Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington Talk First Score in “Rebuilding”
Three years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing writer/director Max Walker-Silverman for the release of his first feature film, A Love Song. With that movie, his earlier short film work, and the upcoming film Rebuilding, Walker-Silverman has carved a bit of a niche for himself in reimagining the genre of the American Western. When searching for someone to write the score, Walker-Silverman settled on Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, two songwriters in their own right, but new to the world of film composition. Luckily, they had built a strong foundation working on Xerxes Fussell’s latest album, When I’m Called.
“I might be wrong about this, but I remember wrapping up the album, mastering and everything, about a week before Jake was asked if he wanted to do this soundtrack,” recalls Elkington. “We had already been working quite intensely for like three months.”
“The way we’d been working on Jake’s record was that Jake would send me demos of him performing the songs and I’d start sketching out arrangement ideas,” explains Elkington. “Then we start batting it back and forth, trying to figure out the best way to approach each song. We don’t live in the same city, but since we already had this kind of rhythm pretty much established, we basically just did the same thing for Rebuilding. It was almost like we just started over. It was like, we finished Jake’s record, now imagine Jake was about to immediately start another record. All of this music comes from Jake. He came up with pretty much everything thematically for the soundtrack.”
credit: Sam Moss
“From my point of view, responding to the movie to come up with scenes was very different from the way I draw from source material to do my own work,” adds Xerxes Fussell. “I’ve written a bunch of instrumentals and never done much with them. The way I work on my own stuff is, I’m always sort of sourcing this older material and playing with it. With Rebuilding, it was like coming up with things anew, which I’d done a little of for documentary films and little short things before, but I’d never been approached about scoring an entire feature-length film.”
“It was a big task, but it was also kind of fun,” says Xerxes Fussell. “I knew that I wanted to enlist Jim’s help early on just because I was going on tour a bunch. We’d just finished this record and had booked a bunch of dates. Film people have these deadlines they really stick to. It immediately became clear that I needed to work with Jim on this.”
Xerxes Fussell and Elkington live in different regions of the United States. Despite how much technology has progressed in terms of audio recording, Xerxes Fussell begins his score sketches by using a cassette tape to capture his ideas. Instead of mailing cassettes back and forth, though, Xerxes Fussell would hook up the recorder to his computer and upload the file that way. The cassette, however, adds something essential to the score, something that feels handmade and speaks to the larger themes of Rebuilding.
“I collect little cassette recorders,” Xerxes Fussell recounts. “I’ve always liked them a lot. I grew up in a family of documentarians. My dad, as a folklorist, always had these little tabletop Sony cassette recorders and I liked the way they sounded. I love working with them. They’re still where I feel the most comfortable recording.”
Courtesy of Bleecker Street
“I would say the majority of the themes that Jake wrote as demos, those demo recordings are on the record,” Elkington says. “The stuff that we later on recorded here at my house, those were new pieces or things we had to adjust or re-record. Anything Jake came up with and found a home for fairly quickly, that stayed like it was originally recorded.”
“Those tape recorders, they impart a kind of compression and nice noise floor to them,” Elkington continues. “It’s so funny. Now, with digital recording, you buy plugins to reintroduce all this stuff. What I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is, these cassettes really do provide an audio context for the music, for the performance happening as soon as you hear the tape. Just the sound of tape, you feel like something is happening in a room. Digital silence is kind of the opposite of that.”
Rebuilding takes place in a Colorado town that was recently ravaged by a fire. True-blue cowboy Dusty (Josh O’Connor) lost everything and is now faced with the question: what is a cowboy without his cows? With his ranch burned to the ground, Dusty finds himself in a FEMA camp. Lonely, looking for connection now that his sense of purpose has been taken from him, Dusty attempts to rebuild his relationship with his daughter (Lily LaTorre) and ex-wife (Meghann Fahy).
Album artwork courtesy of Fat Possom Records
Xerxes Fussell and Elkington weren’t the only two contributors to the Rebuilding soundtrack. One thirty-second selection, “Don’t Steal My Heart Away,” comes from two actors who played members of the FEMA camp. Their song is performed a cappella around a bonfire as Dusty is understanding that community can be built anywhere.
