Featuring Original Music By The Film’s Writer/Director Paul Dalio

Lakeshore Records will release the TOUCHED WITH FIRE – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack digitally on February 12 and on CD March 18, 2016. The album features original music composed by the film’s writer and director, Paul Dalio.

Touched with Fire stars Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby as two poets with bipolar disorder whose art is fueled by their emotional extremes. When they meet in a treatment facility, their chemistry is instant and intense, driving each other’s mania to new heights. They pursue their passion, which breaks outside the bounds of sanity, swinging them from fantastical highs to tormented lows until they ultimately must choose between sanity and love.  The film also stars Griffin Dunne, Christine Lahti and Bruce Altman. TOUCHED WITH FIRE is produced by Jeremy Alter and Kristina Nikolova and executive produced by Spike Lee.

“I wanted to create the score around the film’s two stylistic elements that to me represented the beauty of bipolar,” says Dalio. “The first being ‘Starry Night,’ humanity’s most beloved image of the sky as seen through a sanitarium window with Van Gogh’s manic eyes, and two, the sun and moon coming together and illuminating each other and in the sky into the image of unsustainable beauty that burns too bright and can only last so long. So I used celestial sounding classical instruments, glockenspiel for Marco, the moon and celesta for Carla, the sun, starting them apart with minor chord melancholy melodies for each and then as they come together, intertwining their instruments and melodies into major chords, adding synths as their mania increases with their love. I made the music in logic using a Midi keyboard with virtual instruments, Komplete, Vienna and East/West. Since I did most of the editing myself over the course of a year before bringing on another editor, I had time to make the music and edit simultaneously. I would bring a Quicktime file of the film into Logic and make the music to match edit and then place the music into Final Cut and re-edit the cut to match the music, which became very organic.”

Paul Dalio began his work on TOUCHED WITH FIRE as the writer-director. However, during the writing of the film his wife insisted that she wanted to learn piano with him. His grandfather was a jazz musician and he always wanted to make music so he eagerly committed to it. Over the course of the lessons he began experimenting with creating melodies. As the music came out of the same emotion he was writing from, he found himself making music for what he was writing until he eventually decided to compose the film’s score.  He used the money budgeted to hire a composer to purchase the virtual instruments, midi keyboard and music software and created the music over the course of the scriptwriting and editing process. Thrilled by the new dimension of creative expression music has brought to his filmmaking, which he is grateful this film gave birth to, he is currently making music for his next feature script and plans to do the same for all the films that follow.

Roadside Attractions Presents TOUCHED WITH FIRE in select theaters (NY and LA) February 12th and nationwide on February 19, 2016.  Lakeshore Records will release the TOUCHED WITH FIRE – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack digitally on February 12 and on CD MARCH 18, 2016.

TRACKLIST

1. Touched with Fire
2. Lunacy
3. Carla’s Theme
4. Marco’s Theme
5. Luni Bin Blues
6. Prayer to the Moon
7. Manic Nights
8. Echoes in the Abyss
9. Meet Me on the Other Side
10. God Grant Us That View
11. Love in the Garden
12. Touched With Both Our Fires
13. This is the Place
14. Missing the Mania
15. Eclipse
16. Mania Days
17. Starry Nights