Photo Credit Stephanie Varela; Photo Courtesy Keegan DeWitt

“We swim and lie down together. The remarkable discovery forces itself upon me that I do not love her so wildly as I loved her last night. But at least there is no malaise, and we lie drowsing in the sun, hands clasped in the other’s back, until the boat whistle blows.

“Yet love revives as we spin homewards along the coast through the early evening. Joy and sadness come by turns, I know now. Beauty and bravery make you sad, Sharon’s beauty and my aunt’s bravery, and victory breaks your heart. But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet light, past Howard Johnson’s and the motels and the children’s carnival. We pull into a bay and have a drink under the stars. It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.”

~from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer

A conversation wherein composer Keegan DeWitt opens up his creative process for Aaron Katz’s Quiet City and talks in the most beautiful terms about ‘the sad little happiness.’ Before reading the article please download the film’s score. DeWitt’s been kind enough to put it up for free. Even if you’ve seen the film, it’ll help you considerably to understand the conversation..

SM: I know you have a very particular set of influences. I was hoping you could talk about those.

KD: I really take from, for the scores especially, Michael Nyman—he did a bunch of Michael Winterbottom soundtracks, 24 Hour Party People and 9 Songs, and there’s one thing especially that he did, a soundtrack for a movie called Wonderland, that’s really good. His work is really simple. It’s all composed on piano, and there’s some full string orchaestra arrangements, but it’s all really simple and scaled back…I think Aaron’s movie does it too. The music in my mind is similar to the movie in that it’s simple and a little bit mournful. In its simplicity, in its quiet nature, it pays homage to the fact that lots gets lost in the moment. Instead, what’s really effecting are these miniscule things, these sad little shifts in mood that are where the real content is. (Nyman) does a good job of that, where it’s freely moving but really sparse arrangements on the piano.

Then there’s another song specifically called “Spiegel I’m Spiegel” by Arvo Part. It’s used in the beginning of Gerry by Gus Van Sant, and it’s just this simple, simple progression, playing these basic chords on a piano with a cello accompanying it. It’s repetitive with a plaintive melody to it, and there’s something about its simple, scaled back nature and the repetition of it that’s really effecting, especially over a certain amount of time.

SM: I’m glad you mentioned sparse arrangements because the tracks in which I noted that sparsity, that repetitive nature are the ones I felt most connected with [‘City,’ ‘Bedtime’ and ‘Leaving the Party’]…Could you talk about those arrangements a bit more specifically for Quiet City?

KD: The two key parts of composing something for Aaron are A) being as sparse as possible and B) (the tracks) all being based in improvisation so that literally when I record them I’ll just set up my keyboard and just do as much as fast as possible. So, I’ll do ten compositions in like three hours, just record any idea I have and start with the simplest thing.

The songs we were trying to put in the movie are less like “songs…” (‘City’) is exactly what I think of in my brain when I write scores for (Aaron). I think of things happening on film, mostly two people not talking, experiencing some sort of moment that doesn’t involve them speaking to each other, and then I try to write music that fills in some sort of gap there. I also imagine in my mind as I’m doing it that whatever they’re doing physically is playing a certain part in the song. And so, it’s almost like playing behind those moments. It’s like little echoes of whatever is happening on screen.

It’s something super simple that’s repeated that maybe has a progression laid over top of it after a certain amount of repetitions.

SM: When I was talking to Aaron, the interesting thing he mentioned was that (‘City’) was not supposed to be in the section it ended up in for the final cut of the film, which is the scene where they’re dancing. Because you’ve said that you compose quickly, do you ever have an idea in mind of where you want the songs to go, and if you do, do you remember where that song was originally suppose to go?

KD: ‘No’ to all of those things. Usually I don’t even want to see the movie. I’m doing a score for a documentary right now, and (the filmmaker) e-mailed me originally and wanted to send me his movie. So, I hesitantly watched the movie, and I didn’t finish it. I was just like, “I’m going to write a bunch of stuff for him. I understand that it’s a cerebral documentary. Okay. Great.”

