John Debney is one of the most diverse and productive composers in Hollywood, capable of successfully doing anything that he sets his mind to. One of Debney’s great achievements is his score for the epic adventure “Cutthroat Island” (1995). This exciting, thematic music was written in homage to Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who, if he were alive today, would probably congratulate Debney for executing his score with such intensity and grandeur. Cut from the same cloth as his score for “Cutthroat Island”, yet certainly more modern in its outer appearances, is Debney’s intense music for “The Scorpion King” (2002). Debney’s work is not all on a larger-than-life scale; his intimate and emotional music is exquisite. “Dragonfly” (2002), a film that deals with the supernatural/spiritual connections between life and death, is a complex tale that weaves itself into the story’s physical and meta-physical worlds. Perhaps the most inspired and captivating work that John Debney has created to date is his score for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” (2004), a controversial film of great impact that is forcefully driven by Debney’s epic, heartfelt, soulful score. Describe a little of your music background and hot it led to film music. I started playing guitar at age six. My mom was a musician, so it was natural that I would pick up an instrument. I did the normal guitar-playing thing during m adolescence, then I started to play some piano just on my own and was in numerous rock-’n’-roll bands. In my teenage years, I was in a band that had a record deal, so I kind of went that route for a while. Then I went to college at Loyola University here in L.A., where my double major was drama and music. I did that for my first two years. In my junior year, I decided that, of the two crazy profession ideas, music was the less crazy because it was my passion. So I transferred over to CalArts in Valencia, where I got a degree in composition. I then worked at Walt Disney Studios’ music library department for about three years, copying and pasting scores, being a runner, and doing other things like that. Slowly but surely during the years I was at Disney I started to get some orchestration work. I orchestrated a lot of the theme-park things they were doing at the time. I then got married, left Disney, and started to do some freelance work as an orchestrator. That’s what I did in the early eighties until I started to get a television episode or two, then a series. In the early nineties, after being a television guy for many years, I started to graduate into features, and I’ve had a slow, steady growth into feature work since then. You have a diverse career that seems to have kept you from being pigeonholed in a particular genre, although you have done several comedic scores. What genre inspires your creativity? I am sort of known as the big comedy guy, or at least one of them. The genre that most interests me right now is anything but comedy, anything with a more dramatic emotional side to it. That interests me greatly. I love doing big, epic, adventurous things. Some of my favorite composers are guys from the Golden Age who did the big swashbuckling movies and, of course, John Williams among the modern-day composers. So I’m sort of at both ends of the spectrum. The very small, dramatic, emotional film is very interesting to me, as is the big, overblown, fun “Cutthroat Island”-type thing. Being one of the busiest composers in Hollywood, how do you balance your projects and do they ever overlap? First of all, being the “busiest composer” for a couple of years was never planned. It just happened. They do overlap, or I should say, they did. This year, consciously. I’ve made an effort to do less, which I think is important right now. Doing two projects at once is doable but difficult. Unfortunately, there have been situations where I have had to do three at once. That’s horrible! That’s really undoable. Doing two at once is not the most fun thing in the world, but schedules change, more so now than ever. It’s almost like you can say yes to a project in any given timeframe knowing that it’s going to move. So it just happens. I’m one of those composers who doesn’t use a lot of help. I call in a friend to do a cue or two here and there, but I’m not into having a lot of people work on a score. So I’m sort of doing it all myself, and that cab become tough. Especially when it interferes with your family and everything? Yeah, you want to have a life. It’s difficult to do that. I’m better at it now than I was a few years ago. Did you choose to take on so many projects to gain wide exposure for your work and help yourself move into the bigger films and be able to be a bit choosier of your projects? Yeah, absolutely. There was a period three or four years ago when I basically just wanted to work. I just wanted to get out there and work a lot and work hard, which I did. I was very fortunate with opportunities and representation to help me do that. Again, now this year, I’m looking to just slow down and try to do different things and do them more selectively. Given the fact that you produce so many scores in a year, how do you manage to keep a constantly original sound without duplicating pieces? It’s been easy for me because so many of the projects I do are so different. Perhaps if I were doing two romantic comedies at the same time, but