Arrow in the Head Interviews Jammes Luckett (2003)

(ARMX Note: This interview was conducted in 2003 and originally published here on Arrow in the Head on popular media platform JoBlo.com. We’ve republished it in its entirety below because, after a few decades, the formatting is broken on the original site. All copyright to the material belongs to The Arrow and JoBlo.com)

“May” is a great horror film which was recently re-released in a limited amount of theaters and will be getting its full-blown DVD release on July 15, 2003. In my opinion, one of the flick’s main strengths was the gnarly musical score that backed the off-beat, eerie, and at times, gory images perfectly. Arrow had the chance to blab with all-around slick chick Jaye Barnes-Luckett, the kool kat responsible for the film’s score, and here’s what she had to say.

ARROW: What’s your favorite horror movie?

JAYE: It’s a tie between Jack Clayton’s THE INNOCENTS (1960) and the original DIABOLIQUE (1955) by Henri-Georges Clouzot. I love things that are more psychological than visceral; leaving much more to the imagination. When a person is given a little bit of visual information and is allowed to fill in the blanks based upon their own fears and life experiences, it’s much more terrifying and has a longer-lasting effect, for me.

Both of these are very simple, beautiful films that repeatedly kick me in the teeth every time I see them. They both have supernatural elements to them, but most of the horror in each comes from that suspense, created by using real characters in situations that you could potentially find yourself in. Alfred Hitchcock, of course, is a favorite director for the same reason, and he has ties to both of these films – was influenced by one, and had an influence on the other.

And although it’s probably not considered a horror film by most, I think that A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is one of the finest ever made; it still haunts me to this day. Lucky (McKee – the director of May) also got me into Dario Argento a few years ago, also, so I do have an appreciation for gore, especially when it’s done with beauty and with respect, as he tends to do it.

ARROW: What can you tell us about the Alien Tempo Experiment 13?

JAYE: That’s my main music project. Actually, at this point in time, it’s just myself on various instruments, recording mostly rock, pop, and experimental songs. I started out recording on boomboxes, karaoke machines, and 4-tracks, and I played live with the 4-track playing backing tracks I recorded. An electric guitar and my live vocals were the “real-time” elements of the shows.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve added in a drum machine, a bass, and on occasion, keyboards. Recently, a Macintosh G4 with Pro Tools was added into the mix for recording, but I still plan to do a lot with 4-tracks, just because something about it feels more intimate, raw, and personal.

Anyway, ATE 13’s been around “officially” since 1995, but I was writing and recording a lot by myself before that, since I was little. Lucky is one of the only other people that have ever been a member of this particular project. We’ve been in a lot of bands together, and ATE 13 was one of them. He’s always been very excited about it and still is the first person to hear anything when I’m done. He probably has more ATE 13 recordings than I do!

From the beginning, Lucky always wanted some of The Experiment on the MAY soundtrack, so in addition to my score, there’s a lot of ATE 13 songs as well. Some older ATE 13 songs were actually turned into instrumentals and then used as part of the score.

ARROW: Do you have an “official” album out? If so, what’s it called and where can we get it?

JAYE: No official album yet. It’s in the works at this very moment. I have a slew of cassettes that I’ve made over the years that I’ve begun to make available again, and I’m converting some to CD right now for the digital crowd that, sadly, don’t have tape decks anymore. But the first full-blown album… I’m in the process of recording right now.

The CD will be called ‘Vagus (the wandering nerve)’ and eventually, there may be two additional volumes. I plan to offer them through the Go Little Records site, at shows, mail order, and possibly through mom and pop stores, anywhere I can distribute them easily. I have a Vagus journal online, at GLR, which I’m keeping as I’m making this first one, and in the meantime, I’ll have free downloads of some of the rough mixes of the songs, as I finish them. I may put out some other collections of music on CD-R while I’m working on Vagus.

In 1998, a 7” vinyl E.P. came out on Glimmerfed Records, called “Live From The Roller Derby!”, and it was co-produced by A.J. Lambert, Don Fleming (Hole, Sonic Youth), Lucky McKee, and myself. I may have a few more copies of that lying around somewhere.