Like [Katz's feature debut] Dance Party is very punk rock and plucky, and there’s a lot more attack on the notes and some of the lines on the piano whereas Quiet City is a lot more subtle, kind of like mist moments, more sad, a little more melancholy. Not even melancholy, not even that specific. Even happy moments can be just missed, and everything in that is fleeting or just out of your touch.

So, with this guy, when I understood that it was going to be a cerebral documentary where he’d unfurl a long story, I tried to give him a bunch of different paces of things. What I said to him—and some people respond to it in a good way, like Aaron likes it because we kind of operate on the same wavelength, and we learned how to write and create art together, so our craft is strongly based in improv and the moment—my main disclaimer to people when I do scores is, “I’m just going to give you 20 songs, and you can do with them whatever you want.”

SM: So that literally only two or three words can trigger the improvisation?

KD: Yeah, and even that is a little bit tough. It’s more about the general sensibility. I think I’d read the script to Quiet City before I wrote the music. That’s all I knew about Quiet City at that point. I never watch a scene and write music to a scene. I’ve never done that before. For this new movie I’m doing now Luke and Brie Are on a First Date by Chad Hartigan…I’ll never just go home and craft a whole piece for (one scene). I’ll go home and write five new songs, thinking about his movie in general and say, “I hope there’s something there you can use.” There’s good sides to that and bad sides to that. Aaron I always joke with because he always picks the songs that I like the least. He’ll be like, “Hey, I love this song!”/ And, I’ll say, “Really? What about this one?”/ “Nah, nah.” So, it benefits me, but I also suffer from it in the end too because I’ll get attached to certain songs, and they will or won’t get used.

SM: That’s so interesting to me. I can’t even wrap my head around it at the current juncture. It’s an amazing way to work…I’d made all these notes for myself about very specific things that worked so perfectly, and so now it’s funny to have that structure pulled out from underneath me. Now, I’m thinking, “Oh, wait, it just worked?” I guess it all just goes back to you and Aaron having grown up together, and like you said learned and experimented with your voices artistically in a collaborative way. So, before we talk anymore about these structural devices, which may or may not have been conscious and may in fact be dealt with on a much more subconscious level, we should talk about your artistic development and background.

KD: The Quiet City score, why it also works is because, how Aaron and I were taught to write is just to start writing and not determine things. We’d write in free verse, write the dialogue, not know where it was going. Then at some point we’d be like, “Oh, we guess this is done now.” That being said growing up, we always had the same kind of conversations about relationships between people, about what was important about the way people communicate with each other.

I was listening to some interview with Aaron yesterday from the Minneapolis Public Radio, and they were asking him what he thought about mumblecore, and he had a good answer in that he thought it was in a common thread, at least with his movies, about people trying to honestly communicate with each other. That’s one conversation that both Aaron and I, in both good times and bad, had a lot—that story of Quiet City, that idea of two people connecting without it being the obvious, obnoxious love story of two people meeting, what a privilege it is to have these small moments in life where you kind of connect with somebody aside from everything else, free from all this other baggage, some sort of time away from time.

We both, when we were in college, got excited about this writer named Walker Percy, and he has a book called The Moviegoer, and there’s a great part in The Moviegoer, and he means it in a sadder context, but he talks about the idea of “the sad little happiness.” For me, that’s exactly what Aaron and I have always sought out to do, even if it’s a movie where things are blowing up and diving out of airplanes or it’s Quiet City. “The sad little happiness” is the idea that really happiness doesn’t come in these massive moments, these massive payoffs or in large realizations. It’s more a sad thing that happens underneath everything else. It’s a simpler understanding of happiness.

A lot of the music is based on that same vague, vague thought that I have in my heart or my brain or wherever it is. That’s what that moment is when they’re leaving the party. It’s without thinking about the consequences. Maybe it doesn’t payoff. Maybe (Charlie and Jaime) don’t end up together; maybe they do. It totally doesn’t matter. It couldn’t be less the point. The point is that in this moment there’s that sad little happiness where you say, “There’s nothing I’d rather be doing than standing right here on this street we’re about to cross with you, and we’re huddled in these jackets,” and there’s this small little moment which is that music, that one little hint. There’s no shame that things are satisfying like that.

