[Travis] Scott says, “I was like, ‘If this world or this scene was a country, could this be the national anthem, or the soundtrack for a city, or a sports team’s theme song,’ you know? It definitely wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’ve got an extra song on my hard drive here, y’all can have it.’ I was trying to embody all the movements and camera shots and vocal presence, and the actors’ voices and different scenes and scenarios.”
The song was born after Scott saw the film with Nolan — in a socially distanced manner, of course — on a big screen at Warner Bros. Studios in Los Angeles. Goransson says Scott was one of the first people on earth, apart from himself, Nolan, coproducer Emma Thomas, editor Jennifer Lame and a handful of others — to see the film.
“It was my first time watching a film of such caliber before it came out,” Scott says. “Seeing it with Chris [Nolan], having conversations with him about what I thought and what I took away from it, and what he thought and what his goal was, and just the whole experience in itself gave me the battery for what I wanted to do.”
Scott was joining a process that Goransson and a small group of others had been undertaking every week for several months: Watching the latest edit of the film in full. That was just one of many new experiences for the composer in working with Nolan, a process that began very early in the film’s production. “He doesn’t have any temp music [placeholder] music in his films, he likes create the sound world completely from scratch,” Goransson says. “He called me early in the script stage and I started recording music based on the script and conversations, so when he started shooting, he had maybe three hours of music. And when they started to edit the movie, every Friday we would watch it from beginning to end. To be able to see and hear it from beginning to end and reshape it, was such a great experience. We did that for six months.”
Bringing in Scott toward the end of that process brought another dimension to their work on the film. “His reaction to the film was amazing to see,” Goransson says. “And then he went off to write the song — I sent him a couple of pieces from the score and some beats, and he took that to the studio and wrote the song [with cowriter WondaGurl, who has also worked with Mariah Carey, Jay-Z, Kanye West]. We went back and forth a couple of times, and then Chris put the in the end titles, and it was perfect. Travis said later that the intro the to the song was him emulating the feeling of being in one of those masks [the characters in the film wear when traveling backward through time].”
Scott says, “The vocals and the chorus, to me it sounds like it’s reversed and slowed down and low on oxygen, which is the whole point. You know when you go to the dentist and you take that [anesthesia] and your voice drops down? This is what I felt it sounds like vocally, and the lyrics were just trying to embody every scene and color and angle. I was trying to embody all of that into the ‘DUN-dun-dun-dun, DUN-dun-dun-dun’ [rhythm]. I just tried to put all of those elements on the track.”
Nolan was so enthusiastic about “The Plan” that he placed Scott’s voice from the song into several parts of the film. “Chris said, ‘It sounds like an instrument, you can’t even tell it’s a voice,’” Goransson recalls. “So we took a snippet of that sound and placed it throughout different parts of the movie. That’s actually the first thing you hear in the movie: Travis Scott’s voice.”
“The music of Khruangbin is always complex and varies in emotion. For ‘So We Won’t Forget’ we wanted to create a music video that messed with the viewer’s emotions, misdirecting them, as to what to feel next. The story we told has moments of humour, sadness, violence, sadness and compassion but ultimately it is uplifting. The effect can be seen in the comments of Youtube, where many people cried happy tears. The music video was also shot in Tochigi Prefecture Japan, during Sakura cherry blossom season, just prior to Covid 19 lockdown.” - Writer/Director Scott Dungate.
WIEDEN+KENNEDY TOKYO
Director: Scott Dungate
Managing Director: Ryan Fisher
Head of Production: Kerli Teo
Art Director: Kazuhi Yoshikawa
Account Manager: Mai Ebine Content Producer: Ty Demura
“Until the day a dog finds you, he chooses to be a friend. Then he loves you and will follow you until death. Managing to wake up a part of our soul that was asleep”