that has never happened. It’s usually a romantic comedy and some wacky comedy or maybe it’s a drama or a thriller, which I’ve done less of. In other words, I haven’t had the problem of having two similar kinds of movies happen at the same time. In that sense, it hasn’t been much of a problem. Do you find it tempting to go back on your own work once in a while? Absolutely. You know, when I’m writing themes for a given movie, I’ll write a bunch of themes, and one or two will end up being the theme that the director likes. But I keep the other themes, and, if possible, revisit them. If one of these themes works for another movie, that’s great. But that doesn’t happen a lot to me. There are plenty of stories of themes that never were accepted for a movie that the composer uses for the next project and it’s a big hit. Is diversity the key to longevity in a film music career? I think it is. I mean, my gosh, I’ve had years and years of writing television music and churning it out and honing my craft. It was a golden opportunity for me. When I got my chance to get up to the plate, I was ready. I was sort of in the minor leagues for years, to use a baseball metaphor. So I’m fortunate in that I’ve had a lot of training and a lot of experience with writing a lot of different kinds of music. If you don’t have that behind you, sometimes that can be a problem. I’ve always loved your mastery with the orchestra, and the score of yours that first captured my attention was “Cutthroat Island”. It’s an incredible epic score for a film that seemed to fall through the cracks. It did fall through the cracks. It was quite a disappointment for me because, had that movie done well, it could be a completely different landscape for me. That’s not a complaint; that’s an observation. Actually, that film had a stigma to it. It was such a huge disaster financially that my agent at the time felt that they couldn’t really send out the score on CD with the movie’s title on it. In other words, we would send out the CD, but it just said, “New Music”. I appreciate what you say about the score. I’m very proud of it. It’s probably one of the two or three that I’m most proud of. I think fans have discovered it, and I know a lot of people temp with that music. That’s gratifying, but certainly, as you can imagine, if it had been a big success, it would have certainly helped my career a lot at that moment. With “Cutthroat Island”, I hear the impact of Korngold and Alfred Newman. What other composers have impacted your sound? Very good question. There are a lot of subliminal things that we all do as human beings in that we’re all influenced by others’ work. If I were a painter, I’m sure I would unconsciously be influenced by a lot of other painters. Things sometimes unconsciously come out of me that I feel sound like someone else. Other composers? From that Golden Age, as it were, certainly Korngold, Max Steiner, Alfred Newman. David Raksin, in terms of melody. “Laura” is still one of the most gorgeous themes I’ve ever heard. I think David Raksin is quite under-appreciated. He’s right up there. My list is voluminous. I’m all over the map. I just happened to see the old “Superman” series on TV. Who is the composer of the original “Superman”? What I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of obscure people. I think more in terms of scores. Hugo Friedhofer’s “Best Years of Our Lives”, to me, is one of the finest film scores ever written. I just get choked up every time I hear it. What he did with the music was just astounding. You know, Hugo was mainly known as a master orchestrator. But boy, the few scores he wrote were great! Now, moving ahead in time, my two absolute favorites would be the two biggies: John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. I’m also terribly fond of James Newton Howard. I think James is pretty amazing in that he’s so good. There’s something about what he does with a film score. He just gets right to the heart of things. I credit my passion for film music to James Newton Howard, whom I became familiar with first. He is one of the most prolific composers in the industry, and he has a true ability to capture a film’s emotion. Yes, and I think he’s almost under-appreciated right now. I mean, he’s in the top five composers, but probably people would argue that right now in town. I personally think that he can literally do anything. I want to mention Alan Silvestri, too. I love Alan. He’s another one who can do anything. I just love Alan’s sense of melody. His harmonies are amazing. Sometimes I write things that come out sounding similar to Alan’s, I think. It’s certainly not intentional. But I think I know why it happens. Alan is a guitar player, like I am. I’m sure he writes on the keyboard now, as I do too, but guitar players learn harmony in a certain way or the way to change chords or the way to write a melody. I may be wrong, but my guess is that may have something to do with it. John Barry. Who writes a better melody? Randy Newman, too. You know, I really could go on and on because my problem is that I’m just a big fan of everybody, but those are some of my favorites. It’s nice to hear a film composer speak of how he admires other film composers’ music. Oh yeah. I’m sure you get a lot of them living in an unreal world. There are some great artists out there and it’s terrific that they get a chance to speak their voices, as it