We both, because we grew up together, and we’ve both talked to each other about how in love we’ve been with people, how heartbroken we’ve been with people, how much we want to achieve great things and how much we think we’ll never be able to achieve great things, that is a really common thread, which is what connects the music and the movie.

The conversation about why you don’t love this person anymore and you don’t understand it and how are you going to explain it to them is actually the same conversation that’s happening when Aaron’s like, “Hey, can you do some songs for Quiet City?” That’s what I reference more than, (in a faux British coffee house intellectual accent) “So, they’re walking and we don’t really know what’s happening. Who knows?” That’s why it’s hard for me when someone comes to me like, “So right now I want it to be really tense and then I also want it to have a hint of like, ‘Hey, what’s going to happen?’, and then at the end let’s have a like ‘VROOM!’” That I couldn’t make into music at all.

Aaron and I just had lunch now, and we were talking about this ridiculous movie we want to make called Wilderness. It’s like the most boring episode of Man Versus Wild ever. All it is is thirty minute sequences of me trying to cross wild water rapids, trying to start a fire and sitting in the cold all night. It’s like, “Something horrible happened in someone’s life, and so they go into the middle of the wilderness to rediscover themselves,” just minus the something horrible happened in their lives. Just the wilderness part….So, the point of this being, if he told me, “Hey, that’s the film I’m making. Score that,” I would understand that as well. It’s about a different sad little happiness, about what that means in that context.

SM: This concept of ‘the sad little happiness’ which is so prevalent in the score and in Quiet City I feel like is much more often relegated to the world of literature than it is to film…The cinematic example, I guess, that everyone would use is Eternal Sunshine…

KD: Of the sad little happiness? I think that’s way too intense. I love that movie, but that’s the movie equivalent of the band Animal Collective. Animal Collective does a great job summarizing the total schizophrenic nature of the human heart, how there are great, exciting big moments, loud moments, quiet moments, sad moments, strange moments, and it’s all happening at once somehow. Eternal Sunshine… captures that. The idea of the sad little happiness to me would be: someone sitting in a room at the left of frame having some sort of experience and then on the right hand side of the frame, there’s a doorway and through the doorway, you can see into the bathroom where someone else is standing in the bathroom, looking in a mirror having a separate thought, but they’re actually thinking about each other. That to me is the sad little happiness. It’s a simple, little moment where a lot is happening.

SM: That’s a great image.

KD: When I say sad little happiness, I really mean as little as possible. It’s almost like when you’re having that all night argument, and there are the great points, the big revelations, and then suddenly there’s that really brief moment where you’re both just sitting there, and you’re in silence, and you realize there’s really no solution to it, and really what you both need to do is, without saying anything, one person walks out the door and goes on with their life, and the other person walks out the door and goes on with their life. But, then you don’t. You continue the argument and continue the dramatic scene, but it’s that really small moment where you look at each other with that sad look and you’re like, “Yeah. Fuck.”

SM: I want to deconstruct this concept a little more with one particular track, and that’s ‘Haircut.’ Essentially, the song is a progression of question and answer. I don’t know the musical terminology here, but it’s three chords up, as in a question, then three chords down in response. That’s the structure, very repetitively, of the song. I don’t want to say the question is as intense as: Do you love me? Do you care about me? The question is probably much more simple: How are you doing today? How do I look in this dress? A very simple question that gets answered very softly. I don’t know if this is part of the nature of the sad little happiness for you, this idea that people are constantly asking questions and constantly searching for answers that they may or may not get. Then the interesting thing for me is that the track ends on the question. It ends with the implication “Maybe there won’t be an answer.”

KD: I don’t think there will be. The easy answer would be that it’s not 100 percent intentional, but that’s the one song I did write obviously thinking, “This is going to go over the haircut scene.”

