Sean Lennon Scores Comedic Vampire Flick

Posted on Oct 30th 2009 3:30PM by Mike Ayers
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The cover of Sean Lennon's new record 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead,' depicts him sitting at a piano, dressed up as a vampire. A skull and a woman adorning blood red lipstick are lying across the piano's top, giving off the image that this might be something quite appropriate for the Halloween season. The music is Lennon's official film score to the full-length feature of the same title, which was conceived and directed by his long time friend Jordan Galland. 'Undead' has spent most of this year on the festival circuit and is a meta-type interpretation of Hamlet characters, where a vampire just happens to be involved.

But the music itself isn't scary at all. "The film itself isn't incredibly scary," Lennon tells Spinner. "It's kind of a comedy. In general, I think I wanted to stay away from clichés -- screeching violins. I just envisioned the whole thing as being romantic. The basic essence of the plot is a love story, so I felt the whole thing should be like that. There weren't many scenes that required intensity or scariness."

Lennon says the film was shot on a very tight budget and in "something like 10 days." To that degree, he was forced to write quickly as well. "I wrote a song a day and recorded a song a day for 14 days," he says. "Then it was done and it was just about mixing. The whole thing was fast, really inspired."

The process was simple and different from writing the more pop oriented tunes he did on 2006's 'Friendly Fire.' "I'd never really tried anything of this scope before. It was really fun because there was no pressure from myself to satisfy any standard of expression, personally. I was only trying to satisfy the requirements of the scene."

The sound Lennon achieves is a collection of mostly piano-driven instrumentals that draw from an Eastern European flair at times. Aside from a few horn overdubs, a bass overdub and a guest vocal spot from Kool Keith on the final track, he did everything at home.

"I'd get up in the morning and close my eyes and imagine the scene and write something," he says. "I haven't made pop-song records that way, because I can't think that quickly. With scoring, I had to. There were time constraints."

'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead' is out now on Chimera Music.