Featuring Original Music By Daniel Hart
Lakeshore Records will release the digitally on November 27, 2015. The album features original music by Daniel Hart (AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS, THE SIDEWAYS LIGHT).
“Director Sam Esmail and I had a couple long conversations before the scoring process began, about what he was looking for musically for COMET,” said Hart. “Sam had a really wide range of musical ideas he thought important to telling the story, and I feel like a big part of my job was to take Sam’s incredibly diverse palette and make it into something cohesive. Representing all of Sam’s musical influences related to COMET was a huge challenge for me, but I’m really proud of the way this score turned out.”
Justin Long and Emmy Rossum are star-crossed lovers whose relationship blooms and unravels over the course of six years in this mysterious, dazzlingly original romance. When a chance encounter brings together the cynical Dell (Long) and the quick-witted Kimberly (Rossum), the stage is set for a tempestuous love affair that unfolds like a puzzle. As the film zigzags back and forth in time—from a meteor shower in LA, to an encounter in a Paris hotel room, to a fateful phone call—an unforgettable portrait of a relationship emerges. Sumptuously shot and boasting incredible chemistry between the leads, COMET is a one-of-a-kind cosmic love story.
“With the title theme, I was following a very specific melody that felt to me like a real representation of bittersweet longing, of unfinished love,” said Hart. “It was one of the very first musical ideas I had related to the film, and I’m glad it got to stay, and play a prominent part in the score.”
There are a few themes in COMET that have special significance to the composer. “There’s a piece, which ended up in the film, that is about two friends of mine,” Hard explained. “In the film, it plays underneath Kimberly’s monologue about time, while she’s eating Chinese food in their Parisian hotel room. It’s a solo piano piece called ‘Jill and Brian’, friends of mine who got married while I was scoring COMET. I gave this piece to them as their wedding gift….Sadly, Brian also passed away during the scoring of COMET, as he had been diagnosed with fairly aggressive cancer about a year before. And to that end, everything Kim says in that scene about wanting to stop time, about wanting life to be more like a painting, well, it certainly captured a lot of how I was feeling then, wishing I had more time with Brian before he was gone.”
The film also gave Hart the opportunity to explore other genres and expand his creativity. He composed music to go along with the old educational science films showing at the cemetery before the meteor shower. He said, “That was the most fun for me. Similar to dissecting old French ballads, which I did for the film, I was able to watch several NASA films from the 60s and 70s to get a feel for the type of music in them. They were almost always orchestral, and felt to me like they wanted to create the sense of wonder, mystery and strangeness that we associate with outer space, space exploration, other worlds, STAR TREK, etc. Piecing together all the science film music from COMET in preparation for the soundtrack was an absolute blast (pun intended)!”
Daniel Hart is a multi-instrumental composer and performer whose parents started him on the violin just shy of his third birthday. Countless lessons were followed by post-college forays into blues and jazz from Texas to New York, and then a decade of touring with bands from The Polyphonic Spree to St. Vincent to his own projects. Somewhere in the middle there were several trips to India and China to study eastern classical traditions; to perform and to have adventures. Daniel settled in Dallas in 2010, where he started writing music for film, and where he delved into the 70s RnB, early 90s hip-hop and post-rock that would inform his latest band and self-titled album, Dark Rooms.
A talented film composers, Daniel Hart’s previous work include ST. NICK, AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS, THE SIDEWAYS LIGHT, RETURN TO SENDER, TUMBLEDOWN and the documentary UNCERTAIN. His short feature works includes PIONEER, DIG, RESPITE and THE GIRLFRIEND GAME. Upcoming project are EATING ANIMALS, LOST IN THE SUN and HALF THE PERFECT WORLD.
IFC Films presents COMET now available On Demand. The COMET – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack will be available digitally on November 27, 2015.
TRACKLIST
1. This Is Not a Dream
2. Just Being a Negative Narcissus
3. Theme From Comet
4. The Beginning of the End Really
5. Science Is Fun Is For Lovers
6. Five Minutes From Now
7. Going Up North
8. FMK
9. Memorizing Phone Numbers
10. Jill n Brian
11. Timeless Life Painting
12. Love More
13. Your Favorite Word
14. Ma Petite Libellule
15. The Sixth Sense
16. Goggles
17. You Almost Had Me
18. Part Of That Strange Dream
19. I Needed You In This Life
20. Dell n Kimberly
