Chelsea Spear
Cathedrals of female choirs. Churning, muffled drum loops and skittering breakbeats. Keening sirens and found-sound detritus cutting through minor-key ambient soundscapes. Fluttering string sections that evoke a lost sense of grace. A stentorian baritone who evokes lost friends and femmes fatale. Mercy, the latest solo album by John Cale, feels like a movie for the ears and for the brain.
Throughout a career that has spanned six decades, Cale has crafted rangy melodies, immaculate arrangements, and atmospheric production that would seem as natural a fit for the movies as it is for the records. The scores Cale has composed for directors like Jonathan Demme, Mary Harron, and Oliver Assayas, among others, have paralleled his rock music career, applying musical hallmarks like drones, distortion, and diegetic sound to films that depict the kind of dark subject matter found in songs by his 1960s band The Velvet Underground.
After collaborating with Paul Morrissey on the scores for two Andy Warhol-produced features, Heat and Women in Revolt, Cale scored Caged Heat, Jonathan Demme’s directorial debut. The film depicts the experiences of women in prison from the perspective of journalist Jacqueline Wilson (Erica Gavin), who goes undercover to report on the conditions at an unnamed California women’s prison. She observes that the inmates are being used for medical experiments and joins them in planning an escape.
Caged Heat was released while Cale was working on Fear, a legendary, feature-heavy album that found him experimenting with blues playing and songwriting, and his score built on those aspects of his album. Mike Bloomfield’s slide guitar ricochets through Cale’s sound cues, offering an ironic counterpoint to the seemingly endless scenes of inmates showering. Cale’s skill at building on diegetic sound came to the fore in the scenes where one of the inmates attempts to escape through a heating vent in the bathroom; the rhythm track in these scenes builds on the sound of water dripping from a spigot, with Cale’s angular melodies timed to the dripping sound. In a scene where the inmates confront the villainous Superintendent McQueen, Cale plays a drone on the viola that shifts and grows in volume as the scene progresses, underscoring McQueen’s lack of compassion in a disorienting way that you could feel in the pit of your stomach.
After the release of Caged Heat, Cale released a string of increasingly unhinged solo albums and produced two early punk masterpieces, the Modern Lovers’ demos and Patti Smith’s Horses. Jonathan Demme, meanwhile, yoked his interest in marginal figures to a straightforward, observational style influenced by journeyman directors of the 1940s. When Demme had the opportunity to make Something Wild, a road movie with a 1980s East Village sensibility, he signed Cale to score the film.
Something Wild follows Charlie (Jeff Daniels), a straitlaced middle management type who gets swept up almost against his will with the proto-manic pixie dream girl Lulu (Melanie Griffith), who surprises him with a road trip to her ten-year high school reunion. Their return home takes a shocking left turn when the pair cross paths with Ray (Ray Liotta), Lulu’s ex-convict husband.
As with Demme’s other mid-period indie films, the soundtrack leans heavily on college radio hits that establish the idiosyncratic, urbane mood of the film’s first half. Cale’s cues sprout like crab grass amidst the weedier score selections; a piano-bar pastiche under a dine-and-dash scene, a droning violin as Charlie falls asleep in his car. The further Charlie and Lulu get from the Lower East Side, the longer and more prominent Cale’s score becomes. He’s attuned to the humor and absurdity of Demme’s visuals, as in a minute-long scene where Ray hotwires a Volvo that apparently belongs to a young family. The composer matches a walking bassline to the low-key slapstick of Liotta tripping on squeaky toys and readjusting the cranked-up driver’s seat, building to a crescendo as Ray sits on a Gumby doll. Amidst a series of tense moments between the three protagonists, the scene offers the audience a breath of fresh air, and Cale’s score punctuates the scene without calling attention to itself.
Cale’s presence on the score for Something Wild has a meta sensibility that works better on paper than it does in the film. Demme featured bands like the Talking Heads, the Feelies, the Go-Betweens, and New Order, who arguably wouldn’t have existed without the influence of Cale’s first band, the Velvet Underground, on the soundtrack for the film. Cale has never been one to give a nostalgic look back at his previous projects, and he defies expectations with a generic, glossy synth score that could have been dropped in from any other indie film of the era.
