ON THE RISE
Daniel Blumberg never imagined himself composing for film. That only changed after he crossed paths with director Brady Corbet, a meeting that grew into a close friendship and an ongoing creative partnership rooted in their mutual obsession with music and cinema. Today, the English composer is widely recognised for his Oscar-winning work on Corbet’s The Brutalist, yet his artistic foundations, as he recently explained to Corbet during a phone conversation, trace back to a band he played in during his school years which he prefers not to name and later evolved through countless nights spent absorbing experimental sounds at London’s legendary Cafe Oto. It felt inevitable, then, that Corbet’s wife, filmmaker Mona Fastvold, would turn to Blumberg again to shape the driving and immersive score for The Testament of Ann Lee, her ambitious musical drama centred on the Shakers movement and its magnetic leader Ann Lee, portrayed by Amanda Seyfried. Once more, Blumberg rises to the challenge, creating a sound world that feels layered, uncanny and true to its period, perfectly mirroring Fastvold’s exploration of faith, collective life, ambition and gender balance. So what is his secret to sustaining this level of work? Corbet likens it to his own view of Japanese cuisine: “It’s four ingredients, and yet those four ingredients are reinvented time and again in very, very nuanced ways.” In the discussion below, the longtime collaborators open up about books, London and how cinema finds its voice.—CHARLOTTE ZAGER
BRADY CORBET: Hey, DB. Where are you? You’re in L.A. still, right?
DANIEL BLUMBERG: Yeah.
CORBET: Oh, it’s early for you.
BLUMBERG: [Laughs] I just woke up. I’ve been sleeping so crazy. We watched 15 minutes of [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder and fell asleep—Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. It’s a good one. I haven’t watched it in ages. It’s the best.
CORBET: It is the best.
BLUMBERG: We should do this more often.
CORBET: Well, I’m going to do my best. I haven’t prepared anything, so we’re going to see how it goes. There are a few things I obviously already know, but I think it’s probably helpful for readers to quickly contextualize. I know you had your band when you were a teenager, but how long have you been playing? Since you were a kid?
BLUMBERG: Yeah, but when I was a child, I was just trying to learn the clarinet and piano and I wasn’t very good at it. I was always in the orchestra, trying to read the sheet music at school, and I couldn’t do it. So I only really started when I was 15, when I got asked to be in a band.
CORBET: Were you primarily playing piano or guitar or both?
BLUMBERG: I was just singing.
CORBET: Oh, you were just singing?
BLUMBERG: Yeah. I ended up playing guitar because we were recording at Edwyn Collins’ studio—you know, Orange Juice, “Never Met a Girl Like You Before.” It was his studio, and he had this massive collection of vintage guitars. And that made me want to play guitar.
CORBET: Who else in your family is musical?
BLUMBERG: My brother and sister are really musical, but my parents didn’t really play music. Did you play music?
CORBET: No, I played guitar poorly growing up. My grandfather played piano and tried to teach me as a kid, but I really didn’t have a knack for it. Ada [Fastvold-Corbet, Corbet’s daughter]’s starting to really hold her own because she’s been doing lessons now for the last four months.
BLUMBERG: Oh, shit. Really?
CORBET: She’s been doing it once a week with your keyboard—the one you were working on Ann Lee with in the office.
BLUMBERG: I think you and Mona are really very, very musical. I mean, in different ways, but you’re very fluent in music without playing it.
CORBET: I should play in the second half of my life. I don’t have enough stuff on my plate. [Laughs]
BLUMBERG: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly.
CORBET: If we jump past the teenage years, when did you go to Cafe OTO for the first time? Was that 12 years ago, 13 years ago?
BLUMBERG: It was when I was 21, I think. So yeah, about 13, 14 years ago.
CORBET: You took me there 11 years ago and you’d already been playing there for years, no?
BLUMBERG: Yeah, I have these three weird moments in my life that were really profound creatively. One was reading [Vladimir] Nabokov for the first time.
CORBET: Me too. That’s why my daughter’s named Ada.
