[Photo by John Adams] For the last decade, Chicago quartet Califone has created gorgeously damaged, inspired art-rock albums that are more often than not described as cinematic. Now, with the release of Califone’s frontman Tim Rutili’s first feature film, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, they seem to have actualized their own destiny.
An accomplished songwriter, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Rutili channeled his creative energy in his feature-length debut, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, which also serves as a companion piece to an album of the same name. No stranger to the concept album, Rutili’s latest work delves into the isolated world of a psychic who lives in an house full of ghosts. Featuring veteran horror actress Angela Bettis (Girl, Interrupted; Carrie) in the lead role, the film is a backwoods, goth-Americana carnival of sensation, a rumination on death, spirits and the souls that haunt us all.
For their appearance at Cornell Cinema, Califone will perform live accompaniment to All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, including an additional pre-screening 30-minute set.
During the early stages of composition, Rutili frequently worked on both the script and the songs side by side, weaving a feedback loop of mood and narrative. “This was a brand new project for me. I had never done it this way before,” Rutili says. “I had never done a feature film, or really even wrote a script. A lot of the songwriting happened while I was writing the script.”
During shooting for All My Friends, many of the songs were tweaked and completed where the film was shot, in a run-down, decaying house in rural Indiana. “So much of [the music] was spontaneous. A lot of the music that was done for the film was improvised in the house itself. It was definitely really different,” Rutili says.
When the rest of Califone joined Rutili to record, the album — and film — coalesced into what we see and hear today. “Once we got together to record, a lot more ideas came up. The songs fed into the visuals, and back into the recording,” Rutili says. When he performs live, Rutili says, laughing, “It’s more of a cross between intuitive instinctual playing and total utter panic.”
Since Califone’s inception over a decade ago, the band — Joe Adamik, Jim Becker, Ben Massarella and Rutili — has grown increasingly more confident, and just as likely to churn out a slow-burning, banjo-flecked folk epic (as in the standout title track) as play an abstract, fleeting instrumental (”Snake’s Tooth,” “A Wish Made While Burning Onions Will Come True”).
As with their other releases, All My Friends seamlessly integrates sonic experimentation into an ever-changing palette of organic, acoustic guitar-oriented roots rock. “We seem to really be able to finish each others sentences when we play. We’re all kind of quiet, and we almost never discuss what we’re dong — we just do it,” Rutili says.
Under the direction of producer and longtime collaborator Brian Deck, Califone employs a vast variety of instrumentation, including the optigan, prepared piano, mbira, steel drum, thumb piano and ukulele. “It’s very collaborative, but it’s also a process that is really based on trust. We just had that kind of chemistry at the very beginning with this particular group of people, and it’s only grown from there,” he says.
Rutili originally conceived of the idea while doing something unusual: collecting superstitions. “I had collected, like, 42 pages of superstitions, about babies or death or ridiculous things,” Rutili recalls. “Then I started interviewing people with a little video camera, and they would talk about superstitions they had. I started goofing around with the imagery, and out of that the story kind of unfolded.”
Rutili’s fascination with superstitions began much earlier, as a child growing up with his grandmother. “So much of it came from my family, for me. There was a lot of superstition in my family, like if you dropped silverware, it meant company was coming. I thought that was total bullshit when I was four,” Rutili laughs. “But as an adult, it’s like, “Uh oh… someone is coming!’ I don’t even have control over it.”
Splices of those field recordings later were used as chapter breaks in the film, as a way to reference the idea of superstition and American folk traditions within a more traditional narrative-oriented format. “A lot of these superstitions, are, in a way, archetypal. They’re anachronistic. They feed into a certain kind of atmosphere,” says Rutili. “These beliefs are a part of people’s lives, so we wanted to use it as chapter breaks.”
In many of the ambient score breaks in the album — and even in the eponymous track, “Funeral Singers” — Rutili incorporates those recordings again, as distant voices just beneath the surface of the song. “It all fed into itself in a really organic way. I didn’t think we would have such a narrative film, but by the end that was what it had turned into,” Rutili says. “[Originally] I thought it would be way more abstract — more of a strange documentary about superstition.”
For Rutili, his approach to the screenwriting creative process mirrored how he wrote songs. “It’s exactly the same as writing a record: starting something is the hardest part. But once you start it, you get over that blockade, and through it,” Rutili says. “A lot of it is getting the ideas out, and the process of planning and gathering, and then a process of editing and honing it down to something. But you have to get out of the way and let it be what it wants to be. If you really want to make a story about coal miners, and it’s not naturally happening then… let it be something else. You can’t push it too hard.”
Although the two pieces complement the other conceptually, each work feels marvelously realized, a complete aesthetic statement. “Once we knew what direction it was going in, we were like, “Okay, we have to make a film that works as a performance, but also works standing alone,” Rutili says. “With the album, it was a companion piece to the film but we didn’t want to make a “soundtrack album.’ We wanted to make a stand-up album that was as good as anything we had done before.”
Although Rutili has done other work scoring for film — including collaborations with experimental filmmaker Brent Green, who appeared with members of Califone at Cornell Cinema last fall — this is his truly first independent foray into the world of cinema. A lifelong cinephile, Rutili has finally, it seems, arrived at the project of his dreams. “I never thought that I would get away with doing this, getting to make all of this,” Rutili says. “It makes me feel really lucky.”
Califone will perform to a screening of All My Friends are Funeral Singers this Friday, Oct. 16, 2009 at Cornell Cinema’s Willard Straight Theatre. The show will begin at 7:30pm.