Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner Original Song Added to Oscar-Contending ‘Train Dreams’ (Exclusive)
Nick Cave, the popular and celebrated Australian musician, has, with Grammy winner Bryce Dessner, co-written and co-produced a haunting original song for Netflix’s Oscar hopeful Train Dreams, which he also sings, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Cave was inspired to write the song — which also is titled “Train Dreams,” and which Luis Almau also produced — after seeing Clint Bentley’s film, which stars Joel Edgerton as a logger and railroad worker in early 20th century America, following its world premiere at January’s Sundance Film Festival.
“Train Dreams” now plays over the film’s end credits and has been added to its soundtrack — which will be released digitally Nov. 7, with a vinyl to follow on Nov. 14 — alongside Dessner’s original score. You can hear a sneak preview of it here:
Train Dreams will next screen at the Toronto International Film Festival — where one of its stars, William H. Macy, will record a live episode of THR’s Awards Chatter podcast — en route to a Nov. 7 release in select theaters and a Nov. 21 debut on Netflix.
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The film garnered raves at Sundance and is currently at 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. THR’s David Rooney wrote, “At the risk of gushing, I adored this perfectly formed movie. It elevates Bentley into the league of essential American filmmakers.”
“When we started thinking about making a song for the film, Nick felt like the perfect artist to do it,” Bentley tells THR. “It turns out that [Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella] Train Dreams is one of his all-time favorite books, but he initially feared there wouldn’t be time to do something because he was getting ready to go on tour. Then he watched the film and was inspired to write something and the whole thing came together really quickly.”
Bentley continues, “I knew he would craft something beautiful and resonant, but the film has such a delicate tone at the end, one that was really hard to get right, and I didn’t want a song that would push the audience in another direction emotionally. But Nick and I were very much on the same page from the outset. He read some early lyrics to me that he was working on and I was just really a bit overwhelmed with the whole situation — I’ve been a fan of his for such a long time and there I was, not only having a really lovely conversation with him about life and art, but he was also reading lyrics to me that he was writing for a film I made. It was a really special moment.”
He added in closing, “He’s a very rare artist and one I admire immensely. There’s no one thing that defines a Nick Cave song — sonically, lyrically, or otherwise. He’s got songs about everything, all the varieties of our experience here. There’s a deep poeticism alongside rock and roll. And that just felt like the perfect fit for a film like this that’s telling the story of this person who lived a beautiful resonant life, even if it did include heartache and pain.”