were. You’re one of them. I don’t know. I just do what I do and it’s fun for me to grow. I think that the key for me is that I’m really aware. I don’t want to stagnate ever. There’s always something I can do better. There’s always a genre or there’s always a cue specifically that I think that I can do better. So it’s a learning process for me, and it always has been. “The Scorpion King” is an eclectic mix of powerful orchestrations, with electric guitars and voices. You experiment with some cool sounds while creating a complex score that is an intoxicating listen. How did you prepare for this film and how challenging was this project for you? It was very challenging, and I think it was very successful. There’s a lot of “The Scorpion King” that I’m extremely fond of and happy with because it was really fun for me to write it. It was a difficult one though, and it bears out what you’re hearing. There were a lot of people involved in that movie. It was a huge movie, and it’s a franchise movie with Universal. Therefore, we had a tremendous number of, shall we say, cooks in the kitchen. There were many ideas floating around. At one point, there was a big group that though the score should be, in the main, pretty contemporary and pretty rock ’n’ roll based. I didn’t have a problem necessarily with that, but the director did. So you had a couple of schools of thought, and they were not always agreeing on the direction. So I felt I had to infuse a lot of elements into the score, and I think it came out okay. I wanted to infuse some rock ’n’ roll and some guitar-oriented things. I wanted to infuse world music. It’s sort of an amalgam of a lot of things. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it certainly was kind of interesting to do. Ultimately, the score ended up seventy-five percent traditional, twenty-five percent nontraditional, meaning kind of more rock ’n’ roll oriented. I didn’t plan on the blend. That’s just what happened. It was the result of people wanting different things. Sometimes, as composers, we are hired guns. At the end of the day we have to please the director and the studio, et cetera. So that score was a result of kind of trying to make everybody happy, which we have to do. I have a funny story about that score, which has a lot of choir in it. When we were working on the choir, I got a book on how to teach yourself Sanskrit, and they are saying things. It’s kind of silly. It’s kind of gibberish, but that is Sanskrit in there, which a lot of people don’t know. “Dragonfly” is my favorite work of yours. It is beautifully written with a lovely theme and a nice flow between dark sound and an angelic touch. That score is so close to my heart, and I really appreciate you saying that. I probably put more of my heart and soul into that one than I’ve put into a lot of them, to be quite frank with you. The subject matter was very close to me. I, however, had very little time to do that score – probably three weeks. I totally connected with the movie because I had lost my mom about a year and a half before that score was written. So had the director, Tom Shadyac, and the editor. We had all lost our moms within a two-year period. So you can imagine the emotional experience. I think there was just some door opened or some channel opened in my heart, and I just came up with these little motifs that became the main theme. Tom was very happy with it. I wish the movie had done better. I think it’s a much better movie than people give it credit. A harsh reality, unfortunately, in Hollywood is that you’re kind of judged on the success of the movie a lot of times, and that’s normal. I recently had a conversation with James Newton Howard about this subject. He said, “John, it’s always one film away.” I thought that was very interesting. Meaning, if all of a sudden that film succeeds, then you’re that guy for a while. Had “Dragonfly” been, let’s say, “The Sixth Sense” or “Unbreakable” or something like that, I would be that guy now. I’d love to be that guy for a while in the sense that I’d love to do more movies like that. Now we’ve got the score and it’s wonderful to hand it out. “Liar Liar”, which has a completely different sound, is yet another great work of yours. It seemed to have a huge impact on the blooming of your career. Oh it did, no doubt. It was a big, huge gift from James Newton Howard. James was going to do the movie. He had written a theme, but, all of a sudden, schedules changed, so he was going to have trouble doing “Liar Liar”. Through his incredible generosity, he brought me in. It’s kind of a wild story. I remember that he spoke to the director and producer and said that this guy, John, is great, and they were amenable to meeting me. We had this incredible lunch, James and I and Tom Shadyac, and I think the editor was there and a couple producers. At the lunch, James kind of did his thing and convinced them. He said, “Look, this guy can finish the score for you and I’ll be in the wings. I’ll help John with whatever he needs.” Basically, I wrote a couple of little themes to go along with James’s great theme, and that literally opened the big door for me. That was a huge, big, beautiful Christmas present. Your scores for a lot of movies are not fully represented on those movies’ soundtrack CDs, which may have only a couple tracks of your music. This must be frustrating for you. It is. With “Bruce Almighty”, somebody