Badly Drawn Boy’s 2000 debut “The Hour of Bewilderbeast” continues to win over new listeners with its pastoral folk tunes and unfailingly melodic pop songs. Fans have been clamoring for a sequel, and between touring and beginning work on his next proper album, Damon Gough (a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy) was approached to write the soundtrack for “About a Boy,” an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel of the same name. The result is a disc every bit as beguiling and beautiful as “Bewilderbeast,” something Gough intended.
“I’ve always maintained from the start that I wanted to make a record that would stand alone as well as suit the film,” says Gough, speaking from his home in Manchester, England, where he’s waiting for the birth of his second child before heading back to the studio. “When I was doing it, the directors and I sat down to dinner one night. They were really pleased with how it was going, and they said, `Are you sure these aren’t just a bunch of songs left over from your last record?’ They were just amazed that I had come up with the goods so quickly, which was sort of a backhanded flattery, in a way.”
With the novel and a shooting script in hand, Gough began the soundtrack relatively blind, which isn’t all that different from his usual studio strategy.
“I was just winging it, really, trying a few songs and seeing what would fit,” Gough says. “The first few songs I just wrote from the book, nothing too specific. But in the main, I tend to get a feeling when I’m making an album. It just takes on its own feel, and I just try to guess what I need to do.”
“About a Boy” isn’t a huge stylistic leap from “Bewilderbeast,” though Gough did take the filmmakers’ needs into consideration. “I was a lot more involved in the process than I was imagining,” he says in his clipped accent. “I just thought that if I wrote a number of songs of a certain quality that it would be good enough. . . . There’s no real blueprint for me, except to write what I thought made the film better than it was, or exercise emotions that the director was trying to capture. Whenever they wanted something to be funnier, I tried to address that. Whenever they wanted something to be really pulling on the heartstrings, I tried to do a song that tonally gave that feel. We got used to doing three or four variations per scene.”
Happy with the results of his soundtrack sidetrack, Badly Drawn Boy has begun in earnest on his next album, and he says it’s something of a relief to not have “film people” to please..
“It was really experimental,” adds Gough, “not in the literal sense but because I’m just happy laying down an idea, whether it’s half-finished or not. I’ll try anything. There are already about 20 songs recorded for it, which is well over an album, and I’ve got probably another 15 I want to record. . . . But you never know what could happen. I could go back in later this month and record that one song that changes the whole picture. I’ve got four or five songs that, if I get them nailed the first week, could make it all work, and that could be the album. Or I might want to make a huge production, with so many ideas — a triple-album, Frank Zappa-style. Let it all fly.”
