A Conversation with Michael Penn – HuffPost 4.17.14

Mike Ragogna: Michael, what have you been up to recently?

Michael Penn: I’ve been busy scoring stuff, I’ve been working on the Showtime show Masters Of Sex and I’ve been working on Girls for HBO and that’s what I’ve been doing.

MR: At the moment, you’re kind of putting the singer-songwriter thing aside and concentrating on TV and film. Is that just a shifting focus as far as your career or creativity right now?

MP: It was a decision or a series of decisions that I made over the last few years as the music business has disintegrated before our eyes. I sort of feel like the music business–recorded music, not live–has been sort of the canary in the coalmine for all media in the digital age. I grew up primarily in the seventies, when you could have this romantic notion that you could have a career making records. I love playing live, but what I really, really enjoy doing is making records and making recorded music. To me, it’s as different as writing a play or writing a movie. So for me, I saw that unless you wanted to tour there was really no middle class in record making anymore. You were either fronted by a multinational corporation because you were a super commercial act or you were slugging away in your bedroom. So for me, somebody who really likes to make new s**t and not necessarily just play a group of songs on a tour all the time I gravitated towards this, and I feel very blessed because I get to continue to create new recorded music and make a living off of it. I have a great job.

MR: It seems like a natural evolution for people who got into music to write songs for themselves, then many score films and TV and move on to other creative musical formats. It seems like a natural growth.

MP: There are other aspects that make it a very enjoyable thing for me. I think if the business had remained what it was I would’ve probably wound up doing it anyway, but I sort of felt like it was expedited just by nature of what happened with the music business and the fact that they don’t make an object anymore. That’s really what it comes down to: There’s no longer any manufacturing. We used to take these wave forms that we’ve created and embed them in a piece of plastic, and then that piece of plastic got smaller and now we don’t even embed them in anything, so now it’s completely up for grabs. That’s a depressing reality, and it sort of reminds you that the idea of music as an ojbect really only dates back to the nineteenth century with sheet music. Before that it was all live performance. So I guess we’re going back to that in some way. I talk to people who I view as very smart on every other level who say with conviction that they believe that music should be free. It’s because music is now viewed as data, and data’s supposed to be free. To me, that’s very sad. But I feel very grateful because I get to do this and make a living at this, and it does also contain something that I miss making records; to me, making a record is a very solitary thing, and to me, scoring is very collaborative. I haven’t felt that sort of collaborative spirit since I was in a band.

MR: You’re working with a team now.

MP: In the case of Girls, it’s just Lena Dunham, and in the case of Masters Of Sex it’s the showrunner Michelle Ashford. The collaborative nature of that is not like a committee, they’re both really pleasurable in that way.

MR: Has your creativity changed a little bit because of the TV music focus? Does the muse come in a different way now?

MP: For me, the collaboration is sort of akin to working with a lyricist. There’s no lyrics in the score, so you’re basically working with the scenes as lyric and trying to find a way to emotionally support what’s going on with that. It is very different from writing a song because writing a song you just start with a blank piece of paper and you go to town, but there’s an ebb and flow to this.

MR: What’s the next step for you?

MP: I don’t really think about it that way. I don’t have any game plan, I feel fortuante to have people interested in hiring me to make music for them and then I get to enjoy my life and make music. The extent of any kind of planning beyond that is to try to keep growing as a composer and try to explore the things that interest me in terms of sonics and in terms of melody and in terms of influences and those sorts of things, but that’s about it.

MR: How often is it your job to add extra subtext into the scene if the shot doesn’t quite capture it?

MP: There really haven’t been any issues like that that are that overt. There have certainly been moments in both shows where they really want some aspect emphasized through score to help it along. But the balance to writing score is a lot of times you want to completely stay out of the way and be extremely subtle and essentially neutral and then other times you need to be a little less subtle, and then the third type to me is the piece of music where you’re actually helping bring the audience along emotionally in a way, where you’re actively taking a lead role in that. The unfortunate thing for film composers and television composers is those moments when they arrive these days are often taken up by a licensed song, so the composer doesn’t actually get to do those moments as much, where suddenly, if a film or a TV show really wants to say something, they get it to actually, literally say something and put a song in. But I’ve been really fortunate because both Girls and Masters Of Sexhave allowed me to have moments that really do that and those are, for me, really most enjoyable, because that’s when I can really dive into melody.

MR: Do you feel like having been a lyricist and a singer-songwriter gives you a certain edge for storytelling in the scenes you’re providing music for?

MP: Well, I would hope so. I don’t know that you have to be a lyricist to actually have that sensitivity, but I think that whatever it is that allows me to be a lyricist also allows me to be sensitive to what’s oging on and be able to pick up on subtext. It’s also nice to be working on well-written shows because you don’t have things happen that are contradictory to actual human behavior.

MR: One of your more fascinating projects was Mr. Hollywood Jr. 1947, where the songs were set against post-World War II Los Angeles. That’s a pretty intense concept. If you can come up with projects like that and you can come up with songs that fit in with film or TV, et cetera, you have a real voice. What is it about your projects that make them uniquely Michael Penn?