BLUMBERG: I thought maybe that was why. The second one was walking into a charity shop when I was 17 and buying [Krzysztof] Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing. And then the third one was going into Café OTO, because my friend took me and I saw Keiji Haino play solo.
CORBET: The first show you saw at OTO was Keiji Haino?
BLUMBERG: Yeah.
CORBET: Oh, wow. That’s quite an introduction to the space.
BLUMBERG: Yeah, it was the first time I saw improvised music. And that’s why I always love London, because you can just walk 15 minutes into a different world.
CORBET: That’s what I love about London too.
BLUMBERG: And New York as well, I guess.
CORBET: I mean, they’re two of the only cities I feel like I can really function in. And then, I feel like you and I have been speaking about films and film scores for as long as we’ve known each other, but at what point did you think about actually—
BLUMBERG: Making them?
CORBET: Yeah.
BLUMBERG: I never thought of making film scores, ever. I was introduced to film scores by you, because when I met you, you were making your first film with Scott Walker. We started talking and then haven’t stopped talking. And I remember even just going to visit the set, I thought it would be this really high-pressure environment, but you were chatting about what was going on really calmly. And when you took me to the Scott Walker sessions for the brass—
CORBET: In Chicago.
BLUMBERG: And that was where I met Pete [Walsh], who I worked with for seven years after on every project really, until Ann Lee. So that was my introduction, and I remember the whole process made me think it would be interesting to score films and put the two pieces together: music and film.
CORBET: Are they entirely separate for you? Because to me, somehow, whether you’re working with Keiji Haino in Japan or working with Mona [Fastvold] or me in New York, it all seems like it comes from the same place. You seem to really enjoy collaborating in that way.
BLUMBERG: Yeah, that’s definitely it. It was really interesting working with Gianfranco [Rosi], because that was someone I hadn’t worked with, but it’s the same thing as getting together with Seymour [Wright], the saxophonist, and working on something together. It’s just the two of you sitting, talking about things, and then sometimes making things. It relates very closely to collaborating in other mediums.
CORBET: Can you just talk to me a little bit about how both projects came together? Let’s maybe start with Gianfranco, because I obviously know more about the process on Ann Lee.
BLUMBERG: I’ve known him for years. We met quite randomly, and the day after I met him, I went and saw Fire at Sea and it was one of my favorite films I’d ever seen.
CORBET: Yeah, it’s a masterpiece.
BLUMBERG: I was just so impressed by it and intrigued by the way he was working. And I love that sort of thin line between documentary and narrative. I loved it with [Werner] Herzog, where there’s a real voice bringing us through these stories. So I just followed his work, and then he called me earlier this year to say that he wanted me to help with music at the end of his film—when the camera goes underwater.
CORBET: Exactly.
BLUMBERG: I was sort of relieved that he wasn’t asking me to do anything score-wise, because I love the fact that his films don’t have a score. But then when I went to Rome to see a cut of it, and we started to talk, I just noticed there was actually sound design in there already at various points, sounds that weren’t diegetic or from his recording setup with his camera and stuff. So I thought there was a space to try some things. And as we started working, more and more opportunities for score came up until it actually spans the whole of the film. It’s very subtle, but it was really interesting doing something so sparse. And it’s really, really different to The Testament of Ann Lee, which is full-on musical numbers and everything.
CORBET: Yeah, it’s hundreds of minutes of music and dense melodies and stuff. And to get to Ann Lee and the vocalists and collaborators that you work with—do you want to just speak to that for a few minutes?
BLUMBERG: Well, I have my drawings as well, which is a big part of the way that I work and a big part of my life. I sit down at a desk and I do a drawing and sometimes it can take 30 seconds, and that is the totality of that. That’s the full work. And one of the things with the scores, I mean, you were making something epic, and I definitely extended myself into this. The score from The Brutalist, and obviously now with Ann Lee, it was these long projects and that kind of scale. And I think that’s something that I’ve really appreciated and learned from you—working on a bigger scale. And it was crazy going on to Ann Lee after The Brutalist because it was a really epic musical project for me in terms of just the amount of people, the amount of singers, just the scale of it.
