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About a Son Director on Why Nirvana’s Not On The Soundtrack

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

On Friday, I wrote a bit of a gusher over the upcoming About a Son, in which I speculated that the film and its associated soundtrack were Nirvana-free because securing rights to Kurt Cobain’s recorded output is rumored to be difficult and costly. Over the weekend, About a Son director AJ Schnack wrote a comment on that post with some further information:

Thanks for the blog love. Want to clarify one point. As crazy as it may sound, the decision to not use Nirvana music was not a financial choice, nor was it obstruction from another party. I tried to put a Nirvana song at the end, but it struck all the wrong notes in a film that is not so much about him as a musician as it is him as a man. Ultimately, I thought that Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard’s score music worked better for the end of the film. It’s not the most commercial choice in the world, but I think it fits the movie I made. However, on your larger point that anyone can (and should) go home and listen to Nirvana (preferably In Utero as it was the album he was writing and recording at the time of the interviews) after seeing the film - I am in total agreement.

I’ve seen the film, and I would agree that it makes more sense to fill the soundtrack with music Cobain would have listened to, rather than music he made. In any case, the current soundtrack has a mixtape quality that I like a lot, and that I imagine will go over fairly well with the Pitchfork set.

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Indies

Tim Kinsella Brings Punk Rock Life Lessons to Filmmaking

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

Over the weekend, Ray Pride posted a long interview with Chicago music scene stallwart/budding filmmaker Tim Kinsella. I’ve been a fan of Kinsella since discovering his first band, Cap’n Jazz, when I was in high school. By the time I moved to Kinsella’s home base of Chicago in the late 90s to go to art school, Kinsella was on his second album of experimental quasi-electronic indie rock with Joan of Arc. He’s since released half a dozen records under the Joan of Arc name, and countless more with tangential side projects such as Make Believe and Friend/Enemy.

Frustrated with what he calls the “lousy cost/benefit ratio” of life as a semi-well-known indie musician, Kinsella also recently wrote and directed his first feature film, titled Orchard Vale. It’s set to open the Chicago Underground Film Festival on Wednesday.

It’s a logical transition, as much of the Joan of Arc output has been infused with clear cinematic elements. The cover art for Joan of Arc’s 1999 album Live in Chicago 1999 (which was not a live album) featured recreations of scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend; on one of that record’s tracks, Kinsella lamented that he’d “only want to make a film if it was in French/and I don’t speak French.” Later JoA records like the The Gap and In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust sounded like self-contained soundtracks for neo-realist disaster films. So I guess it’s no surprise that Orchard Vale is, as described by Pride, a “claustrophobic experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization.”

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