January 30, 2008
Part 1 - New Moon
Matt said:
I believe this is the only song I had any influence over whatsoever. The original title Zaid had given it referenced some sort of music terminology. I liked it but it seemed out of place so I suggested he change it to ‘New Moon’ to bring it in line with the other moon songs. We already had a ‘crescent moon’ and a ‘full moon’ so it seemed only right to have a ‘new moon.’
I didn’t want to have any influence over the music. I wasn’t part of the band, and, although I secretly wanted to be in the band, I thought it would be best if the writer were an outsider. I wanted the music to dictate the action. That’s the way most music videos work. In movies, it’s usually the other way around. The music or score slaves to the image. But, I didn’t want to make a music video. Nobody wanted that. We wanted a movie. It had to tell a story with or without the music. So, it was more like a silent movie based upon the Ozark Cousins album.
The image of a cowboy waking up with a bullet wound was the very first thing Craig, Zaid, and Amelia described when they told me the idea for an album-length movie. The band, Ozark Cousins, sounded sort of countryish with flairs of spaghetti western so a western-style movie seemed a reasonable fit. I left the opening pretty much unchanged. It was my favorite thing about their idea. It was a good image. Something I could cling to while I tried piece together the entire story. At the time, we didn’t really know what it meant. At least I didn’t know how it would fit in with the storyline of two cowboys—one bad, one good—fighting over a woman. Was he dead? Was this the afterlife? Who knows? Who cares? I tried to preserve that ambiguity when I wrote the screenplay.
So, the first image we thought of became the first scene in the movie. I don’t know if that owes more to an uncompromising vision or a persistent stubbornness.
-Matt Weber, director/writer
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Craig said:
Musically, this is one of two songs I had nothing to do with on the album, the other being track 5, "Isn't it Me." It was, however, the song that inspired me to say to Zaid and Amelia, "We should make this into a movie," thereby eleminating virtually all of my weekends in the first half of 2007 due to filming and editing. Something about the ambient "windy" sounds in this track gave me a picture of a dusty old western town. I could see tumbleweeds.
Anyway, we proceeded to map out a plot for a movie on a piece of cardboard (I still have it) that we thought we might make. I still had many doubts we would actually go through with it at that point. The plot involved a man returning to town and having to win back his girl. But there were many differences in this original plot. Matt's script was better. This opening, though, was something Zaid, Amelia, and I more or less planning from the onset.
As far as shooting, it was actually quite cold that day and this was at the end of a long shoot involving the climax of the film. I mainly just wanted to get the hell outta there. The fake blood was really annoying because it was sticky and I had no idea whether or not the blood was all over the clothes underneath my costume. It wasn't. Compared to the rest of the day's shoot, this was easy. At least I got to lay down.
This was the first song I edited in it's entirety, mainly because it was the first song filmed in it's entirety. We had pieces of many songs, but this one was done right away. I had a hard time filling out the entire track because we didn't shoot much for this scene. You see pretty much every angle we shot for this. But I ended up holding on shots for long periods of time and I think it makes it work better anyway. When I finished I just remember being very excited by how awesome the footage looked and how well the emptiness of the scene (one lonely man on a beach) matched the ominous mood of the music. I couldn't wait to see how it would all turn out. Oh yeah, and the Title font was just put in as a place holder until we came up with something better and more elaborate. I don't even remember if it was me who put it there. May have been Ryan or Matt. We eventually decided it was perfect. Others can debate that if they want.
-Craig Benzine, actor/editor/guitarist
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Zaid said:
This track started off as some piano thing I was playing around with. I think the working title was "Etude in Cm". Amelia eventually played piano on the recorded version and Matt suggested renaming it "new moon" to go with the other instrumental tracks. On this record most the synth work was done with an old arp odyssey. It really gets put to good use here. The contrast of the heavy bass and those distant howls really create a spacious lonely mood.
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