CORBET: And just the fact that it’s musically driven. I think that it’s a different responsibility to make a musical for a composer than it is to do a more traditional film score. There’s a lot riding on it because you’re part of the narrative thrust of the film. I mean, I suppose you are anyhow, but in a more literal way on this one. And what drove you to bring in Maggie [Nichols] and all these extraordinary vocalists?
BLUMBERG: Well, when I read your and Mona’s script, initially I was thinking about Phil Minton and Maggie Nichols and these two improvisers that I’d always go and see when they’d come and play at OTO. They’re seminal, legendary vocalizers. And I always like looking into the Shakers and their formation. They were praying with singing and their voices, but before they’d written all their hymns. So I was excited about that transformation. And Mona spoke about it really early, how they get from their formation to this really amazing, organized—
CORBET: Songbook. Yeah, exactly. Mona and I talked about it a lot, the fact that it must have begun as something absolutely improvisational until it turned into the songbook of gift songs in the 19th century. But it was an interesting thing because even though some lyrics didn’t come around for another 100 years, some melodies feel like sea shanties and stuff. They feel even more ancient than the 1750s.
BLUMBERG: Mona was encouraging me to approach it like I approached my song records. And with my song records, I always try and distill what the song is into as simple a form as possible so that when the improvisers come, I have the most simple core of what the song is for people to bring themselves to it. Obviously with Mona, she’s so calm and just… It was this massive expanse of work in front of us, but she’s very good at focusing on—
CORBET: Brick by brick. She’s good at that with me, too.
BLUMBERG: I felt like it was training for our future work as well, because just being alongside Mona on the set or in the sound mix, I was learning about the problems that you encounter as filmmakers.
CORBET: Yeah, that’s interesting. Because on both The Brutalist and on Ann Lee, you’re a lot more embedded in the process of the movie. But I also think that’s the reason that the scores are so accomplished, because they’re so intertwined. I would imagine, as much as possible, that we’ll continue to work that way in the future, because the scores don’t feel grafted onto a finished piece. They’re really inside of the films. And there’s a lot of work in the mix and a lot of work from you, just conceptually, to make sure that that happens. But I think that’s why it’s important that you’re actually on set, because most composers are not.
BLUMBERG: But it comes back to when I started, when Mona invited me to do my first score for The World to Come. And I remember speaking to you—I think it was late in Romania—we were drinking, and I said, “Should I listen to some scores?” And you were like, “No, no. The important thing is you understand the language of cinema.” And that was a big encouragement for me, because trusting the director, trusting the language of what you’re doing, is more important. You create these parameters and then trust the world that you’ve built for that piece of music.
CORBET: Because I know you’re a real cinephile, and we have many of the same favorite films and filmmakers. And just to jump back to something you were talking about a couple of minutes ago, one thing I think is so interesting about the Shakers’ hymns is that inherently they have something in common with a lot of your work and songs. What I love about your records is that, for me, it’s great minimalism. It’s how I feel about Japanese cooking: it’s four ingredients, and yet those four ingredients are reinvented time and again in very, very nuanced ways. So I thought you were sort of uniquely well-poised for this.
BLUMBERG: I remember speaking to you about Minus, because that was a big record for me. It was a bit of a turning point for me as an artist, and that was the first one I did with Pete Walsh, who I met through you. And I remember sending you the lyrics before I’d completely—
CORBET: Yeah, I remember that too.
BLUMBERG: You were saying how much you loved these mantras. And for me, it was because I left songwriting. I left it for five years and just made purely improvised music and then came back to songs. Quite naturally, I just heard a song that just reminded me how powerful songs could be. But I was really thinking of what made me allergic to songs for those years. And one of them was pressing the listener into a really small tunnel and just pushing the lid down, because you’ve got all these words telling you to think this, and then the strings come in, and it’s just pressing the listener down. But I like poetry and films where you can come away reflecting. I mean, the obvious one is [Andrei] Tarkovsky, where you’re left to think your own thoughts as well.