MP: I have no idea. This is getting very esoteric. I can’t help but have whatever I do be that because I am that, so there you go. Apart from that I don’t know. I have my set of interests and my set of interests get blended with other sets of interests when I’m collaborating on a score. As far as my last record, which was ages ago, that was just something that interested me as a jumping off point. I was actually thinking of my father who served in World War II and came back to Los Angeles, and I imagined myself in that place. It was a strange time. That record was written in 2004 and I had been seeing the country, post 9/11 going into a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. I really do think that a country as a whole has a psychology to it and I think that the traumatized nation that we were just made me think of a traumatized guy coming back from a war and that just kind of lead me to write this record that in my head was kind of like a musical, where it’s almost all dialog between people who are in this situation in that year.

MR: And you’ve also been a producer, working with Aimee Mann, The Wallflowers, Liz Phair… Are you still signing up for those kinds of gigs?

MP: I never actually sought those gigs out, but I really do love producing. When I was growing up, I was as obsessed with George Martin as I was with Lennon and McCartney. I was as obsessed with Brian Wilson as an arranger and record maker as I was with his melodies. To me, the record making process is really interesting and rewarding but to produce somebody else’s music is pretty all-encompassing and I can’t really do anything else while I’m doing that. It’s really getting inside somebody’s head for a while to bring what they want out. It wasn’t really anything I really sought after but I got a call here and there and would do it. But it’s fun, I’d do it again if the opportunity arose.

MR: Your “No Myth” was a pretty big hit. When did you know making records is what you wanted to do?

MP: I abandoned LA for years, and one thing lead to another and I finally got signed and was able to make a record. But I made a record in 1989, which was really kind of the beginning of the end. 1989 was probably the last year that most of the major labels actually put out vinyl. It had started to shift to digital and mine was a story that was similar to a lot of artists’. The guy who was running RCA at the time, Bob Buziak who quit because it was becoming this monolithic corporate model where labgels were merging with giant multi-national corporations, realized that just from that standpoint, things were getting f**ked-up. Anybody that knew anything about computers kind of realized that if the object of the vinyl record was going away, the CD was not going to be something that would keep the genie in its bottle.

It was a very tough period for me right away. After the success of the first album it became tough because we suddenly had a label where nobody who signed me was there and I got shuffled around and it was rough going. But I got to make records and that kept me happy. I’m not somebody who’s that fond of the Kickstarter model mostly because I don’t like the idea of somebody paying me money before I know what I’m doing. The problem is I would need a year to write a record, or at least six months to write a record, not doing anything. I’m not going to ask somebody to pay for me to live for six months while I write a record that I may or may not be happy with. So right now, I’m doing this and I’m having a ball and that’s good by me.

MR: Well that’s the model, though, isn’t it. But even that seems to be fading out. I don’t hear much about the Kickstarter campaigns backing new artists as much. To me, it seemed like the mommy and daddy paradigm to me.

MP: But that paternal aspect of it was always in play with record companies, too, but they were at least professionally doing that. They weren’t people giving their hard-earned money to get something in advance of it being made. That, to me, makes it a little strange. But that’s really where we are, recorded music is now this weird thing that’s straddling between commerce and charity, and that’s just too bad. That’s just sad.

MR: Michael, what advice do you have for new artists?

MP: Do what means something to you. That’s all I can say. If you had asked me that question twenty years ago, which someone did, my answer would have been, “Learn HTML.” At this point, I’m not sure that matters. But I have no answer for what’s going on with the way the business side of things exist now. It just seems completely in flux to me. I don’t think anybody’s got a real clear view of what it can be. It’s ultimately going to be up to the large, multi-national corporations to figure out what kind of model they’re going to create to reimburse people for work. If live music is your thing, that’s great because you’ll always be able to play live. But if recofrded music is your thing, that’s going to get tougher and tougher, I think.

MR: Are you still playing live to satisfy that aspect of your art?

MP: I don’t really have time. I have to sort of be in that mode in a fairly regular way to be able to do that, even if it’s a one-off thing. When I did this song for Girls, I really had to get back in voice and all of that stuff. I wish I had time to do that; hopefully at some point, I will again. I used to do a monthly thing at Largo in Los Angeles. I would love to do something like that again, but right now, I’m too busy, which is a great problem to have.

MR: What’s the next thing you feel like doing?

MP: I just love doing good projects. If something is good and they want me to do music for it, I enjoy that. That’s the extent to which I think about it. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky working with people who are extremely talented. I never thought I would get into this and then Paul Thomas Anderson called me and said he thought I could score stuff. So that sort of set me off on doing it. I’ve been extremely fortunate to work with really creative, really smart people.

MR: Do you still have the acting bug?

MP: Oh, I’ve never had the acting bug. I was in Boogie Nights kicking and screaming. I’ve never had that bug.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne