Inasmuch as it’s possible for someone whose formative cinematic influences went from Disney animation to Jackie Chan to have a “favorite filmmaker,” John Carpenter is mine. I have an appreciation for my fellow Italian-Americans Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola — mostly thanks to our shared Catholic guilt and love of Keith Richards — and my the Criterion Channel hipped me to Les Blank, but really, I’ve just seen Big Trouble in Little China more times than I care to admit.
(Halloween was also indelibly, forcefully stamped onto my unconscious long before I ever actually saw the film. When I was a kid, one of my neighbors eschewed ninjas or commandos as the theme whenever we played in our backyards, preferring to don a Michael Myers mask and coveralls and stalk me around the neighborhood with a fake butcher knife.)
Painting Carpenter as a lone-wolf auteur short-sells his collaborators, like fellow composer Alan Howarth, cinematographer Dean Cundey, producer Debra Hill, and FX wizards like Rob Bottin. That said, there’s a stubbornly independent streak to his career — along with his love of Westerns and his persistent fixation on mythology and institutional failure — that makes him, to my mind, one of the most capital-A American filmmakers, as does *drumroll* … his parallel career as a composer.
Carpenter — whose father was a music teacher and started a young John out on violin — famously composed most of his own scores. At least in the early days, this was a financial consideration, because he preferred to dedicate the bulk of his budgets to expensive cameras, lenses and film stock. But for someone who loved the maximalist studio Westerns of Howard Hawks and John Ford, Carpenter film scores are stark, simple, constructions that — and here I’m quoting a Red Letter Media video, though I can’t remember which one — he thought of as “wallpaper” for his films. Because of this evocative description and because I’m a giant dork, I’m tracing a direct line from Erik Satie’s early 20th-century “furniture music” — music composed to unobtrusively take up background space — to minimalist pioneer John Cage and on into Carpenter’s work, even though he’d probably scoff at such a high-minded comparison.
Excluding wacky stuff like his Big Trouble song with an ad hoc group called the Coup De Villes that included frequent film collaborators Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace and must be seen to be believed …
… most of Carpenter’s film scores are based around 1970s analog synths like Arps, Prophets and Oberheims. This came down to pragmatism; as he put it, synths were “a way to sound big with just a keyboard.” He worked fast, composing the score to Assault on Precinct 13 in three days. Along with the labor-intensive nature of those early synths (they had to spend as much time tuning and resetting them as they did playing them), this ensured an economy to his compositions that you didn’t always see in contemporaries like Vangelis or Tangerine Dream. Carpenter may be an ornery outsider, but there’s a streak of pop-music efficiency to his work, even as he eventually switched over to the limitless digital pastures of Logic and its software synths for his debut solo record, 2015’s Lost Themes.
The album, Carpenter said in its promotional materials, was “all about having fun,” as opposed to the pressure-cooker environment of soundtracking his own films. He worked with his son Cody (and Kinks guitarist Dave Davies’ son Daniel) on the record, eventually touring behind it in 2016. I saw him at the friggin’ Best Buy theater in Times Square on that tour (backed by, um, the Tenacious D rhythm section), and he was clearly having a blast, parked behind a keyboard for what was basically a greatest-hits soundtrack set along with a couple cuts from the record.
“Vortex” was Lost Themes’ lead single, and it’s easy to see why. Between the insistent quarter-note pulse that underpins the song from the start and the Big Trouble-esque guitar tones that alternate with its piano chords, it’s essentially Carpenter Composition 101 (a course I would gladly take, or teach). Some of the higher-register colors that wash in remind me explicitly of Big Trouble as well; I can easily see a be-mulleted Kurt Russell gallivanting around the sewers of San Francisco to this.
Incidentally, Carpenter’s label, Brooklyn’s Sacred Bones, commissioned a bunch of remixes for these songs from folks like Zola Jesus and JG Thirlwell; I haven’t investigated all of them in-depth, but they’re included on the Spotify version of the record.
Quite a lot of Lost Themes is dependent on the aforementioned four-on-the-floor kick-drum feel, a holdover from Howarth’s Linn LM1 drum machine. But “Obsidian” embroiders that pulse with a neat double-time floor-tom figure, and the song moves through a multi-movement structure — with a variety of keyboard sounds and some nice harmonic shifts in the back half — that practically moves it into prog-rock territory. (At nearly eight-and-a-half-minutes, it’s the longest song on the album.)
