The label reissued the soundtrack on CD in 1997 with previously unreleased cues. Released in 1984 by Polydor, the Dune soundtrack album was, according to the band, not a bestseller. Oftentimes, some of the phrases from the film we still use to talk to each other-it just comes out of nowhere. I saw Dune a million times when we were doing it. I spent a lot of time in recording studios from 1976 to 1992, doing 20 sessions a week… and having a band. It’s very difficult, tedious work, and I just want to run on stage and play my ass off and get paid and go home. I’m not the right guy to spend the rest of my life doing that. I just want to stay in my lane, if you will. It was a great experience, but it was not something I wanted to do for a living. Lukather: It was a one-and-done for us, as far as I was concerned. I thought, If this is the way it’s going to be… I wanted it to be a blockbuster like Jaws, and it wasn’t. Paich: Working on that film discouraged me a little bit from working on films. The Toto score for Dune was Wagnerian and powerful, yet the band never composed the soundtrack for another movie. David Lynch was one of the champions of sound design and movie music going together. This was the wind whistling through the castle, and he recorded that. I said, “What is that?” He said he went to Scotland up into the hills where there was supposedly a haunted castle. I remember when I went to his house, he had this haunting, low, whistling sound. ![]() Lynch is very into the combination of those things. Paich: There was a lot of sound design going on with Lynch at the same time this orchestral stuff was being conceived. He had one of his sound designers, Alan Splet, who unfortunately isn’t with us anymore, come on the film, and he was on David’s wavelength for that. Penelope Shaw Sylvester ( Dune assistant editor): David had a strong audio vision too. here, and Steve Lukather did some of the guitar backward sounds. He pre-recorded stuff he just thought would be good for the movie and sent it to David Lynch, and that was the music. It was a great mixture to have both elements, between Eno and Toto. He brought in those luscious and compelling and haunting voices that were in some of the scenes. Paich: When I look back on it, the sound design aspect was Brian Eno. Now that I look back on it, it was the perfect call. All they wanted was to be more inclusive with the music and bring in some other elements to it. Paich: It was a little touchy at first, because we thought that he wanted to go in a different direction, that he wasn’t satisfied with Toto. Lukather: He temped a scene with Brian Eno’s music, and we tried to fucking satisfy him, and nothing would do it until he finally said, “I’ll pay Brian to do this.” ![]() The filmmaker ultimately decided to supplement the score with a single 12-minute synth track by Eno (alongside Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno) known as the “Prophecy Theme,” which caused a bit of tension with the members of Toto. While Paich and Lukather were always the main composers for the film, another artist Lynch considered bringing in from the get-go was British ambient pioneer Brian Eno. It was a new experience for me, and I learned a lot. I’d never done anything like that before. Lukather: David Paich gets to scratch his itch to write an orchestral score with all of us contributing compositional ideas, but-in all fairness-Paich was really running the show on this one. We took it that way and kind of Toto-ized it, trying to follow David Lynch’s instructions, which put limitations on what we’re trying to do. When Queen did Flash Gordon, I thought, Wow, that’s interesting to have a band score a movie. I come from the old-school orchestra scoring of a movie. He did some movies and a lot of TV and constantly conducted orchestras all his life. My father was an orchestrator for Jerry Goldsmith. Paich: That’s where my head was at because I grew up with orchestras. Toto wrote no lyrical songs for Dune, instead conjuring a big, sweeping orchestral sound with only a few guitar chords here and there.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |