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Paste Magazine: Let’s talk about Tony. How do you even begin to soundtrack Anthony Bourdain’s coming of age?
Jay McCarrol: Well, first, when I knew that we were doing a Bourdain movie and I was tasked to do the score, I knew I needed to just find a piece of music that I thought was fair and something that I could sign off on about the Bourdain that I have always known and loved. I’ve appreciated the type of man that he was and how he carried himself. He was very cool and dark and dignified, and I knew I needed a piece of music that had that in it. So, for a month or two, I played around on the piano and recorded a million different little voice memos on my iPhone, just trying to search for something that contained all those parts of him.
For composer Jay McCarrol, that meant resisting the temptation to musically foreshadow the larger-than-life figure waiting in Bourdain’s future. Instead, his score stays firmly inside the uncertainty, anger and darkness of the young man in front of us – the “first rumblings” of a storm still to come. Built from low upright piano, accordion, harmonium and textures that evoke “rust and worn wood,” McCarrol’s maritime-inflected score provides an intimate counterpoint to the film’s raucous humour and energetic needle drops.
Speaking with our Peter Gray, McCarrol discussed finding the musical language of a Bourdain who had yet to find his own voice, scoring the sudden optimism of a life-changing summer, and how years of friendship with Johnson have created a creative shorthand between director and composer.