said to me, “I thought I was going to get all your music from the movie, but I got a bunch of songs.” I replied, “At least you got some score on there.” A lot of times I don’t even get a track on there, and we fight for it. “Princess Diaries”, the score, would not have happened unless we complained for months to Disney and whined and begged. I’m serious. They’re not wild about having the score come out because, quite frankly, it doesn’t make them any money, and they don’t want it to compete with the soundtrack. It’s dollars and cents, and they don’t want to compete against themselves. That I understand, but I also think people are a little smarter than that. If you clearly market the score and clearly market the other one, the soundtrack songs, I think people know the difference most of the time. You’ve been involved with Varèse Sarabande recordings on some of the older releases, including one of my favorites, “Superman”. What is this experience like, working with other composers’ music, and how did you get involved doing this? Bob Townson invited me to a party a few years back. At this party, Bob asked me if I would be interested in coming over to Scotland to conduct some scores for Varèse Sarabande. I said, “Why not?” I just thought it would be really fun. So we worked on it and I brought the family over to Scotland. Prior to this, Joel McNeely had done a lot of those albums for Bob. They’re very close, but Joel had been getting much busier with his feature career. I’ll never forget the very first day, when the first batch I conducted was “The Golden Boys of Sinbad”. The first piece was the main title, and when we rolled tape, Bon and I were floored. I was just like, Wow! There was just so much magic in the room. I’ll tell you honestly, I think the Bernard Herrmann stuff turned out really well. With “Superman”, I did not have enough time. I felt some of the tempos were not correct because the music is so demanding, as you know, that the orchestra physically got tired. The cues to “Superman” were recreated from sketches. The score has gone by the wayside, destroyed. Somebody, years ago, had them in a file, but they were thrown out. Luckily the sketches exist and we’ve orchestrated all that stuff. That was all great. “Back to the Future” was a complete disaster in that, unbeknownst to me, when Alan did that score, there were so many picture changes that they made so many cuts in the score, physically, that sometimes the scores wouldn’t match. So the trumpets would have twenty bars missing. It was a mess. It took us a couple of trips to even get what we got, and it was still a mess. What is the most satisfying part of being a film composer? That’s easy. It’s getting to work with the orchestra – to be able to stand in front of these incredible musicians and conduct, which I call a birthing process. There’s nothing more thrilling. Still, to this day, I love it! I love the people I work with. I love standing in front of the group, and I’m just astounded every time they start playing. That process of hearing the music, finally, after I’ve been spending months or weeks in my little room on my machines, is just a fantastic payoff. Are you taking Pete Anthony on as your conductor more now? I love Pete. He’s fabulous. He’s a great orchestrator. We have a great relationship. I take him on a case-by-case basis. There are scores that I need to be in the booth for because I feel I need to really communicate with the director. On others, if I feel it’s a pretty good situation, I can be out front. Sometimes, like for “The Scorpion King” or some of these other ones, there are so many pre-records that it’s better for me to be in the booth with my assistant, Michael, and the engineer and the director so I can hear the mix going down. I conducted “Princess Diaries” because it just is what it is. It’s a nice orchestral score and not a lot to think about. You just do it, and then run back and talk to the director and go out and do it again. [I had the opportunity to speak again with John Debney at a later date once his score to “The Passion of the Christ” was complete. It is a monumental work, not only from the musical aspect, but the project as a whole. I wanted to get John’s insights and experiences on this controversial Mel Gibson film.] How did you become involved with “The Passion of the Christ”? It’s a rather long story, but I’ll tell it very quickly. Last October, I got a phone call from an old friend of mine, I gentleman I had grown up with who happens to work for Mel’s company. I hadn’t spoken to him in a couple of years, but he called to pick my brain. He told me that they were having some problems with the music for a film he was working on. He didn’t tell me what it was at that point, but he said that the director of the movie was not sure what kind of music he wanted in the movie. I asked, “What’s the movie?” When he replied that it was “The Passion of the Christ”, I fell off my chair. I said, “Gee, I read all the articles about this film. It’s been talked about for almost a year. Can I see the film?” He said sure. They sent the film over. I viewed it. I was completely emotionally touched by it. I offered to write some music for free, just on spec, because of my interest in the film. I thought it would be an honor to write music for something like that. It would be a dream, really. So I spent the weekend after I viewed the film writing some