In the 1990s, Cale experienced a slight bump in popularity after the release of the Andy Warhol tribute album Songs for Drella (which he co-wrote with former Velvets singer Lou Reed) and the Dylan Thomas-inspired Words for the Dying. He began collaborating with younger, more self-consciously avant garde directors on scores for low-budget features. One of his most notable partnerships in the late 1990s was with Mary Harron, whose first feature, I Shot Andy Warhol, depicted the assassination of Andy Warhol that brought the freewheeling early days of the Factory to an end. The swirling, staccato score Cale composed mirrored the eddies of madness experienced by troubled feminist Valerie Solanas.
Harron and Cale re-teamed for American Psycho, which reinterpreted Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial novel as a bloody slapstick of failed masculinity. The subversive tone of the film is established under the opening credits, as a gooey red substance drips down from the top of the frame. As the camera pulls out, we see raspberry puree decorating a single, sumptuous-looking dessert. Cale plays the kind of arpeggiated melody under the scene that sounds like the kinds of music you’d hear at a swank joint like Dorsia.
In the leadup to the release of American Psycho, Harron described the film as a comedy. Cale’s score deftly balances both Harron’s comic tone and the film’s darker moments. In an early scene where Bateman leaves dinner with his fiancee Evelyn, Cale sets a steady snare drumbeat under his footsteps. The effect is slightly unnerving, like a ticking time bomb, and there’s almost a feeling of relief when he encounters his mistress instead of a murder victim. The score goes from tasteful subtlety to bombastic excess as Bateman loses touch with reality. In the infamous scenes that close American Psycho, he goes on a surreal shootout through his office building before hiding from the police in his office. Cale’s string-driven cues grow from violin stabs to fuller, more orchestrated melodies that sound like something out of a big-budget 1980s action movie. When Bateman calls his lawyer while being pursued by an NYPD helicopter, the violins are bowed until they start to go a bit out of tune. This vertiginous effect underscores Bateman’s tenuous grip on his sanity.
The idiosyncratic approach and musical mastery that Cale had cultivated on his solo albums and film scores seem like they would best serve the kinds of off-kilter yet polished films made by directors like Jonathan Demme and Mary Harron. In the 2000s, the composer began one of his longest film collaborations with the French director Patricia Mazuy, whose workmanlike features are the kind of thing you’d stick with until the closing credits if you caught them on cable, and never think about them again.
Sport de Filles, Mazuy’s feature about the competitive world of horseback riding, depicts the fraught relationship between high-strung rider Gracieuse (Marina Hands) and Franz Mann (Bruno Ganz), a septuagenarian riding coach whose virility and old-world charm have shaped many up-and-coming female riders. The pre-Me Too gender politics are cringe-inducing (particularly in the final scene), and Mazuy and cinematographer Caroline Champetier’s verite-informed visuals—with their overreliance on wide-angle shots and handheld photography—bump up against the pedestrian screenplay.
Cale scored Sport de Filles between his albums Black Acetate and Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood, and at times his cues sound like experiments with the distortion pedals he used on those albums. In the early scenes, the electric guitar-driven score sounds almost comical against the staid drama of the film; the sudden burst of guitar distortion under the title screen, after the protagonist’s meltdown in the opening scene, made me laugh involuntarily. But Cale’s trademark slow burn works effectively in a few moments, most notably in a scene where Gracieuse watches footage of Franz’s days as a competitive rider. The flickers of recognition and frustration that cross her face are mirrored in the arpeggiated guitar line, and as she gains a sense of clarity, the distortion fades away and the guitar lines become clearer.
Cale’s most recent film score, for Patricia Mazuy’s crime procedural Paul Sanchez Is Back!, came out in 2018, and he’s spent the intervening five years working on Mercy. No one could blame him for focusing on his own work and less on film scores. Particularly on his work with Mazuy and Harron, Cale seems to treat his film scores as sketchbooks that allow him to experiment with techniques that he expands upon on his albums. Cale’s scores offer some insight into the development of his ideas, and should be viewed as an even more experimental facet of a peripatetic and engaging career.
