Chicago’s Daily Herald recently caught up with Rob Zombie guitarist John 5 to talk about his score for the new Rob Zombie film ‘The Lords of Salem.’ A couple of excerpts from the chat can be read below.
John 5 explained how he approached the compositions: “I always say, it’s music that people don’t want to listen to, because you’re watching the movie…It’s tough. It’s gotta be good enough, but it can’t distract you.”
He added that with the help of Rob Zombie, he was able to create some very unusual and unnerving sounds: “Rob would give me direction, like, ‘I want it to sound like this, or I want it to sound like that.’ It’s very primitive, not your everyday-sounding instruments. I would use a violin bow across an acoustic guitar or clank on things or use other odd musical instruments. Then, of course, you have your bassoons and french horns and everything under the sun for other parts of the score.”
Although he had previously written music for the films ‘From Hell’ and Rob Zombie’s ‘Halloween II,’ ‘The Lords of Salem’ is John 5’s first full film score. He explained why he decided to take up the challenge: “I like to do stuff that I haven’t done before. I wanted to give it the old high-school try and, again, it was like, ‘Wow, this is a lot of work,’ because a lot of it wasn’t in a certain time signature or key signature, so it was different for me than when everything is all mapped out.”
The guitarist said that he drew inspiration from John Carpenter’s self-scored films and Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells,’ featured in ‘The Exorcist’: “I wanted the theme of this movie to be very simple, like ‘Jaws’ or ‘Halloween’ — something that’s so easy to remember,” he said. “When you see the movie, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. I really wanted to concentrate on the simple things that ring in your head. I wanted to do something easy in that sense so people could remember it and hopefully have fun with it.”
‘The Lords Of Salem’ hits theaters in 2013.
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