Pop culture has become a neverending intermingling of media formats and personalities. What was once indie is now pop and what once existed in just a song has found new avenues in which to manifest itself. We’re living in a world where The National’s Aaron Dessner is now Taylor Swift’s go-to producer; deepening the indie and pop Venn diagram. And the spheres are increasingly extending beyond musical collaborations.
Indie artists like Dessner, Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, and Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never are routinely being pegged to score the soundtracks to notable films. And while films they’ve scored like Cyrano, Queen & Slim, and Uncut Gems, respectively, have found varying levels of success, Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen and Christopher Bear composed the score to director Celine Song’s A24-released Past Lives, a film that has become 2023’s first Oscar favorite.
“It still is a little bit of a mystery how it all came together,” Bear, Grizzly Bear’s drummer, jokes on a Zoom call. ”Grizzly Bear’s music was licensed in the past for films, but we’d never scored anything together, that’s for sure,” Rossen, the band’s guitarist and co-lead vocalist, adds.
Rossen says he’d never scored anything himself — at all — before this, and relished modestly in the new experience, especially given Grizzly Bear’s standstill since their last album, Painted Ruins, came out in 2017. Bear had helped Rossen “in a pretty involved way” on his 2022 solo album, You Belong There, providing drums and percussion for it. And while that laid a foundation for this newfound partnership, scoring a movie together was a new frontier.
“It’s been a while since we had worked on anything together so it was an exploratory thing to see what that would mean for both of us, given our separate studio setups for me in Santa Fe and Chris in LA,” Rossen says. ”I felt like it was a bit of a rediscovery process for us too, figuring out the scoring.”
While Rossen is new to scoring, Bear had scored the HBO series High Maintenance, where Past Lives star Greta Lee was briefly featured as far back as 2012. They said there was initial interest in some of Grizzly Bear’s music for the film, but the how and why of their involvement stops there. When you consider that Past Lives marks Song’s directorial debut, she’s clearly establishing her aesthetic across the board and the errr…grizzly pair, is a part of that. It’s likely that her film will help boost Rossen and Bear to be the next indie musicians in line to make a concerted push into Hollywood. And it’s one heck of a start.
Past Lives was a standout at Sundance in January as well as at the Berlin Film Festival the following month. It’s already out in LA in New York and will have its widespread release in theaters nationwide on June 23. It currently has a 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metascore of 93 on Metacritic, where it’s marked as a “must-see.” Out now, the soundtrack features Rossen and Bear’s grounding 15-track score, plus Sharon Van Etten’s Zach Dawes-produced “Quiet Eyes.”
The romantic drama tells the story of a Korean ex-pat (Lee) who moved to Canada in her youth and then eventually to New York City. She cultivates an online relationship of sorts with her childhood sweetheart (played by Teo Yoo), which fizzles in the long distance. She then eventually meets and marries a New Yorker (played by John Magaro) until one day Yoo comes to visit them in New York and she has to confront her past and present feelings for both men. It’s a story that’s a very real one for a number of immigrant Americans, packed with emotional nuance that hasn’t been told with this much candor on the big screen; an amazing and brutal reminder of the past and an essential story in today’s America.
All the while, Bear and Rossen manage to capture the passage of time beautifully with their music. As Song’s film jumps from time periods and cities with an incredible flow, the composers find ways to stitch senses and memories together. Big cellos and wistful keys guide a scene during a montage of the characters communicating intercontinentally. Shots of New York City and Seoul seesaw along with the evocative strings and gentle synths of “Crossing II” and “Why Are You Going To New York.” It’s a gorgeous score that captures love, longing, nostalgia, whimsy, hope, coincidence, and anxiety in its many forms, and then some. Through it all, the music transcends whatever the language being spoken is and builds the artfulness of Past Lives’ scenes and locales.
Bear explains that while working remotely in their respective studio spaces, he and Rossen built a sort of matrix of emotions for plotting out sounds. A visual that they could use to keep things focused throughout the film’s many arcs.
“In the end, we had started developing those thoughts and where those themes would reappear into a color-coded graph where we’d say, ‘these three things are related because they’re telling this story,’” Bear says. “And then there’d be certain cues mainly focused on one of the themes in the film but maybe more of a theme related to Nora (Lee) and Arthur’s (Magaro) relationship, but then also still leaving in hints from her childhood relationship. We’d figure out interesting ways of intermingling those while simultaneously trying to do that so it’s not overbearing or bonking over the head…to let the viewer have their own feeling and have their own emotional interaction.”
It’s just Rossen and Bear playing every single instrument on the score. There’s no backing orchestra in a grand studio to support them. Bear played piano and applied different synth textures, while Rossen played guitar and piano while adding more acoustics “around the edges,” including cello, an upright bass, and “little horn parts.” Bear dipped into expansive synth arrangements, percussion, and vibraphone, angling to assign each instrumental “a character that was unique.”
“Chris really took a strong lead in a lot of the score,” Rossen says. “Not that he didn’t do that in Grizzly Bear, but we had slightly more set roles in the band and this was a lot more open.”
As for the state of the band, they contend that Grizzly Bear is in the same place it has been for the past six years: Not split up and just up in the air. “The band exists as an idea dislodged from time,” Rossen jokes. I semi-seriously suggest to them that it’s only a matter of time before a certain corporate promoter approaches them about a band reunion for a nostalgic festival appearance. Rossen takes that in stride and chides that, “I always say eventually we’ll get desperate and do our Vegas casino tour.”
But they give off the sense that a reunion is far from imminent. Bassist/producer Chris Taylor lives in Spain, while singer Ed Droste has been pursuing a new career as a therapist. Meanwhile both Rossen and Bear have put out solo projects in recent years and now this score. But if the attention that Past Lives is getting continues to grow as the film reaches its widespread release date later this month, there might be a lot more film composing gigs in the future for them.
“This felt like a big one, like an important role,” Bear says. Before Rossen adds, “I think we’d be into doing something like this again, yeah.”