All the questions that you listed—I was listening—the only difference is that the questions are not literal questions that could be answered verbally. You know how when someone touches you, and you’re not sure how they’re touching you—in that haircut song, there’s something really specific that happens, and they’re sharing something really specific. It means a lot: that she has a preference about the way he looks, that she either likes the way he looks or she doesn’t like the way he looks; the way she pulls at his hair and pauses for a second, is she taking a second to enjoy it, or is she just cutting his hair? You’re right in that it is like a question. It is a serious question, but at the same time it serves a different purpose in the movie than the other (songs.)

Whenever I imagine the music, I imagine it in a very Terrence Malick kind of way where it’s like moving, moving, move, and then it suspends itself for a second, and everything hangs in dead air. Thin Red Line is a good example of that…The [Quiet City] music to me is like the Terrence Malick without someone being like, “What is this? Who are these guys that control our lives?” that happens in Terrence Malick movies during the voice-over parts. That’s how everything else is usually intended to me. That’s how the dance scene operates, and ‘Leaving the Party’ operates where ‘Haircut’ to me is really rare in that it’s the one song that happens in my mind in real time, within the moment, without suspending the moment.

It’s interesting that you told me it’s like a question and answer because it totally is. It’s that moment when—you spend a massive amount of time in your life trying to find somebody who’s right for you, and then suddenly it just kind of happens. It’s almost like you have this series of moments trying to understand it, and you’re like, “I don’t understand why this person suddenly likes me when the three people before this didn’t like me.” There are all these weird, different validations that you go through in your brain where you’re like, “Really? Huh. Really? Okay. This is amazing.” So, to me, it’s a sad little happiness in the happiest of ways. It’s a really nice feeling. It’s a feeling like, you want to look at a person and say, “You’re nice. I like sitting with you.”

In many ways Brooklyn is treated as another character of Quiet City, and so DeWitt and I change course here and begin to talk about how location affected the score.

KD: (Aaron and I) are really sentimental people about cities and places and spaces, whether it’s the middle of no place. We talk a lot about moving into the middle of no place, and we joke about Aaron moving to Sheboygan so that he can sit in the middle of no place.

I was having this thought about how we never remember any location based on how it is at two in the afternoon when everybody’s out. Our favorite place in the world when we were growing up in high school was this place called The Parking Lot, which is the dumbest high school kid place to hang out. It’s in Dance Party; it’s where they go after (Gus) discloses all that information. He’s like, “Do you want to go someplace?,” and they go sit in the middle of this parking lot. It’s this massive parking lot in the industrial district underneath all the bridges in Portland where we used to go. We would just drive around, get coffee and go sit in the middle of an empty parking lot and talk. I realize that’s how I remember the city I grew up in, that I’m really in love with.

And, that’s how I always remember New York. I never remember New York at 2PM in Chelsea on the street with cabs going by. I always think about being in Brooklyn, maybe in the late fall, early winter and it’s like 10PM or 2AM. That song ‘City’ is totally that area where we both lived for a really long time, Gowanus, where the shot of all the street lights changing at the same time is done. That’s Third Avenue in Gowanus. It’s the idea of garbage and some leaves blowing around in that really, really cold air in the middle of the night. While people are in their rooms having these moments, in this city where everyone’s about connecting and networking and creating a career for themselves, at this point everyone’s in their homes, having some personal relationship with somebody else. And, outside life has its own little balance or relationship that’s happening—a little scatter of stuff blowing this way and then a little scatter of stuff blowing the other way. Everything balances itself out in the vacant spaces of where people congregate in mass.

I’m a lot more interested in the room after everyone’s left it than when everyone’s inside of it. That’s the same thing as ‘City’ to me and the music in general. It’s not about the hustle and bustle of New York and Brooklyn. It’s about what it is in the middle of the night when nobody’s there and that it’s still really filled with all the resonations of all those people and all those relationships. Everybody’s always on their way to things, but then suddenly when no one’s on their way to things, and everyone’s at rest, that space takes on a different meaning.

For more information on DeWitt’s composition and to hear his work with the Sparrows, visit www.keegandewitt.com.