Dan Deacon Talks New Heights in HBO’s “Task”
Dan Deacon is a jack-of-all-musical-trades. Over the summer he performed the national anthem at Camden Yards, he toured across the country with his solo work, and now he’s coming to HBO on Sunday nights with the score the for Mark Ruffalo-led crime drama, Task. The series follows a Philadelphia-based FBI agent (Ruffalo) who has been tasked with ending a string of violent robberies by a family man (Tom Pelphrey). Deacon’s foray into the world of prestige television was, by his own admission, a bit of a roundabout journey.
“After college, I moved to Baltimore because it was so cheap. My goal was to make $70 per show and do three shows a month. I would be able to do nothing but that and then be able to maintain my studio practice. I lived in a warehouse. My rent was $180 a month. I lived in the place where Food Not Bombs would store all the food that would be used to make that week's meals. A jar of almond butter will last you for a long time,” laughs Deacon.
“I sort of fell into success with touring in 2007, and I toured nonstop. My next two albums took a few more years to get out. Right around this time, like 2010, I got an email from Francis Ford Coppola and I thought it was a scam. I was convinced it was like that Nigerian prince scam, but this was a new one that targeted musicians. It was a weird email address,” recalls Deacon. “Luckily, Francis was persistent and finally got in touch with my booking agency. My booking agent verified that it was him, and it was an invitation to go out to Napa and talk to him.”
“We just talked artist-to-artist about music and art. The reason he invited me was because I did this NPR interview about how music has this unique position where it can have a definitive version, the album, which is the best the artist can make with the time, budget, and ability they have at that time,” explains Deacon. “Then they can do it differently night after night. There are infinite ways it can exist, but film only exists in this cut. That resonated with Francis.”
“A few months later he said, I'd like you to write music for my next film. I was like, oh, I've always wanted to do this, sounds great. I very quickly realized I had no idea what I was doing. That was a completely different set of muscles,” Deacon says. “Francis is a great collaborator, very experimental-minded, very supportive of the ideas I had.”
“After that, I realized I needed to get into scoring the same way I got into everything else, which is from the ground up. Little Rascals style. It was like six years later that I met a director, Theo Anthony, who had never made a feature and was like, hey, I'm making this film that's about rats, but it's not about rats, do you want to do the score? I said yes, 100%. We discovered our roles together. He discovered being a director working with a composer. I discovered being a composer working with a director.”
“It felt really intensive. That's when I realized I wanted this to be my primary focus. I'm writing music that I would never get to write for my own albums and I'm getting to collaborate with all these non-musicians who have incredible ideas about music. It was like a puzzle. Figuring out how to solve their needs musically and the trial-and-error in that, especially with nonfiction, where it can move around so much and everything's constantly changing.”
Deacon has worked on indie projects like Rat Film and massive blockbusters like Venom: The Last Dance. HBO Sunday Night is another level in Deacon’s film career. That spot has been home to behemoth hits like The Sopranos, The Last of Us, and Game of Thrones. On September 7, Task will take on the famed timeslot. From Brad Ingelsby, creator of Mare of Easttown, another previous Sunday Night show, Task, and Deacon, will join that prestigious lineup.
“I feel like it's always good to have two handfuls of imposter syndrome the entire time,” laughs Deacon. “It’s another level. I'd done HBO docs and HBO sports, but an HBO Sunday night at 9:00 p.m. show is a big deal, so I had to get vetted by Brad. We talked about music and what we liked. We really leaned into the American minimalists like Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, and Philip Glass. I probably came on annoyingly thick on how badly I wanted to score Task. I really appreciate Brad not being like, this guy's driving me fucking crazy.”
“The way I like to choose a project is, are they down to experiment? Are we trying to find something that's bespoke to us?” muses Deacon. “You just try to see what each other likes and if you can get along. Could we be roommates who wanted to find a new place together after two years, or would we be the roommates that are like, just throw the shit out, I don't fucking care? You want to make sure you can really hang with these people for a long period of time and have hard conversations. Making sure that everyone is the same kind of psychopath is really important.”
The world of Task is split between the police force and the biker gang. It was Deacon’s job to find a way of connecting them to make a socially cohesive score.
“We talked a lot about family. Biological family, chosen family, the family you're trapped in, the family you’re assigned, and the Venn diagrams of how they overlap, come together, or spread apart,” recalls Deacon. “We talked a lot about timbre and instrumentation specifically with that in mind.”
“I think it's fun to set up rules and a framework before you start and then be like, oh, I can break this. We were very adamant about having motif-based storytelling for this series to make sure that when you hear a certain motif, it would help put the audience's mind there as well. It's a score mostly for strings, piano, voice, flute, vibes, and synths. We tried to have those families of sounds to play with that idea of how do we connect the families?”
The score for Task has a distinct electronic texture that likely comes from Deacon’s personal music career. It was his past experience that was a launching point for the collaborative process for Task.
“The way we came about the sounds was pretty fun. They were still shooting and I was writing demos, sending them up to Brad and the producers just being like, does this work? I write pretty densely, so there's a lot of pretty wide stems,” explains Deacon. “I went to set, and during lunch in craft services, Brad broke out his laptop. He had each stem in its own tab in his browser. He was like, I was listening to this particular motif and I really liked this stem with this other one. He's like deejaying tabs in his browser. It just showed me how in the weeds Brad wanted to get and it was fun.”
“We found a lot of sounds that way. That moment sticks out because I was surprised that the night before a big shoot, Brad was like, I'm gonna listen to 600 stems and I'm going to see what would sound good with this one. It was really fun to have that level of collaboration. We were kind of cherry-picking sounds throughout these larger arrangements and then knowing that we wanted the sounds to evolve as the character arcs changed and as the stories became more involved. It was like finding those timbres that fit the narrative line we wanted to attach them to and then seeing throughout the series like, how can we fold this and how do we mash these together? How can we make sure these never touch?”