yourself, and that increasingly, filmmakers want to work with composers they think of as artists in the total sense. On that point, the cues you’ve written to close each episode of Task and take us into the end credits are spellbinding. That’s where you get to take the gloves off as a composer and allow the audience to feel what they’ve just seen. I noticed it right from the first episode, when after everything goes to hell with the drug house heist, Robbie is cradling little Sam in his arms, and similarly, at the end of Episode 2, when Maeve—also carrying Sam—asks Robbie, "What have you done to us?” These cues not only make for great and gripping drama—they’re also first-rate contemporary pieces on their own.  Thank you for doing this with me, Dan.

DD: It was a pleasure.  

Note: As mentioned above, there is a musical treat at the end of every episode of TASK. As Dan and I have discussed here, the underscore in the body of the episodes is beautifully spare and understated, but as the show closes and the end credits roll, he gives us a kind of summation of the dramatic weight of the episode. These feature wonderful performances from artists like Gracie Carney and Jessica Hanson on violin and viola, Jonathan Villegas and Peter Kibbe on cello, the vocals of Allison Clendaniel and some very nice mixology courtesy of Jason La Rocca and Mick Roby. When I heard the first of these in Episode 1, I had to rewind the sequence twice to make sure I was hearing what I thought I was hearing, and to affirm that it was genuinely of a piece with the score. It is, and it’s damned good writing. So stay through the end credits and you’ll be rewarded. It can be tricky with HBO Max, because they’re so anxious for you to move on to the next episode or the next show that they minimize the frame and cut away from it unless you click on it to bring it back to full screen.