Belle And Sebastian - Storytelling

THIS record features music written for the Todd Solondz movie 'Storytellling'. As some of the group admired Mr Solondz's work in the past, when he expressed the desire for us to write some music for his new film we immediately made our way to New York City armed with high hopes, dreams of artistic endeavour and a copy of the 'Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid' soundtrack.

However, once esconced in the process of film scoring not only our fate but our true nature seemed to emerge. Soon we were behaving like veteran hacks composing seventies style sit com jingles on demand and churning out songs with lyrics referring to the action of the plot, a bit like the Colonel's staff songwriters in the Sixties who hacked out all those appalling Elvis Presley soundtracks (althought to be fair everyone of those contained a classis e.g. 'Rock A Hula Baby' on 'Blue Hawaii' but this is hardly the place for a critique of the King).

So there we were, yoked up to the TV monitor with them big American Movie people cracking the whip. But to be honest this was no bad thing and working within the framework of a collaborative endeavour is incredibly satisfying even if the pleasure is sometimes garnished with the occassional disappointment e.g. the movie consisted of two halves and originally we were commissed to write the second half of the movie, then at some point were were asked to do the whole thing (whoopee) but then later on still we found ourselves back to just the second half. Oh well, too many tunes and not enough celluloid time. Fair enough in my opinion; the Director has got to get his vision down after all. Anyway, as a result, not eveyrthing got used.

'Fiction' and its variations including 'Freak' were written for the first half of the movie and are included in extended form for your listening pleasure. We had three goes at writing a song for the finishing credits, each on focusing on a different character in the film. These were 'Wandering Alone', which refers to aspects of Consuelo's imagined family history, 'Big John Shaft', which was written as an ode to Todd himself (guess which one he picked?).

'Black and White Unite' is not so much representative of the movie but more that bittersweet, slightly decaying summer feeling in the air when we were putting this record together (the tune however is based on the leftover theme from the film). 'I Don't Want To Play Football' comes from the second half although the scene was deleted in the final cut. All the other tunes are featured in some form and are adapted here for the LP format.

And that's that. The film has been released, the reviews have been writtenn, and Todd has moved on to pastures new. This record contains parts and fragments of the story he came to tell but if there is a story on this record, it should be regarded primarily as our own. I suppose it's time for the group to be moving on also, although in leaving I have to be honest in say that in my view 'Storytelling' is a great film and that this is a cracking record, maybe the best one we've made in a while but look... it's just my opinion and... what do I know?

Stevie, FEB 2002