03:02And I think I wanted to sort of stay away from an overly polished sound.
03:07I have this kind of crummy, upright piano in my home in Denver.
03:11Nickname is Firewood.
03:12Please explain the nickname.
03:15I've heard this, but tell us why it's called Firewood.
03:17So long story short, I have a piano tuner in Denver, Colorado.
03:21His name is Michael Jackson.
03:22He's about, true story, he's about 6'5".
03:25He's originally from Los Angeles.
03:27And many years ago, I said, Michael, he was tuning my piano.
03:31And I said, what do you think of this piano?
03:32It's my favorite piano.
03:34And he stopped what he was doing and he said, partner, it's firewood.
03:39And I think the myth was sort of born from that.
03:44And that was sort of my first, this is the instrument for the Bruce Springsteen film.
03:49I mean, it sounds like an engineer's worst nightmare, but.
03:53Yeah, there was actually a funny story.
03:54We recorded at the power station in New York City, which was very meta for the film.
03:59It's part of Bruce's story, right?
04:01A lot of his biggest hits and a lot of the film was actually recorded in that kind of tiny live room that is the power station.
04:08You mentioned you wanted this to sound a certain way.
04:10Obviously, Nebraska is Bruce's, you know, slimmed down record.
04:16It's him.
04:17It's very sparse.
04:19It was that sort of you wanted to make sure that the score reflected that.
04:23Yeah, I think I wanted to make sure that anyone watching the film never confused a piece of an original cue for like a B-side or something that could have been off Nebraska.
04:34So I stayed heavily away from acoustic guitar cues.
04:36I think there's one acoustic guitar cue in the whole movie.
04:39And it's performed in such a way that would never be mistaken for a Bruce Springsteen song.
04:43It's a very odd way I performed it.
04:45And I did a lot of electric guitar, as you heard in those first two cues.
04:49The firewood piano.
04:51Did some strings, but nothing too big for the film.
04:54Wanted to try to keep that vulnerable sort of sparseness there.
04:57And I understand that you actually put some of these tracks through a four-track recorder just like Bruce.
05:04I mean, Bruce made this record on a four-track tape recorder.
05:09And you did something similar.
05:10Yeah, it was a brilliant idea by my music editor, Jason Reuter.
05:13He said, you know, we have a bunch of these TIAC 144 Porta Studios that Bruce recorded in Nebraska on.
05:18What if we ran through some of the stems?
05:20So I think we ran through some of the pianos and some of the glockenspiels and sort of some of those percussive instruments through the TIAC 144, which kind of gave it this almost distorted, grainy quality.
05:31Because it's quite a basic, it's something that people can just go and get, right, back then?
05:36Yeah, it's very consumer-grade, not professional at all.
05:40And what was the idea behind that?
05:42What did you want to, do you use that to sort of get a similar tone to Bruce?
05:46Yeah, I thought it was a novel idea that you would, you know, sort of go back to that time and use,
05:53Brian Eno sort of talks about the things that are inadequate at the time, become later sought after, you know, decades down the road, like distortion or whatever have you.
06:02And that sort of, people pay good money for that crappy Porta Studio sound these days.
06:07But at the time, that was sort of like the best money could buy at the consumer-grade level, so.
06:12Yeah.
06:13You obviously scored this film.
06:14You scored A Long Walk, which also came out.
06:17How are you finding this side of the world compared to being in The Lumineers and recording your own solo work?
06:24I love it.
06:25I feel like I'm in awe to be here, to watch everybody perform tonight, the Splat, Volker, to know Hugh Brunt, the conductor, to play with this insanely talented orchestra.
06:36To be here, for me, it's a truly humbling moment, so.
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