music. The very first thing I wrote was what became the trailer music with the female voice and so on. After that, they liked what they heard, and it became my sort of backdoor way into the project. When you first tackled this project, what was your approach on inspiration? I got a lot of whatever music exists wright now from that period, and I listened to that and looked through whatever written music there was. I learned about the instruments of the period. But I had to do it very quickly because, when I was first hired, I had about four weeks to compose. I just had to hold my breath and dive in, like I’ve had to do a lot of times with the movies I’ve done. I’ve read many different opinions on the movie and the score. Some were religious in nature, some were political. Rarely did they review the movie and its music for what it was. Did you have a spiritual connection to the movie? Absolutely. I’m a lifelong Catholic. I went to Catholic grammar school and was an altar boy. So this is a subject that obviously is my story, my personal belief system. Although, there was a time a few years ago when I had sort of lost my faith. I returned to it because of a number of things that happened in my life. After the loss of my mom a couple of years ago, I sort of started to re-look at my personal faith and religion in general. It led me back to reading about people of faith through the ages – saints and holy people of all faiths. I was trying to grasp the subject of faith and what that is. And, lo and behold, I slowly but surely regained my own personal faith. When I got the phone call about “The Passion of the Christ” last October, I was sort of at the end of my spiritual journey back to my belief, so doing this movie was absolutely very spiritually personal for me – so much so that it’s hard to talk about sometimes. There was a lot of prayer involved, a lot of introspection, and a lot of self-doubt. I feel it was no mistake that you were chosen for this project. Yeah, I must say, I believe that there is some truth to what you said in terms of people who were meant to be on this movie. As I’ve told people, if you were to list twenty composers who would have been appropriate on this movie, I wouldn’t have been on that list. I firmly belief that. Mel made a great leap of faith to hire me. Talk about your interaction with Mel Gibson in this film and how much of a role, if any, he played in defining your sound. Working with Mel was everything you could imagine. It was incredibly intense. At first it was very difficult because Mel is an extremely nice human being. I think that, if he doesn’t like a performance or a piece of music, it’s very difficult for him to tell you so. And it was also a new process for him, by the way – he had never had a composer demo every piece of music or invite him in to be such an intimate partner in this thing called “making music”. So it was a rocky road at first. But that slowly eased up and it became more and more wonderful. As time went on, he got to know me and I go to know him. A level of trust developed, and, you know, you can’t get that overnight. I invited him to be brutally honest to me, which he learned to do. I would invite him into the studio to work with all these wonderful, different musicians that we utilized, and he would look at me and say, “Yeah, you’re right,” or “What if we tried this?” It was a collaboration. And it literally got to the point where he would run out and tell the musicians something and run back to me and ask, “What do you think?” And I’d say, “It’s pretty good, but why don’t we try this?” and then we would try something else. That’s how the relationship developed, and it was quite exciting. By the end of things, when we were in London recording with the orchestra and the choir, it was more of the same. He would get that look on his face – he would sort of scrunch up his face and he’d say, “I don’t know.” I got to the point where I could read his body language. And, I think, at the end of the day, we just really had a good time working with each other. Has he told you outright his feelings about the final collaboration? He has. Again, he’s a very humble man. He’s kind of a man’s man, I would put it. I think, sometimes, it might be a little hard for him to express verbally what he’s feeling. But, right before the film opened, he gave me one of the sweetest phone calls. He very kindly let me know that he felt my contribution was very powerful and that he would love to do it again. And I said I would, too. It was very kind of him to let me know in the way he did. I noticed that he also performed a little chanting and so on. Was that his idea or was that yours? It was completely my idea. People forget sometimes what a great actor he is. This guy is a great actor. He is a brilliant actor. He is a brilliant director. He also has a very musical ear and is a singer. He sang on “Pocahontas”, which is that Disney animated film. Great story: One day when we were in my studio (like we were quite a bit during this process), I said, “Why don’t we try some chanting – a Tibetan monk-type of a low, guttural thin?” We were experimenting along those lines when, behind me was Mel, changing along. He has a very low voice and was doing a very low sort of ethereal, guttural thing. I said, “That sounds really good.” He goes, “What?” I asked Mel to go in the recording room and chant along. He goes, “No, you’re