“I wish we wrote it, and I wish it was actually our voices secretly singing,” laughs Elkington.
“We don’t really know much about it,” adds Xerxes Fussell. “It was part of the film already when it was sent to us. The song was just in that scene, and I loved it because it sort of sounded like unaccompanied folk balladry to me, but then also kind of like a popular country song or something. I was like, what is this? Do I know this song?”
“Apparently, it’s a song that one of the women wrote,” Xerxes Fussell continues. “They were just in that community, and Max recorded them singing the song. I thought it was beautiful. Jim and I both, early on, were like, this would be cool if we released this on the soundtrack. It would be really cool to include that because it feels very special. It’s also nice on a soundtrack to break things up if there’s a lot of similar sonic sounds because neither one of us was singing on this record.”
In my interview with Walker-Silverman for A Love Song, he said it was “his little mission to try to show tough places in a gentle light.” It’s a mission he fulfills in all of his works, but perhaps most literally in Rebuilding. There are still beautiful scenic shots of the American West, but Rebuilding is set in a town that has been burned to an unrecognizable degree. Thematically, this idea of beauty and harshness coexisting also shows up in the score.
Courtesy of Bleecker Street
“I think maybe I was approached by Max and producer Dan Janvey because they probably recognized something of that quality in my music already,” Xerxes Fussell explains. “I don’t want things to feel too heavy-handed, cliche, or downtrodden, because music can be weighty in that way. Especially in a film where it’s pretty quiet and there’s not a ton of dialogue. A fear of mine and Jim’s early on was like, oh, no, our score is gonna be too loud.”
“I didn’t want to be too theatrical with it, but at the same time, there’s a balance there because you do want to convey something of the mood as you perceive it,” Xerxes Fussell continues. “My approach is just to try to get into what I already know musically and how I relate to the world through music, which is certain types of melodies or riffs I’m drawn to and see how that plays out as we’re watching the screen go by.”
Now that Elkington and Xerxes Fussell have one score under their belts, the question is, would they do another?
“My immediate answer to that is yes,” affirms Xerxes Fussell. “It was a totally different process for me. Even though Jim and I described us just continuing the way we had worked together, it was different. Once we started receiving feedback from Max, it was very specific. When I’m working on my own records, there’s kind of a point at which I’m like, well, I sort of like it this way, and I don’t really know where it lands with other people.”
Courtesy of Bleecker Street
“With Max, I actually found that very liberating, that immediately he was like, yeah, this is not working for this scene,” Xerxes Fussell says. “I learned a lot from that process. It gave me a whole new respect for the people who work as soundtrack composers. If I were to do it again, I’d love for Jim and me to work on another one again. I did base a lot of this off of stuff I was coming to naturally with my guitar, but it would be interesting to work with more instruments from my point of view.”
“Jake’s right that it was actually liberating in a way to have those confines,” Elkington adds. “You’re like, well, this is the sort of thing they want. We had kind of a framework to work in. It would be super fun to do another one. Like Jake was saying, maybe a different kind of movie or one that had a different kind of requirement.”
“I think I would need Max or someone like Max to be the director.” Elkington smiles. “The one thing I was a little trepidatious about was, when you are coming up with music for a director, it’s really about how does the music make the director feel when they’re watching their own movie? You have to imagine what it’s like for them and try and get in there in their head. That’s not that easy to do, but it’s easier if you have a director who’s welcoming and has a huge amount of positive energy coming toward the project. What was so useful for us was that if we came up with a cue for something that we thought sounded pretty good, but it wasn’t working for him, Max would find somewhere else in the movie where it could work. I never felt, at any time, like there was wasted energy. The train just kind of kept rolling the whole time.”
“I need Max to always be the director on everything,” jokes Elkington. “I think he could make a banging sci-fi action movie and then we could supply a completely synthetic soundtrack for it.”
“Right? That’s the thing. We need to convince him to go in these other directions in order to support our ventures and soundtrack ideas,” adds Xerxes Fussell.
“He can just take every genre, invert it, and make it real, human, and nice,” Elkington states. “He seems to be going in the opposite direction of Hollywood in general, where everything’s just mean and nasty.”
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