ARROW: Will the “May” score be available for purchase? Where and when? I gotta get my hands on that slick puppy!

JAYE: I’m curious about the same thing! I’d love to see a soundtrack release, but as with the movie itself, everything lies in Lions Gate’s furry little hands. They’ve released some soundtracks on their own Lions Gate Records imprint that I thought were much more unusual than MAY’s, and we’ve gotten a lot of requests for a MAY soundtrack.

I have a few ideas for making a pretty cool and unique soundtrack album, with the packaging, as well as a small library of 4-track demos of stuff Lucky and I originally considered for the film, and alternate versions of things we actually did end up using, and I also thought that maybe it would be cool if the CD was enhanced with video footage of Lucky and I playing in our old band The Disastronauts. Just jam pack it with good stuff, you know?

But I’m sure the music has to take a back seat to the film, since that’s what Lions Gate’s main business is. We just have to see what happens with the movie. If they release it in more than just a few cities, maybe a record will be warranted and justified, you know? The way I see it is that the people who really want to hear it will have it one way or another, eventually. [As for you, personally, though… no problem at all! I’ll make sure you have some muszak. I’m just glad you like the stuff!]

ARROW: By your filmography, “May” is the only film for which you’ve composed a score thus far. I guess my question is: how did you wind up getting the gig?

JAYE: Funny enough, my first one was the score for the short film of some friends in school, and the production of that 5-minute score was a thousand times more elaborate than what we did for MAY. I’ve never even heard the score with the finished film to this day, though! I came into scoring MAY because Lucky and I have been very much like brother and sister since college, and we strongly believe in the joy of being with your friends and indulging in their every creative whim. It started out that he’d always been the biggest supporter of my music than anybody, and in general, we seemed to ‘get’ each other’s creative thinking right away.

I was studying a little about film myself at the time, but music was my first love. I started teaching him how to play guitar, and soon after, we became songwriting partners in several bands, while I learned a lot about screenwriting from reading his awesome stories. The next year, I played the first versions of the character of “May” in a short B&W Hi-8 video and an 8 mm color short he did in school, as well as a live monologue he directed me in for his Filmic Writing class. I also used to contribute songs, voiceovers, and all kinds of crew work for him and other friends during college.

Anyway, Lucky’s class flipped out over the original video we made, as did I, especially because he’d just improvised the character’s qualities and the story on the fly as we were shooting it, because it was due for class the next day, and he hadn’t thought of anything previously! The response was so good that I guess that prompted him to go ahead and write a full script about it. I was one of the first to read it and of course, fell in love with it immediately. He told me back then that if he ever got to make MAY into a feature film, he wanted me to do the music for it. Five or six years later, that opportunity came, and he kept his word. Many of the other key crew members were also longtime friends of ours that worked with us on a lot of previous projects.

With Lucky and I in particular, we’ve never viewed the other as a threat, competition, or a source of envy, but instead as someone to learn from and who would share in your excitement about an idea. We both know our strengths and weaknesses, and our creative partnership is amazing for it; a great level of give and take on both ends. We are truly one another’s biggest fan. I’m honored to have been one of the few folks who got to come full circle with MAY, from start to finish. When you consistently and genuinely believe in your friends and family, you get to share the experience of all kinds of great things together. MAY was only one of those things.

ARROW: What were the hardest aspects for you, as an artist, when it came to scoring your first motion picture?

JAYE: Actually, the full answer to this question alone would probably justify an entire hilarious and shocking episode of E! True Hollywood Story. In a nutshell, there just wasn’t the time or money to do everything we wanted to do. Despite all the years and months of preparation and planning Lucky and I had done for the soundtrack – we were extremely confident amongst ourselves that we had never heard a score like the one we had planned to do – the producers threw us a curve ball in the midst of post-production. The interference cost us two or three months of valuable time, and by the time everything was right again, they no longer had a music budget to give me access to upfront.

