Inside the soundtrack for The Road

Best known for their band, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (although they’ve enjoyed plenty of separate side projects, including Cave writing the screenplay for acclaimed Aussie drama, The Proposition), Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s work is celebrated for being eclectic and unpredictable, even straying into pop territory in 1996 when they duetted with Kylie Minogue on single, “Where the Wild Roses Grow”. And now the pair has teamed up once again to produce the soundtrack to The Road, a project that reunited Cave and Ellis with The Proposition director, John Hillcoat.

For the director they were the only choice. “We didn’t want a big, orchestrated, heavy soundtrack,” he explains. “It would weigh the movie down. It needed to be almost slight, dare I say it. It didn’t need to be overwrought and big and important, it would have made the material pretentious.”

“We talked about the fear stuff, which is something these guys can do in a nanosecond, with their eyes closed, because they are very adventurous with sound, disturbing sounds,” he adds. “Yet, there’s the beauty and the lightness as a counterpoint, which was also needed.”

Ellis continues: "One side of the music should support this beautiful story between the father and son and the other side that we wanted was the earth in turmoil – this constant feeling of “it’s falling to pieces,”" recalls the musician. “We had two very different types of music going on.”

Summing up the distinctive sound of the score, Cave describes it as “a light, haunting, simple score with a sense of absence and loss at its heart.”

That sold you? If so, get The Road Soundtrack here in the UK and here in the US.

[via BBC News & SPIN]