CORBET: They mean different things to you in different periods of your life. I think that the reason I struggle with narrative, and the reason I’ll struggle with songs is that it’s not usually the first thing I listen to. Whenever I’m alone, it’s very rare that I put on a verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus track, and it’s simply because I feel like when you’ve seen a narrative film once, or you’ve listened to a song a few times—once you fully metabolize it, once you understand it—it sort of dies. If I’m listening to Mark Hollis or something, the songs are pulled apart in such a way that I always discover something new about them. And that’s something I really feel about your albums since Minus as well. It’s something that you’re really tapped into.
BLUMBERG: There’s something about a chorus—that waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, and then the chorus hits, and that undeniable thing that just switches in your body when the chorus comes in. Trying to find that in our work is something we share, I think.
CORBET: Totally. Well, I’m so sorry, but I have to go on a work call.
BLUMBERG: Can I come?
CORBET: [Laughs] I really wish you could, but I love you, pal.
ON THE RISE
It was the beginning of 1996 when an up and coming alternative group called the Smashing Pumpkins set out on a global run in support of their latest release, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” One of the earliest dates brought them to Los Angeles for a packed performance at the legendary Palace Theatre, where fans filled the venue wall to wall. Instead of opening with the loud, abrasive energy that dominated alternative rock the year before, the band surprised everyone by beginning with a quiet piano performance.
The song was the album’s title track, a deeply reflective piece filled with emotion, optimism and the feeling of stepping into a new chapter. Billy Corgan, who was 28 at the time, wrote it while teaching himself how to play piano.
Corgan recalls the moment feeling almost unreal, surrounded by the Palace Theatre’s velvet drapes, the gentle melody and the overwhelming excitement from the crowd. Then everything erupted as pounding drums and roaring guitars crashed into the room, fully introducing the massive soundscape of “Mellon Collie.”
Three decades later, “Mellon Collie” is widely viewed as one of the defining rock records of the 1990s, later inspiring artists such as Muse, My Chemical Romance and Silversun Pickups. The album marked a dramatic turning point for the band, who had previously become known for the dreamy, progressive leaning sound of their 1993 breakthrough “Siamese Dream.” Unlike that record, “Mellon Collie” arrived as an ambitious concept double album, with lyrics tracing a journey that Corgan described as “one day that can represent your entire life.”
Throughout that concept, the record shifts through crushing and emotional examinations of rage and identity on tracks like “Muzzle,” “Zero” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” nostalgic and delicate moments in “Cupid De Locke” and “Thirty-Three,” and themes of youth and romance in “1979” and “Love.” Its enormous range in both storytelling and musical direction made it stand apart from other rock albums of its era, abandoning the detached attitude often associated with grunge in favor of sincerity, emotion and experimentation.
Taking cues from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” the noisy textures of Sonic Youth, the symbolic songwriting and layered arrangements of Black Sabbath, along with surreal visual art influences, “Mellon Collie” pushed the Smashing Pumpkins further than ever before. The album challenged the group to discover how far they could stretch creatively and how completely they could capture human emotion within a single project.
To celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary, the band has partnered with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, their hometown orchestra, to reinterpret “Mellon Collie” as an opera production. They are also releasing the album again alongside previously unheard recordings from the 1996 “Infinite Sadness” tour. Featuring performances from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, the recordings preserve the intensity of the live shows and document a defining chapter in the band’s story.
In “Tonight, Tonight,” Corgan reflects, “And our lives are forever changed, we will never be the same.”
Looking back at the legacy of “Mellon Collie,” those lyrics feel hauntingly accurate. “Nothing was quite the same after this album,” Corgan told the Times. In many ways, that statement could not be more true.
The album earned seven Grammy nominations and launched the band into another level of fame through massive MTV exposure and a series of enduring hit singles. Away from the spotlight, however, Corgan was struggling through the collapse of his first marriage. During the tour, growing tensions inside the group eventually exploded following the overdose death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. Later that same year, Corgan also lost his mother.
What followed “Mellon Collie” and the turbulent 1996 tour was a period filled with instability and upheaval. Yet within the life of the album itself existed a rare moment where Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins came together in complete creative harmony to make a record that would ultimately shape their careers and, in many ways, the course of their lives.
Something I really love, especially about the piano and “Tonight, Tonight” as the opening track, is this feeling of hope that it starts off with, or maybe that’s just what I got from it.
[Laughs] It starts with hope and ends somewhere else, let’s put it that way.
What was the intention with starting with this feeling and what was it inspired by at the time?
I was going through a lot in my personal life, and I was grappling with the changes in my life and the awareness that I had in my life, given what I’d been through as a child and now as an adult with success, it was like I was trying to grapple with all that and wondering what really matters.
I think if you look at the general narrative of the album, it starts with the idea and it starts with the dream and what is possible within the dream. So, for example, you pointed to the piano piece that opens the record.
I went to a store, not too far from where I’m sitting and talking to you [he was calling from his car in Chicago], and bought an old 1920s piano with mismatched legs for $2,500. Now that may not seem like a big deal, but at 27 years old, when I was writing the record, I never owned a piano nor was I allowed to play a piano in my relatives’ houses.
So I finally had this moment of, wow, I can actually buy a piano and I can play my own piano in my own house. As silly as that sounds, it had never crossed my mind that way. I’d always lived in apartments and I was always on the road. It was like a new beginning. It starts with the gift that I gave myself and that ends up having a lot of influence on the compositional structure of the record.
And then “Tonight, Tonight,” was a song that we messed around with for about four months. And one night it just came to me in a flash, like what the song needed to sound like, and I went upstairs to this room that I had in my house and I just remember playing it like I could hear the whole orchestra in my head and I thought, OK, that’s what I need to do.
Something I see on this new reissue is that there’s going to be a lot of recordings from that live 1996 tour right after the release of the album. What was it like relistening to these performances, especially as it was the last tour with the band’s full original lineup?
We had crested a particular wave at the time. We had a No. 1 album. We were playing, I think, a 90-date arena tour, which, now there’s a ton of artists playing stadiums, but back then an arena show was essentially the top of the mountain. So then we had success, we had fame, we had money that we’d never had.
With that, we had all the trappings. And I think in the recordings that are on this record that’s coming out, it’s like a light burning bright before it burns out. If you’ve ever had that experience, you’re in a room and all of a sudden the lightbulb gets really intense and then it burns out. So, you hear us basically burning out.
And there’s a sort of incandescent poetic beauty to all that, and there’s just the sorrow to it because you also realize it’s the last of that moment. In many ways, it was truly the end of that band. I mean, yes, the band has continued, and James [Iha] and Jimmy [Chamberlin] and I have been playing back together again for seven years, and released more records and had a tremendous amount of success of late.
But you can never recapture the innocence of youth or the innocence of the time. When you combine those types of experiences with loss and sorrow and the knowledge of what didn’t happen or what could have happened, then it makes revisiting this time bittersweet.
What do you think “Mellon Collie” means today and how has it been for you to see younger generations continue to be inspired by it?
I view that album in particular very much within the realm of a child who grows up in a latchkey situation. It’s very much a Gen X term. Latchkey kids were those whose parents were working a lot or not home, so they grew up by and large unsupervised. So what does a kid who grows up unsupervised do? They watched a lot of television, and then we consumed a lot of sugar and got up to a lot of delinquent-type things.
So I think the album is very representative of that experience and I think why it continues to resonate for subsequent generations is, it’s very dissociative. Back in the ’90s, the mainstream culture, including the L.A. Times and the New York Times, they really struggled with, “Where’s this all coming from?” Now you are living in a world that is constantly dissociative thanks to social media.
The thing that’s surprising, I’m basing it on personal conversations I’ve had with tons of musicians through the years, is that our album gave some musicians the permission to pursue a wider artistic vision. Because “Mellon Collie” is so wide. It has so much breadth. So what I’ve heard from other artists is, “Wow, when I heard that album, I thought, I can do this too, but in my own way.” And that to me is like, that’s a penultimate compliment from another musician. It’s really humbling.
The greatest thrill now is seeing that young people really do connect with the record. And they connect with songs that are different from the previous generations, which is even cooler. They seem to like the weirder stuff on it rather than the ... let’s call it, the classic rock alternative stuff.
