Dan Mangan’s song Wants from The Valley Below was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
In The Valley Below, four musicians (Dan Mangan, Rae Spoon, Eamon McGrath and the Wooden Sky's Gavin Gardiner) scored a quarter of the film each. We spoke to Vancouver's Mangan, a two-time Juno-winner whose closing song Wants was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award.
On the lack of a collaboration process
The four of us each wrote our music separately. Rae Spoon's summer-drenched electronica, for example, captured the idea that two of the characters were about to embark upon their adult life. It was interesting how we each worked, without anyone directly overseeing us. The director and producers put their faith in the musicians, and I think we all knocked it out of the park.
On providing the score to the fourth and final section of the film
Watching the very last visuals of the film, it was a car driving through something that was very familiar to me, which was the Alberta winter. It was a desolate, hibernation thing, and I responded to it immediately. I wrote down the line that became the staple part of the closing song, which was, 'I want a couple things I don't know how to ask for.' That line captured not only my character, but all of them. They're wanting the thing to happen where they'll be the person they want to be. They're waiting for their life to start.
On writing in service of the story
You can't just write a song that describes what just happened. You have to be subtle. So how do you approach what's beneath the narrative? You have to poke at one of the nerves of the subtext, and give the audience credit. People will get it. It will hit them in a way that is less on the nose, but ultimately more powerful.
Brad Wheeler