Bill Frisell

Bill Frisell talks about how he composed the music for the score of All Hat:

"The script - All Hat is such a great story - and the chance to actually work on a film from beginning to end. In the past I've contributed songs to films, but nothing where I was in on it from beginning to end and doing the score. It's so interesting to work from the script stage, in this case I started working at script stage and was looking at scene edits before the film was finished shooting, and then took various passes during the editing."

"I write lots and lots of music with a vague idea of what I'm after, inspired by characters, a small detail, a sunset, will inspire melodies. It's hard for me to write one thing on command. I won't write one melody for a character, I'll write twenty and then sift through it all. When Len and Jenn first came down to see me I had narrowed it down to a few major themes which I played for them, and then I gradually honed in on what seemed right."

"I was able to bring in a bunch of people that I play with regularly and we sat down and jammed in front of a cut in Seattle, I had written the music, but it was such a luxury to have these people in front of me, we would take music I wrote for a scene but experiment with it quickly because we are so familiar with each other, and make changes to make the music work."

"It's really similar but on a much larger scale with film - when I do an album all the steps you go through of recording, editing, mixing, mastering, with film you go through the same steps but each step is much more involved. The music for me is like a miniaturized version of what it's like to make a film. It really blew my mind to see how the film changed while I was working on the music, even just a few seconds being removed from a scene can change the entire tone and message of a scene."