LOS ANGELES (Top40 Charts/ Interscope Records) - Inside
Karen O is a Wild Thing - as singer for the Grammy-nominated Yeah Yeah Yeahs, her wild thing is in your face, vulnerable, obnoxious, tender, exciting... a self-proclaimed "spazoid." To Oscar-nominated Where the Wild Things Are director Spike Jonze, however,
Karen O and her music possess something of a child-like innocence, a guileless charm that put her exactly on the right emotional wavelength to sonically capture the film, be it a tender moment or a wild rumpus.
To compose the music, O enlisted friends and fellow musicians she believed had a musical intuition that would bolster her intent to marry sound to vision. Dubbed Karen O and the Kids, these include Tristan Bechet (Services), Tom Biller (co-producer with Karen O and member of Afternoons), Bradford Cox (Deerhunter), Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age, The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs), Aaron Hemphill (Liars), Greg Kurstin (The Bird and the Bee), Jack Lawrence (The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs, The Greenhornes), Oscar Michel (Gris Gris), Imaad Wasif (New Folk Implosion, Alaska), Nick Zinner, (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and an untrained children's choir.
"I didn't want to make music that was hammering you over the head or go for some kind of pushbutton emotion," O says. "What I initially wanted to do was close to Cat Stevens in Harold & Maude, really simple, but memorably and seamlessly woven into the movie.
"Working with all these highly-empathetic musicians over of a couple of years on this soundtrack was a lesson in the power of collaboration," says O.
Together, Karen O and the Kids created songs that are at times gargantuan and at others stripped-down and bittersweet. Jonze pushed O to pour as much heart and soul as she could muster into the songs, reminding her that the music would play a heavy role in the film. That's saying a lot, considering it's based on the Maurice Sendak classic - one of the most beloved books of all time - with a screenplay co-written by Jonze and author and McSweeney's publisher Dave Eggers. Where the Wild Things Are is ultimately a story about childhood and the places we go to figure out the world we live in.