One knock against Carpenter is that — perhaps because of his get ‘er done approach to composing — he’s definitely got a formula to his songs, which usually goes something like: Quiet “A” riff - LOUD GUITAR JOINS “A” RIFF— quiet “B” part — LOUD AGAIN — quiet textural wash — LOUD OUTRO. But he’s canny enough about varying his sounds — and Lost Themes sounds great on vinyl for an entirely DAW-produced album — to get the most out of that format. (Supposedly he improvises a lot of these, which kinda shoots down this formula theory.)
Side note: I love the incredibly half-assed names of these songs. They would not seem out of place in a setlist taped up in a dive-bar bathroom, with “Fallen” and “Obsidian” perhaps sandwiched between “Drop D” and “Trilogy.”
“Domain” is … interesting. It’s possible that after three resolutely minor-key, ominous-sounding tunes, the song’s blaring major-key fanfare and harmonized guitars are just striking me as completely laughable in the moment. Carpenter’s background of formal violin instruction explains the quasi-classical sound and contrapuntal approach to his layers of synth lines; it wouldn’t surprise me if his dad forced some Bach on little Johnny early on.
The Halloween theme is probably tied with Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” as the Western world’s most famous song in 5/4, and some of that odd-meter DNA is embedded in the tumbling opening arpeggios of “Mystery.” (It also sounds like it’s got a Picardy third in there at one point; apparently Cody studied music composition at UC Santa Barbara.) But this one is also illustrative of the largest weakness of the album, which is that the connective tissue of these songs’ constituent parts isn’t uniformly strong. Frequently, things kind of just… grind to a halt and pick back up in lieu of more natural-sounding transitions. “Mystery” drops into a pretty bitchin’ Bonham stomp in its final chunk, though, which rules.
I’m kicking against my limitations as a musician here when I get into this — because ya boi has pretty much parked himself in 4/4 for life — but it sounds to me like “Abyss” winds through some odd-meter parts as well, which contrast nicely with another smashy-smashy beat. I’m also hearing what sounds like a Mellotron cello, which is a welcome deviation from the by-now bog-standard analog synth tones. This tune is on the longer side as well, but it just doesn’t feel like its disparate movements have enough room to breathe adequately. That may be due to the fact that Lost Themes was recorded mostly via email-swapping; its longer songs have a cut-and-paste feel where you can see the stitches showing.
I’m hitting a wall at this point. When I bought this record, I put it on a lot while I made dinner or folded laundry — which, “wallpaper music,” remember? — so sitting down and intensely focusing on a bunch of swirly synth sketches is taking it out of me. I’m also noticing that much of this record is an over-relies on pretty stock drum beats and guitar parts. There are a lot of BIG HONKIN’ UNISON BENDS™ every time the guitar kicks in — and the lead parts were, apparently, mostly Davies’ work — and it would have been nice to hear more variation there.
Side note: The liner notes to this explain that Davies was responsible for the score to I, Frankenstein, as if that’s anything other than something he’ll have to answer for in Hell. Between this and the rote guitar work here, is Dave Davies’ son Daniel John Carpenter’s greatest villain?!?)
“Purgatory” opens with a stately progression before moving into what is, bar none, the most interesting drum work on the record. It doesn’t sound programmed to me, because it’s a lopsided beat based on a snare roll that — while it doesn’t exactly “swing” — sounds like a jaunty halfway-point between rock ‘n’ roll and New Orleans parade drumming. (That is a bizarre conclusion to draw, I know, but you get what you pay for here.)
Closing out Lost Themes with “Night” at the end was a sharp move. It’s currently the only one of Carpenter’s non-soundtrack songs sitting in his top 10 most-streamed on Spotify, which I guess qualifies it as the album’s “hit.” My ears immediately perked up at the guitar figure, which more than any other song on here (except maybe “Vortex”), sounds like, well, a lost theme to one of his films. That said, I’m a little disappointed they didn’t opt for the LOUD-RIFF-SMASHY-BEAT treatment for this song; it feels like it’s building to a climax that never arrives.
So, final thoughts: Individual mileage with Carpenter’s non-film music will definitely vary depending on your level of love for his films. Without having this kind of texture-heavy music linked to foundational cinematic visuals, a casual listener might find Lost Themes a little exhausting or simply uninteresting. But I still maintain there’s a lot to like here, and approaching it on its own merits is more rewarding if you’re not expecting anything world-shaking. And — though I made it through this whole entry without using this word — it’s spooky! Halloweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee —