When it comes right down to it though, Wingo would much prefer not to intellectualize about art. He’d much rather be asked about all the technical details of scoring: how he comes to find sounds and layers pieces together to compose. “No one’s ever really asked much about what in the Undertow score—Philip Glass did a lot of the score. He’s credited as doing the score—but (Michael Linnen, credited jointly with Wingo for the scores of George Washington, All the Real Girls, Manic as well and I) ended up doing at least a third of it, if not half. There’s tracks on there that Philip Glass was very generous and allowed David and I to take out…some of his tracks and instrumentation and replace it with elements from mine and Michael’s score for other scenes. No one’s ever really wondered about which of the songs in there were true collaborations,” Wingo says.

“There’s a really weird set of songs in there that are really interesting. It’s all his typical Philip Glass orchestration, and then the background is just really dissonant and scary, sampled guitar chords going around, swirling in and out of it. It’s during the middle of really intense action, thriller sort of sequence, so it’s one of those things where I don’t think a lot of people notice. I’ve always wondered if that was going to work for people,” he finishes.

Mi culpa. I can’t give him a definitive answer to his question, but Wingo is kind enough to offer answers to some questions that—yes, yes, we’re not supposed to intellectualize—are a bit abstract to say the least.

SM: What are your opinions on the way music affects film and how film affects music?

DW: The one quality that music has that most other art forms don’t have—maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always felt like it has a visceral effect, it’s so immediate, it takes zero intellectualizing. It can take no words, maybe just a couple of instruments playing the right progression the right way. It’s so simple as that that it can have such an immediate reaction. It kind of bypasses the brain, the thought process and goes straight to the heart and the soul. I think bringing that into film is the point.

One of the bad byproducts of it is I feel like you can tell when a director is putting some music in there because (the film’s) not conveying the emotion out of the actors or out of the script or out of anything else about the scene…I don’t like it for that reason. I generally think that music serves a film well when it can be more vague, provide just something deeper and more complex, to have it more in the background to the point where you’re not even noticing that the song is coming into the scene. It’s just weaving its way into the fabric of the movie, and it is sort of having a vague, emotionally complex effect on you.

SM: That’s actually my complete experience with all of your soundtracks. When I listen to just the tracks, I’m able to notice all of the nuances and emotionality to it, but if I’m watching the movie, it’s not playing. It’s like when you’re watching a really good cut of a film, and you don’t notice the edits.

DW: Maybe that’s a cliché in some circles, to say, “Film music is doing its job when you don’t notice it.” I was on a panel with some other composers, and they were really decrying that whole notion, saying, “That cliché is just not true.” In some ways, I can see where it’s maybe overused a little bit and maybe downplaying the role of (music). But, I think at its heart, it’s cliché for a reason. If it’s working it’s way subconsciously, it’s doing its job. The film is not there to showcase the music. The music is there to help the film.

SM: Now, where do you come from with your music? Has that been a conscious process, developing it?

DW: What process in the film?

SM: Just developing music in general for you. Where does it come from? Why do you do it?

DW: I always had an attachment to music since I was really young—and, to film, both. Me and David Gordon Green met when we were eight through having the same church actually, and our parents talked about how we both seemed to have a love of movies at the age of seven and eight that most kids didn’t have. We started hanging out after that, just going to movies together all the time in elementary school. Then I think for me, I was also interested in music, and I think I started pursuing music more at that point when I was in junior high and playing guitar. For me, it’s always just been—I don’t even know if I think of it as self-expression so much because it’s not nearly as conscious as that. I feel like it’s the one thing that I can do without putting really a whole lot of thought into it. It’s always been somewhat natural for me to come up with songs and progressions.

SM: At point did you say what you were doing was just going from making music to making art—or maybe that’s not an important distinction. For some people, it’s that transition between feeling like you’re practicing and working toward something to—

DW: I’ve done some commercial work, and I know when I’m doing that I’m not in my mind, in no way, am I creating art. I’m being a craftsman. That’s why they have me out there. It’s kind of fun. It’s like doing a science project: I have parameters that I’m supposed to follow, and I have limitations in instrumentation, tone and everything. It’s more like it’s a fun kind of project, and I don’t get my feelings hurt if someone doesn’t like it. It has nothing to do with me. But, apart from that, anytime I’m creating, anytime I’ve written a song—anytime you’re creating something on your own for the sake of just creating, I think it’s art in and of itself, whether it’s music or anything. So I don’t know if I make a distinction at a spot. It became more artistic for me from the second I started writing songs. That’s what art is for me, creating something where there was nothing before, so I feel like I’m always doing that.

But, at the same time, I’ve said in conversations with friends before that I don’t think of myself so much as an artist. I have friends who I really think of as serious artists, who would not be able to exist if they are not creating at all times. Whatever they create is so a part of them and who they are, and I don’t even feel like I could site influences—there’s influence, but I don’t even know if it matters to talk about the influences with some people because it’s so much a part of them. They are always doing it. I’m not like that. I can go a long time without creating and feel okay about life. I could probably never play music again, and I would figure something else out eventually that I got some satisfaction level out of. In that way, I do think I’m just a craftsman who also is able throw my soul and heart into it and therefore makes art. But, an artist is—? That’s a hard distinction.

