It’s been a decade since John Carpenter recorded the material that would become Lost Themes, his debut album of non-film music and the opening salvo in one of Hollywood’s great second acts. Those vibrant, synth-driven songs, made in collaboration with his son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies, kickstarted a musical renaissance for the pioneering composer and director. In the years since, Carpenter, Carpenter, and Davies have released close to a dozen musical projects, including a growing library of studio albums and the scores for David Gordon Green’s trilogy of Halloween reboots. With John Carpenter's Lost Themes IV: Noir, they’ve struck gold again, this time mining the rich history of the film noir genre for inspiration.
“Sandy [King, John’s wife and producer] had given John a book for Christmas, of pictures from noir films, all stills from that era,” Davies says of the lightbulb moment for Lost Themes IV. “I was looking through it, and I thought, ‘I like that imagery, and what those titles make me think of. What if we loosely based it around that? What if the titles were of some of John’s favorite noir films?’”
From that seed, the music the trio was working on began to shape itself into an album. Since the first Lost Themes, John has referred to these compositions as “soundtracks for the movies in your mind.” On the fourth installment in the series, those movies are noirs. You can hear the death-stalked gait of the private eye in the skittering electronics of “He Walks by Night,” just as you can feel the steely gaze of the femme fatale in the snarl of electric guitar that introduces “Last Rites.” The lead single and scene-setting album opener “My Name Is Death” feels like new territory for Carpenter. A driving, almost punkish bassline initiates the action, before being joined by washes of atmospheric synth, pulsing drum machine, and, at the song’s climax, a smoldering guitar solo. If the goal of the Lost Themes project is to create music that’s as cinematic as anything we can picture in our heads, “My Name Is Death” might be the group’s most successful effort yet.
Like the film genre they were influenced by, what makes these songs “noirish” is sometimes slippery and hard to define, and not merely reducible to a collection of tropes. The scores for the great American noir pictures were largely orchestral, while the Carpenters and Davies work off a sturdy synth-and-guitar backbone. The noir quality, then, is something you understand instinctively when you hear it. “Some of the music is heavy guitar riffs, which is not in old noir films,” Davies notes. “But somehow, it’s connected in an emotional way.”
The song titles, as Davies hoped, mostly riff on John’s personal film noir canon. The director behind Halloween and The Thing is, as one might expect, a true cinephile, and the track list for Lost Themes IV could double as a watch list for budding film fanatics.
“The greatest is Out of the Past, with Mitchum,” John says without hesitation when asked for his favorite noir. That gets a sly nod on the eerie “Beyond the Gallows”—Out of the Past was also released as Build My Gallows High. Norman Foster’s Kiss the Blood Off My Hands becomes “Kiss the Blood Off My Fingers” here, while the horror-noir Night Has a Thousand Eyes transforms into the album’s moody closing track, “Shadows Have a Thousand Eyes.” A lifelong Howard Hawks devotee, John also shouted out The Big Sleep, which isn’t directly namechecked but seems to loom over the whole project. (Davies is partial to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, while Cody, according to his father, “rejects motion pictures totally.” His eagle-eyed contributions to a film score they were working on that afternoon beg to differ.)
A recurring theme in talking about the Lost Themes IV process was how easy, intuitive, and natural it felt. That’s owing not just to the decade that this trio has been recording music for public consumption. Their collaboration dates all the way back to the younger Carpenter and Davies’ childhood. The two of them jammed constantly, and they cut their teeth in high-school rock bands together. (“I just listened and appreciated,” John says.) It helped that they grew up in a musical environment. Daniel’s dad is the Kinks’ Dave Davies, and he would pop by the L.A. studio – the same one the Lost Themes records are made in today – to jam, or to perform at wrap parties for John’s films. Steve Buscemi was an occasional guest drummer, and on one memorable night, Hammer Horror composer James Bernard stopped by to show the youngsters how he wrote his Dracula themes.
“We were always watching movies and talking about music,” Davies says of his and Cody’s shared childhood. “How does music work in movies? Why is a movie scary? What is that movie about? What is the underlying theme? We were always talking about that kind of stuff, all the time.”
By the time they got together to make the first Lost Themes, the Carpenters and Davies were, at least informally, decades deep into their collaboration. That album helped formalize a way of working that has largely gone unchanged 10 years later. “It’s always been pretty much the same,” John says. “We all jump in. We all have ideas. Sometimes the ideas don’t work. Sometimes they do. But it’s a democracy, in that sense. It’s a sense of, ‘Oh, I don’t like that. Let’s do it again.’ We usually police ourselves. We usually decide whether our performances are no good. And then we just do it.”
“We’re all bringing something different,” Davies adds. “I think you’ve got to let that person express that idea, and then, if it’s not working, then we all kind of know it’s not working. But it’s really rare that that even happens.”
That kind of free-flowing chemistry means Lost Themes IV: Noir runs like a well-oiled machine—the 1951 Jaguar XK120 Roadster from Kiss Me Deadly, perhaps, or the 1958 Plymouth Fury from John’s own Christine. It’s a chemistry that’s helped power one of the most productive stretches of John’s creative life, and Noir proves that it’s nowhere near done yielding brilliant results.
“This is who we are, I think,” John summarizes. “Daniel’s the adventurer. He pushes for new sounds, new directions. He tries things that I haven’t thought of. He’s a lot more daring than I am, and he enriches the whole thing. Cody’s the musician. He’s a savant at music. He understands music. We depend on him to rescue us.”
And what about John’s contribution? With characteristic understatement, he concludes: “I’m the experience. I’ve done music for movies before.”
John Carpenter's Lost Themes IV: Noir will be released May 3rd thanks to Sacred Bones Records.
