Tag: music

Music Supervisors Pick Their Favourite TV Syncs of 2018 So Far (Part 1) – Synchblog by Synchtank

Garrett McElver, SuperMusicVision (The Tick, Seal Team)

Show: American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace – Music Supervised by Amanda Krieg Thomas

Episode 4 – ‘House By The Lake’

Song: “Drive” – The Cars (on-camera performance by Aimee Mann)

“Drive” comes about midway through the season, and as a viewer we’re just so traumatized by everything that’s happened (and what we know will happen soon) that this music moment really cuts through. It’s a great showcase of the collaboration between the writers, director, executive producers, music supervisor, and Aimee Mann herself, as they’re all accomplishing a lot with a big featured song moment with an on-camera performance. We feel so helpless for the character David as he’s essentially been kidnapped by his murderous ex-lover Andrew. David’s whole life has crashed down around him, and we know there’s really no way out for him. As Andrew and David stop in a local bar during their escape out of town, we see the incredible Aimee Mann as the evening’s anonymous performer, and she begins to play a rendition of the song made famous by The Cars. David considers escaping through the bathroom window but ultimately does not, in fear of not making it very far and because Andrew’s manipulative reasoning for staying has gotten to him.

While Andrew sits at the table watching this performance by himself, we get to witness one of the very few honest human emotions from Andrew as he breaks into tears. So much of Andrew’s story showcases how manipulative and fake he is, but in this moment, something comes out. I love that this song can really resonate with both characters in this moment. Lyrically applying to David feeling lost and trapped in this situation with no literal or emotional escape. Who is going to be there for him? Who will drive him home? And also with Andrew, who we can tell thinks he’s in the right, feeling alone in his own regard. He feels he’s lost David. Andrew has put himself into this situation where murdering those in his way is the only conceivable choice left in his mind. Who’s gonna pay attention to his dreams? Who’s gonna drive him home? Seemingly no one, as he feels woefully under appreciated by the world around him. He cries at the bar, but we know these are not tears of a lesson learned, it’s fuel for his continued spree to come. Aimee Mann’s performance captures this sense of loss and dread so beautifully and hauntingly. It’s heartbreaking, it’s frustrating, it’s unfair. It’s a great scene.

Music Supervisors Pick Their Favourite TV Syncs of 2018 So Far (Part 1) – Synchblog by Synchtank

Critics Pick the Best TV Soundtracks of the Year (So Far) – IndieWire Survey

Joyce Eng (@joyceeng61), GoldDerby

If this were 2017, I’d say “Big Little Lies,” no contest. This year, I’ve enjoyed the ’90s tunes of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” and the era-transporting hybrid mixes on “Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G.”, which had to tell the story without Pac’s and Biggie’s music.

Critics Pick the Best TV Soundtracks of the Year (So Far) – IndieWire Survey


https://acsversace-news.tumblr.com/post/175322915324/audio_player_iframe/acsversace-news/tumblr_pb0dktg1Zu1wcyxsb?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tumblr.com%2Faudio_file%2Facsversace-news%2F175322915324%2Ftumblr_pb0dktg1Zu1wcyxsb

Episode 2 – Mac Quayle

In this episode, Brooke speaks with Mac Quayle, the Emmy-winning and Grammy-nominated composer of shows like Mr. Robot, Feud, American Horror Story, American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Here, Mac shares how he started out, working with composer Cliff Martinez (Traffic) on films like Contagion and A Normal Heart and how he became the go-to guy for show runners, Ryan Murphy and Sam Esmail. He also reveals his inspiration and process for creating music for some of the most memorable scenes on television.

Should Phil Collins Be Celebrated or Vilified?

One of the most memorable scenes from The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, FX’s brilliant and underwatched 2018 miniseries, concerns Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) and a wealthy older man who thinks he has hired Cunanan to have sex with him in his Miami hotel room. What the man doesn’t know is that Cunanan is a fugitive serial killer who will soon murder the world’s most famous fashion designer. Cunanan has decided to torture his would-be john with some duct tape, a pair of scissors, and “Easy Lover,” 1984’s hit duet that Collins performed and cowrote with Philip Bailey.

The appearance of “Easy Lover” in The Assassination of Gianni Versace reveals new layers to Cunanan as well as the song. Setting aside the obvious logistical problems — why would Cunanan pack Bailey’s Chinese Wall CD for his cross-country crime spree, on the off chance that he would want to play it during an assault? — the song perfectly spotlights how the killer’s delusional megalomania fed his increasingly homicidal behavior. Criss’s ecstatic arm-waving to this frothy pop tune, moving in time with Collins’s titanic drum beat, while his prey slowly suffocates, is both chilling and darkly comic. The walls are closing in on Cunanan, but he will not be deterred from relishing his mayhem in the meantime.

As for “Easy Lover,” The Assassination of Gianni Versace teases out the song’s dark subtext, and then completely reinvents it. At the scene’s climax, Cunanan straddles his would-be customer, raising the scissors above his head. As he plunges the blade into the duct tape covering the man’s mouth, finally allowing him to breathe, Collins’s screaming vocal lifts on the soundtrack: “You’ll be down on your knees!” Whoa. Was that in “Easy Lover” from the beginning?

Should Phil Collins Be Celebrated or Vilified?

superslothsavesthegalaxy:

Darren Criss at the Largo

Notes from Darren’s Show at the Largo 6/11/18

1. The show was at the historical Largo. A gorgeous venue. Darren was geeking out about seeing shows there as a youth and how excited he was to play at it. Very full circle. No video recordings were allowed.

2. His parents and Mia were a row behind us. They’re adorable. I sat next to Joe Moses? Before Darren started he turned to my friend and I and asked, “Is that Harry Potter?” That was cool!

3. Darren, of course, hit up the vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and piano throughout the show. He said all his equipment was jacked up from the tour, so his acoustic guitar had this feedback that was driving him crazy. At some point, he borrowed the bands guitarists guitar to play, because his worker better. He started trying to play “I Dreamed a Dream” on it, but gave up and went back to his acoustic.

4. The bad pianist was amazing. He played the keyboard and piano at the same time. Like?! How.

5. He kept going on about how their only real rehearsal was sound check before the show. In a true Darren fashion.

6. His solo set was like a clusterfuck but in the best way. This guy literally has a songbook in his head? Including like so many Great American Songbook numbers. You never know what’s gonna show up. He said he enjoyed playing songs related to each LMDC tour city stop so much, to make each city a little special, he wanted to play them for us. I think the Nashville/ Patsy Cline number was my favorite and I think his dedication was for Mia.

7. He played “Gloria” from the American Crime Story soundtrack. He gave us a history lesson and how he talked about imagining Versace hearing it in his shop in Milan when he was about Darren’s age. He talked about how he and his Spanish-speaking cast members spoke Italian on set, but how he probably spoke the best Italian. He started singing “Gloria” in Italian, since that’s how it originally was written, then switched to English.

8. “Cough Syrup” has become one of my favorite songs to see/ hear him perform. The power and emotions he puts into it is unreal. You could kind of hear the toll the tour was putting on his voice at this point, though.

9. Before playing “Teenage Dream” he tinkered around in the piano and told everyone not to sing along. He ended up doing this quiet then loud, then quiet, then loud rendition, which was phenomenal. I liked that he took the song we knew him for and made it fresh and new. I love how he makes songs his own.

10. The planned encore was “Get Back To Hogwarts”. It was hilarious. He played all the characters and before each one entered, he gave a synopsis. He talked about being a “half-Asian kid” and jokingly said he “wasn’t racist” before Cho Chang entered and talked about how there was only one other Asian person in the department, so they wanted to do a bait-and-switch and make her a Southern blonde. A totally fun song!

11. The audience was mostly middle aged. I really liked that for a change. Of course there were a few screaming girls in the front row, but they were mostly controlled. The mix of guys/ gals might have been 60/40.

12. Overall, I really liked the atmosphere. I somewhat wish there was video of some of the songs, but the Largo said they may post some pics or something. Dude must be dead on his feet from the tour and show, but somehow he’s already at an interview this morning?

‘Versace,’ ‘AHS: Cult’ and ‘9-1-1’ composer Mac Quayle explains how he scores so many shows at once [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO INTERVIEW]

[…] Compared to the low-key score that accompanied “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” the “Versace” sound was deliberately grander and baroque, befitting the tone of the show and the subjects involved. “’O.J.’ was a lot more subtle. We tried to do it more grand at first and it didn’t work. We went back and said it needed to be more subtle,” Quayle revealed. “There was a lot of discussions about the sound for ‘Versace.’ The murder took place in ’97. A lot of the backstory is in the decade before that. There were scenes in nightclubs, there was this creepy serial killer, there was Versace’s love for opera. When we latched onto the sound, I then started calling it if Giorgio Moroder was scoring ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ in an Italian villa.”

When it came to the theme for Versace’s (Edgar Ramirez) murderer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), Quayle concocted a piano melody before folding in a screeching, haunting horn sound — an aural symbol of his twisted mindset.

“For such a creepy sound, it ended up with a very friendly nickname around post-production. It was ‘The Seagull’ sound. I was hunting around and going through some weird sample libraries and I just came across this — I can’t even tell you what it is now, where it came from,” Quayle said. “All of the sudden, it’s like, ‘OK, there’s Andrew’s creepy mind.’ It had different levels of intensity. It could be really just screaming, very creepy and then a little more subtle, sort of in the background, just adding into the melody, so it was a fun little texture to add.” | 14 June 2018

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)