SM: What do you do in your downtime when you’re not making music?

DW: Sleep a lot, read a lot of books. I’m a pretty big basketball and football fan. So I waste a lot of time watching football and basketball. Simple things. It definitely feels like I do a lot of traveling, not so much overseas, but I have friends all over the country. That’s one of the good things about music is between working on the films and having my band, playing here and there, and some of the films will bring me out for festivals or to play along so I end up getting to see a lot of friends all around the country because of the experience.

SM: I actually wanted to ask you one thing about travel. I don’t know if I just read into this, but listening to Ola Podrida, the one thing that I noticed was this feel to me that I was almost on a train and each song, with very little break, felt like I was moving.

DW: With the record?

SM: Yeah.

DW: Oh, that’s interesting.

SM: I felt like each song had this very train track feeling. I could almost hear the sound of the train moving, but it was different, the tenor of the way the wheels hit the railing, in each song. I don’t know if I was reading into that.

DW: That’s cool. I hadn’t heard that. I like hearing that. That’s nice.

SM: I know a lot of other musicians, a lot of filmmakers will say that rhythm is integral to the way that they process events and experiences. Virginia Woolf used to go walking, Joyce Carol Oates likes to go running, there are a million other examples that I’m not thinking of. Do you feel like movement, the actual process of movement and rhythm is important to your work?

DW: Yeah, for sure. A lot of the melodies I’ll come up with—I’ll start a song when I’m jogging, working out, just from the hypnosis of consistent movement that boasts your heart rate. To get everything synchronized like that triggers a lot of stuff squared away in my head for sure.

SM: I was talking to a DJ about this, and he seems to believe—and, I don’t know if this is always true that—not only does music effect people subconsciously and emotionally but because the body is a rhythm, because the body is primarily water, and literally what you’re is vibrating, music is an external vision of that vibration.

DW: I’ve never heard that before. That’s interesting. It’s a good theory. I’ll take it. Music also comes from the same part of the brain that does math interestingly enough. So I’ll say, “You don’t intellectualize music. It hits you kind of immediately,” it is interesting to me that it comes from the part of the brain that does the most tedious brain work. In the end, math is kind of abstract in a way too. It’s just numbers that we’ve made up. It’s not solid.

SM: Yeah, math is completely rhythmic in that it’s a pattern.

DW: Exactly.

SM: It’s a composition of patterns that we try to make definable. If you were to look at it holistically, if you looked at the whole pattern, it would be completely scary to look at the whole thing. It’s just our way of breaking down those patterns into smaller component parts. The Fibonacci sequence, I look at that, and that’s a terrifying sequence. It keeps going. It doesn’t end.

Now, here’s another big question: When you were going to work on George Washington, All the Real Girls and The Guatemalan Handshake, where did you start from? Did you have the cut or the screenplay?

DW: With David’s movies, because David and I have always been very good friends and talk at least once a week, I’m always hearing about every script every step of the way. That’s always been really helpful with his movies, just knowing so far before it’s shot, way before we know what kind of movie it’s going to be, where he’s going with it, reading versions of scripts. We don’t actually start until they have a rough cut assembled, but at that point I’ve already come up with a bunch of demos without ever seeing a scene. I’ve also visited all of his sets so I get a vibe from there. It’s a different deal with him than with most composers for sure. I have so many ideas about what I want to do with it that by the time we start it’s like I have a rough draft of what the entire score is going to be.

But, with Guatemalan Handshake, I didn’t know (director Todd Rohal) beforehand and had seen it. David was a big champion of that movie and was showing it to a lot of people before it was finished, trying to get people on board. So I’d already seen the movie without ever having any ideas about having anything to do with it and really enjoyed it. So when Todd called I started immediately with a finished cut. It’s always different all the time. Great World of Sound I’ve been hearing about from Craig forever. Since I mostly work with friends, I have a very different experience than most composers for sure. I start with the rough cut, but I know so far ahead of time usually what I’m already thinking about for it.

With Great World of Sound, Craig was going to go with— I never thought I’d be doing music for that. I thought he was going to go with his friend Jaime who couldn’t end up doing it. So, once we realized I was doing it, it was time almost to do it, and it was a lot of me and him just talking essentially about what the music not so much in terms of instrumentation, what it should sound like, but the vibe we wanted to give. I remember us saying a lot stuff like—the health movies you watched in science class when you were a little kid from like the 70s that had this sort of naïve version of the future. We felt like that we kind of be a good idea for the music for that.

It depends always talking conceptually about things versus talking straight up instrumentation and citing other music. It always depends.

SM: When you talked about that naïve sense of the seventh grade science video, I got this sense of playful sadness (from Great World of Sound.) 