kidding. No, no, no.” I said, “Mel, it’s good. Look, I’ll make you a deal. I won’t let you make a fool of yourself. If I think it’s bad, I am going to tell you. And if I think it’s good, I’m going to tell you that too.” He goes, “You think so?” I said, “Yeah.” So he went in and did a little chanting along. That’s what ended up on the soundtrack, and it was quite fun. You chose an interesting and powerful approach to this score. You have a modern ethnic-style score with a lot of synth percussion elements and sounds. What led you down this road versus an epic symphonic score? That’s an easy one. Mel didn’t want to let me go down the big traditional bible-movie road. And I think for good reason. His movie is quite different from most other bible movies. His movie is very visceral. It’s in your face. He really wanted the music to be very eclectic, and he wanted it to be situational, which I thought was very interesting. I’ve never had a director tell me, “John, I want that music to be situational.” When he first said that to me, I didn’t know what he was talking about. But then, through our discussions, I figured out what he meant. He meant that he didn’t want a traditional sort of referential-type score. He wanted the score to be very specific to each moment in the film. He said, “I don’t care if one piece of music doesn’t relate to the next at all. I really want this to relate to exactly what is going on in the given scene and with the given character.” And I think he was absolutely spot-on with that, because what we ended up with was a score that’s not one thing in particular, which I think is really cool. There’s not really one overriding main theme, but there are a couple of themes – there’s Mary’s theme and there were a couple of motif things. When Mel heard Mary’s theme for the first time with the Aramaic vocals, he was crying. He had tears rolling down his face. What’s so cool about the score, for me, is that every piece of sort of its own statement and yet there is an overall feeling to the score, and that is what you mentioned, Christian, that there are common elements. There’s a lot of percussion. There are a lot of ethnic and ancient instruments. There are the vocals. These are common threads, and yet there’s not an overriding overall theme. That makes it sort of refreshing when I’m listening, when I just have this thing on in my car. It’s kind of fresh in a weird way, because of the relation from one cue to the next. Those in my family whom I have shared your score with have been touched beyond words. I feel the need to share this with you because, in this day and age, it takes a lot of strength to persist in your spiritual beliefs and to allow yourself to remain open and in tune on this journey. The experience is just perfect for me. Thank you. I think that’s the highest compliment I can get, and it humbles me. I don’t think I have a large ego in the Hollywood sense. When people I barely know come up to me in tears and want to hug me, I’m touched. People have told me they’ve listened to the CD in a lot of special stories like that. And I don’t know. It’s not a testament to anything I’ve done. It’s just sort of the voice of God speaking through some of this stuff, whether it’s the movie, whether it’s the photography, whether it’s the performances of the actors. I don’t know what it is. Call it God. Call it a divine source. Call It whatever. You’ve created what I feel is a masterpiece in the history of film music. What does this mean to you? Wow! I’ve got to tell you, you’re so kind with your comments. If any of that’s true, it’s just so hard for me to get my mind around it, and I’ll tell you why: When I was writing this music, it was so not about me, meaning the ego me. And it’s never happened to me like that before. I want to always write the best music that I can. That’s the way I want to keep it. If it speaks to people, then I’m so touched. If, you know, twenty years from now, twenty years from now, people look back and they think it was a good score, I’ll be very happy with that. I can look back on my work on “Cutthroat Island”, and, yeah, that was a pretty good score. I can look at “Hocus Pocus” and remember writing it and striving to make every note perfect. But “The Passion of the Christ” is one of those scores where I literally let go and let it be what it was. Luckily, I had a collaborator in Mel who gave me that freedom. There are all kinds of directors out there, some who will give you freedom, some who will want to agonize over every note. Mel agonized over every not but, then, at interesting moments of insight, he would just go, “Go with it. That’s great. We’re done. That’s good.” That’s the way it is with him. I’ve never experienced anyone else who’s quite like that, and maybe that’s ultimately the genius of the man. And I don’t say that lightly. I have no reason to say stuff like that other than that’s the way I feel. There is a genius to this man that is very elusive, and I would experience it in different ways. Getting back to your very sweet comment, if that is the case, I’ll be delighted. I’ll be delighted if thirty years from now I can be an old guy teaching in a university and find then that it inspired somebody to get into writing music. That would be great. If it would inspire people’s lives, that would be great.
Every situation is different, and sometimes you’re recreating from nothing basically.