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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Jake Dilley: A troubadour for Oompa Loompas
Wednesday 21 February @ 17:07:04 |
  by ANDREA MYERS
There are a few initiations every college freshman must endure, certain rites of passage on the way to adulthood. There’s the first time you have to wash your own underwear, the first time you drink beer out of a funnel attached to a tube and, perhaps most importantly, the first time someone convinces you that if you watch “The Wizard of Oz” while playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, the music and the imagery, like, totally line up together, man. For Jake Dilley, who was a freshman at the University of Iowa in 2002 when he first witnessed the Oz/Floyd amalgam, the experience struck a chord in him much deeper than the usual stoned-out whoa, and it sparked an idea for a project that he would eventually pursue himself.
“I loved it,” he says excitedly, over a cup of coffee in Uptown. “I wanted to do something like that.”
Dilley, a bespectacled early twentysomething with a soft smile, shaggy hair and kind eyes, graduated last year with a degree in Studio Art and is now putting the finishing touches on his second set of songs written to accompany a film; for his Honors project last year, Dilley composed and recorded an album of tunes that sync up with a segment of the original “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” This Friday he will debut his newest project: songs written for the 1957 French film “The Red Balloon.”
“It’s a constant battle, and that’s what I like about it,” Dilley explains, when asked why he is drawn to crafting music for movies. “I sit down with a metronome while I watch the movie, and kind of let it direct me, and I count along with the metronome. I have an idea in my head that I think will fit appropriately, and then it’s about trying to fit an idea to the metronome. It’s a lot of counting and a lot of odd time signatures.” The technical labor pays off for Dilley in the long run, though, and he says that he is drawn to movie songwriting because it places the “focus more on what I’m actually saying as opposed to how I’m saying it or when I’m saying it.”
What is most surprising about Dilley’s work is that not only can the music be synchronized to the changing scenery of a film, but that his songs are substantial enough to stand on their own as individual tracks. His first record, The Color Pharmacy, was similar to what you might expect from a collection of songs meant to serenade scenes of bursting colors, Oompa Loompas and chocolate rivers. Songs transitioned from soft and lovely pop to full-on psychedelic rock, and they could blend in just as easily with late Beatles material and the Flaming Lips as with a dark theater under Gene Wilder’s watchful gaze. Dilley’s newest record, The Red Balloon, is more subdued and has more contemplative moments that allow his lyrical passages to stand out from the soundscape.
 Throughout the disc there is a sense that Dilley is struggling with the greater meaning behind life’s moments. “Looking for the answers and questioning the answers I get,” he sings in “Holes,” and the melody is layered over a drawn out piano and string part that seems tailor-made for a scene in, um, a movie. Whereas the structure of a film might constrict some songwriters’ creativity, Dilley uses film as a canvas to create his own art. In crafting a soundtrack, Dilley writes and records the parts for each instrument himself, and he says he enjoys being “able to have some freedom, and to know that not every instrument has to be playing all the time. You can wait the whole song to bring in the bass or the drums if you want to do that for dramatic effect ... Playing in a band, a band member might just sit there for a while, and it’s hard to get people excited to wait for moments.”
And each moment of Dilley’s music is meticulously crafted to suit both the film and his feeling as he watches a particular scene. Both the “Wonka” project and “The Red Balloon” took hours upon hours of planning, watching film and diligently counting the beats of his metronome. “When I try to finish a project I do little else. It’s 12 hours a day ... I started working on [The Red Balloon] shortly after I got done with the last one, so I think I’ve been working on it nine months or so. It’s like a baby,” he says, laughing. In addition to playing the full score and screening the original film, Friday’s performance will feature some of Dilley’s own video clips and imagery on separate screens, creating a full audio-visual explosion.
So how does Dilley stay motivated to work on projects of such epic proportion? “If I didn’t do it, I’d be unhappy,” he says, with a lovestruck glimmer in his eye. “I can tell a difference in my mood when I don’t do any writing or recording for a few days. It doesn’t feel right. I have to be doing it. And I guess that’s good for me to know; if I’m willing to do it for nothing and that’s good enough, then I’ll be able to do it my whole life, even if nothing else ever changes ... It couldn’t be any other way.” ||
Jake Dilley and the Color Pharmacy will premiere “The Red Balloon” this Fri., Feb. 23 at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. 9:30 p.m. $8 advance/$10 door. For tickets and more information: 612-825-8949 or bryantlakebowl.com. For more info on Jake Dilley, check out his MySpace page at myspace.com/jakedilley.
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