DW: Yeah.

SM: Even within how sad the film could get, there was still this childlike note. I don’t know what instrument it was. You’ll have to forgive me.

DW: It was almost all synthesizer. It was this old 70s Roland SH5 synthesizer; it was before they had presets or anything. It’s a very imperfect machine…That’s definitely what I love so much about it. That’s what kept it I think childlike; there’s a lot of imperfections to the music just by the nature of this synthesizer. You can’t dial in a BPM, and so—not to get too technical—but, there’s one setting where it’s pulsating at a certain rate. So I would have five lines that were all pulsating, and I was trying to get them all at the same rate, but it was not quite possible to get the exact same rate because you can’t dial them in. There’s always this kind of shifting, slightly imperfect thing going on. Melodically too, I would tune it all differently so that the tuning was slightly off, and that all that served to give it a very childlike (feel), trying to have this very technical sounding futuristic tone but not quite right.

SM: Do you know right after you talked with Craig that you were going to be working with the synthesizer?

DW: When we talked about having that sort of tone, I definitely was like, "Let me try to get or borrow"—I had a friend who had a big collection of old synthesizers…I didn’t know how to use that instrument at all, which also gave it that quality. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I can play keyboards, but this synth was foreign, so foreign to me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was really experimenting a lot.

SM: I know the process for you, you said, occurs without too much deliberation, or stressful deliberation is a good way to put it.

DW: Yeah, much better put than I could.

SM: What is the greatest challenge for you in making music?

DW: The greatest challenge is just to realize that if it’s not happening when to keep pushing at it and not be lazy and self-defeatist, and when just to give up for the time, for that day, and say, “This is just not happening.” It can be very frustrating to keep pushing and pushing. Sometimes that’s been what kept me from playing for a while for a dishearteningly long period. To learn to let it sit for a while, experience life and come back to it after a few weeks of not thinking about music is usually very helpful. I’ve had times where I just really try to push it, and it just makes the matter so much worse… I’ve had days where I’m just not being happy, and you stop yourself and kill that association as being a stressful thing to create. That’s horrible, just associating creating something with expectations…It’s always a mystery. If it’s not there, it’s not there.

SM: Conversely, on the opposite spectrum, what is the greatest pleasure that you derive our of making music?

DW: When it is there, you just keep going it seems effortlessly, and it’s just falling to place. I’ll listen to some parts of songs, and I won’t remember really even making up some of these parts. That’s a weird melody for me to make up; that’s not the kind of melody I ever make up…If I was really deliberating about that song, that part wouldn’t have come out of me. That’s just not what I naturally do. So, it’s always kind of really cool to realize.

SM: Do you see any major trends going through film music composition right now?

DW: I feel like I wish I liked more film music. That’s the main trend is I don’t like a whole lot of it…I wish sometimes more directors put more thought into what they were doing with the music. There’ll be an indie movie where all the aspects of it are going for a good, unique vibe, but the music sounds like it could have been taken straight out of a romantic comedy. It’s the last part of the process, and I think people are just tired a lot of the time, not wanting to think much anymore. If you’re not a musically minded person, I can see a director being tired, and he doesn’t really know how to talk or think about music anyway. I’ve been really lucky to be blessed with directors who are really big music fans and have great taste in music, very esoteric and obscure taste and know about a lot of stuff. It’s easy for them to talk about, and they get very, very excited about that last step. That’s great because they’re not stepping in and hassling. They really are collaborating.

As far as trends in music, I don’t know. I wasn’t a huge fan of that Brokeback Mountain score, but that got a lot of attention. I’m really glad—although I wasn’t a huge fan—I’m glad that it got a lot of attention because it’s almost always those Oscar-winning scores, the big John Williams or Hans Zimmer type of thing.  That was an acoustic guitar-based score, and it won an Oscar for it. So that makes me think that non-traditional type scores might get a little more recognition for the mass audience and mass film community. That’s certainly what I do, non-traditional scores, so I like seeing that trend. It will be more apparent in the next year or so if that really influenced other movies that were in production at the time that won the Oscar...It’ll be interesting to see.

SM: What is the experience like for you as a composer to—after you see the rough cut, after you see the finished film—to see it at a festival as an audience sees it?

DW: It’s always so surprising. I always figure that I’m never excited to see a movie anymore that I’ve worked on because I’m always thinking I’ve seen it so many times. It’s like, “Oh, I’ll go see it to give support because it’s work, and I’ll go watch it with all my friends.” I’m never thinking about my own personal experience with the movie until I get in there, it starts and it’s so different. Once it’s been color corrected and sound mixed, especially blown up with an audience, I often forget my own part in it and just watch it. At times I forget it’s my friend’s movie. I’m just watching a good movie. You’d think by this point I would learn that it’s going to be a very different experience. Whatever I’m working with is still so crude all the time. I never see the real deal so it’s always a lot of fun.

Check out Ola Podrida http://www.myspace.com/olapodrida./p>