That’s a cool way of looking at it. Like the previous generation probably was really obsessed with “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and maybe newer listeners aren’t as focused on that song specifically. In that song, it’s interesting that you say, “Can you fake it for just one more show?” Or this feeling of putting on a performance and feeling that you have to fake it as an artist. Is that something that still resonates with you?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because you work so hard to be on that stage and then, as Roger Waters so aptly describes in “The Wall,” you find yourself having a surrealist experience on that same stage. You put yourself through hell to get there and then one day you’re standing there and you’re like, what am I doing here?
I’ve had similar moments where I’m standing on stage and you feel like you’re tripping on drugs, but you’re totally sober. Because the thing that you love inverts on you. When I was a kid, I thought being on TV was a peak thing. But then I was there, about to perform on TV, and there were all these things going on, like you’re tired, or you’re being sued or your bandmate doesn’t like the deli tray. And I just thought, what am I doing here? I felt like I was living in “Spinal Tap.” This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be glamorous. This is supposed to be a thousand other things that you put on the rock-star checklist and you find yourself saying, I don’t want to be here.
If you turn to your friends or your family and say, “I’m really struggling with how I’m supposed to process the information that I’m receiving up here,” you’re told you’re ungrateful or you’re out of your mind or you really need to check your ego. I reached a point where it was like, no, I don’t have the skill set to survive punishing my mind, body, spirit five to six nights a week in front of strangers singing songs that are very personal to me and I hear the cheering and I see the flash bulbs popping, but I’m so numb that I can’t feel what’s happening. So in a lot of ways, that song and the themes from the album are still real.
You’ve said in the “Mellon Collie” sessions, you guys were working on 50 songs at once, that you’re working for six hours a day, just really intense in the studio. What are your thoughts as you think back to that? Were there any memories that really arise for you?
Despite our public persona of being dysfunctional and brawling, we were quite quiet in the rehearsal space. We almost never had guests and 97% of the time, it was just the four of us in a room working.
So, the real memory for me is just day after day after day of trying tons and tons of different ideas, and it started to wind itself into a story through those 60-plus songs, many of which came out in those few years. It was our best period of musical alignment and I think you can hear that. We worked very hard and very peacefully together for eight months to put all that together.
We had just come off a tour, “Siamese Dream,” which was a 14-month tour, and we went in the studio for eight months, made the “Mellon Collie” record, and we immediately went back on tour. And that tour was 22 months long. So when you ask my memory from that time, it’s like, can you describe the blur? It was a really beautiful blur, you know?
You said something really interesting earlier about “Tonight, Tonight” coming to you with the sound of an orchestra. Talk about what it was like to see that song and this album come to life as an opera with Chicago Lyric.
The idea that I would even not only write something on the piano, and now, a full orchestra is playing that song here in Chicago with the lyrics I wrote ... is totally mind-blowing. The first time I heard it with an orchestra, I started to cry, because I thought, this is so crazy. This song that I used to teach myself how to play the piano was now being played by some of the greatest musicians in the world in this beautiful opera hall. I can’t explain to you the strangeness of that journey.
I was made fun of [for using classical instruments in ’90s rock music]. It was seen as too precocious or too artsy or too, I don’t know, overly grand. And now, if you look at alternative music, I mean, there’s been an absolute explosion of people using unconventional instrumentation within the breath of alternative music, as it should be. So it makes me laugh now that there was a time where somehow that was pseudo-controversial.
Coming to my last question for you, how did this album impact your life 30 years later and impact your artistry?
After putting out something like this, artistically it was a triumph. But then publicly it became surreal. We hit a level where people were following you through malls and we were on MTV. It’s not like we had not tasted success, but this was this other stratospheric aspect of success. And something about that album just kind of blew everything wide open.
Family relationships, personal relationships, business relationships, everything just kind of went sideways. I remember thinking nothing was quite the same after that album. Which is true, but it’s not true the way you think it is.
The album has never left my life and is never far away from the conversation. It was never like I put it down and left it behind. Other people won’t let me forget and that’s a good thing because the value holds, and I’ll never forget about it.
