{"id":154740,"date":"2025-10-31T06:03:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T06:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/154740\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T06:03:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T06:03:12","slug":"bryce-dessners-train-dreams-score-composer-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/154740\/","title":{"rendered":"Bryce Dessner’s ‘Train Dreams’ Score \u2014 Composer Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

The protagonist of \u201cTrain Dreams<\/a>,\u201d Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton<\/a>), is a quiet man, but arguably one of the most important supporting characters in the latest movie by director Clint Bentley<\/a> doesn\u2019t have a single line of dialogue. Visions of the Western United States \u2014its woods and landscapes\u2014 both entice and haunt Grainier throughout his life, evoking unanswerable beauty and heartbreak that circle around and around the logger and railroad worker, nonlinearly over the course of the film<\/a>.\u00a0(Listen to an exclusive track from the score below.)<\/p>\n

Creating an emotional throughline for a film that embraces the lyrical, dreamlike quality of its title gave composer Bryce Dessner<\/a> enough of a challenge to disrupt how composers usually create a movie score.<\/p>\n

\"KPOP<\/a> \"'BLKNWS:<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of times [composing] is kind of wedging into a corner of \u2018you\u2019ve got 40 seconds to say something\u2019 or whatever. But I felt like the music in this needed more development. It needed to simmer in its own juices a bit more and be more like a composition. So half of the score I did where I had some images \u2014 I had still photography from the set and a couple of sequences I was watching \u2014 but I was pretty much writing and then recording off picture,\u201d Dessner told IndieWire.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dessner also deliberately went off-piste when choosing how to record the \u201cTrain Dreams<\/a>\u201d score to evoke the slower, older sense of connection to the world that the film explores. \u201c[As part of] trying to access this older way of working, I was working in recording studios that were not set up for film. It was pretty funny. Getting a monitor into the live room was kind of a challenge, where normally that\u2019s the first thing there,\u201d Dessner said. \u201cThese older studios have this gear from the \u201830s and \u201840s, and the old analog boards and microphones, so you can kind of hear it on the score, a little bit of a crackle in the sound.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Much like the film\u2019s protagonist, there is not a lot that would be outwardly pushy or loudly experimental about Dessner\u2019s music on \u201cTrain Dreams.\u201d A lot of it is simple, disciplined, ruminating in a way that won\u2019t surprise anyone aware of his work with The National. But having the freedom to let the music breathe and develop allows the score to feel emotionally expressive, and never didactic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of times, composers and editors end up being problem solvers to put out a fire or bridge something; the first act\u2019s good, but there\u2019s a tricky section in the middle, things like that. That\u2019s not really the case with Clint and Greg. They\u2019re really fine filmmakers. They\u2019re really bold filmmakers. Their scripts are kind of airtight,\u201d Dessner said. \u201cMusic can do the thing that words struggle to do, and the film itself is also really emotional, but it\u2019s not hitting it over the head with it, you know?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"TRAIN\u2018Train Dreams\u2019\u00a9Netflix\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

Which is not to say that Dessner didn\u2019t get to play around and push the music of \u201cTrain Dreams\u201d any. \u201cI did try some things I haven\u2019t done in film scores before \u2014 some of the more outlying, stranger harmonic ideas are pushing it, I would say, pretty far. Then, in a similar way, there\u2019s really simple music in there. Really kind of like folk songs,\u201d Dessner said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Honing in on American folk music of the early 20th Century wasn\u2019t just logical given the period in which \u201cTrain Dreams\u201d is set. The score\u2019s spirit \u2014 the African American musical tradition coming out of slavery and the Civil War, merging with other immigrant cultures of Ireland, Scotland, and other places \u2014\u00a0 aligns with the spirit of the film, too, so much wrapped up in how Grainier affects and is affected by the changing American landscape.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, people say America is a melting pot, and if you talk about the music, it\u2019s really true,\u201d Dessner said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost impossible to distinguish where all of this comes from when it gets all mixed up. And in terms of American identity, it\u2019s fundamental. The way that the music and the landscape of America \u2014 you know, if I had to say the two unique things about the American experience, it would be those two things,\u201d Dessner said.<\/p>\n

Listen to an exclusive track from the score below.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrain Dreams\u201d opens in select theaters on November 7 before streaming on Netflix November 21.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The protagonist of \u201cTrain Dreams,\u201d Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), is a quiet man, but arguably one of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[263],"tags":[90436,18,117,597,19,17,327,55075,68194],"class_list":["post-154740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-bryce-dessner","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-top-of-the-line","tag-train-dreams"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115467269155780396","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}