Lucky and I had to throw all of our plans out and start from scratch with a mere remaining period of 6 days (that’s s-i-x, folks!) and no money… to recompile, prepare, record, mix, and deliver the entire soundtrack because the film was going to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival within a week or so from then. Worse yet, was that those 6 days fell over the holidays, when hardly anyone is around to do any kind of business dealings, in the first place, let alone on such short notice. This included a friend of ours who is an experienced Music Supervisor and who was going to take care of all the clearances.

Literally overnight, I became a Music Supervisor and assistant Music Editor, in addition to Composer. (I also had a regular full-time day job to juggle at the time, with long hours and moderate pay.) I had no choice but to dive in and learn as I went along, and now, I can do any combination of those jobs, and it seems very natural for me.

With the time restrictions on the film, there are some rough spots in my own material; stray notes here and there and production quality that I would have liked to have been able to improve upon, but in the context of it being a 6-day affair and my first full-blown experience in any of these jobs especially, I feel very proud of what we were able to do with what we had. With Lucky’s support, I still got to have a great amount of freedom and trust with what I was doing even under the crunch of time. And overall, I was free to go to the set as often as I was able to, worked with the art department a little bit, met some great people, and got to show a whole other side of myself that probably no one except for Lucky ever imagined me having, so how could I complain, really? I don’t think it was the typical experience of any composer, even on an indie flick, so I feel fortunate in many ways that this was my first big one and this is the way it went down. I’d do it over in a heartbeat. My resume’ is small, but my experience is vast, just from this one project. I’m now ready for anything. Bring it on!

ARROW: Admittedly, your kick-ass “May” score had some very Danny Elfman-like rings to it. Would you say the man was or is an inspiration?

JAYE: It’s funny you bring up Danny Elfman, because a reviewer recently gave the MAY score an “F” rating, because he said it was “typically Elfman-esque”. It made me pretty happy, excited, and annoyed at the same time, because that was the entire summary of the musical part of his review. I personally think Elfman is great, and I don’t see how anything remotely akin to it could be seen as warranting the lowest rating possible, even if it were a total hack doing the job.

And even so, the pieces of mine that are drawing those comparisons stem from something I wrote as a teenager that Lucky later heard and wanted to use in MAY. Danny Elfman is an inspiration, because his scores are some of my favorites, and I also grew up loving Oingo Boingo, and was pretty excited that this rock/pop guy became this huge accidental film composer. I never intended for there to be an resemblance to his work, though, because again, I was a college freshman when I wrote the stuff that makes people think of him. In truth, for the MAY score, I was inspired more by Bernard Herrmann and classical Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. And I’m mainly a self-taught, play-by-ear-and-feeling type of girl that started writing music because of people like The Beatles and The Smiths.

Another thing to look at, is the fact that I see MAY as a dark fairytale. Lucky has been compared to Tim Burton because of that same thing, the specific way he treated material that is an unusual combination and tone of horror, fantasy, comedy, and emotional drama. The films and the respective scores are almost whimsical, with a heavy touch of darkness to them, and I feel that some of the comparisons by most people may stem from that. The classical part of my score is what has that type of feeling; it’s only one part of the entire score.

In actuality, some of my scoring in this film is done in a more rock, pop, and punk sort of way, with electric guitars and a drum machine, with maybe a keyboard here and there. Some of the pieces preexisted as songs originally, but were shortened, broken down with lyrics removed, and then reassembled as score to specific movements or shots in the film. Other score sections borrow from ATE 13 song melodies, or otherwise are very pop, punk, rock, or whatever themselves, so they do blend in with the rest of the soundtrack a lot more. If you watch some of those parts carefully, you might be able to see some of the visual markers that I was playing to. I think it’s kinda cool, actually, that people don’t notice it blatantly. From the comments that I get often about the music really fitting the movie, I think they get it subconsciously.

I always felt the score itself was unusual, because it wasn’t just classical music that was being used to underscore the picture. That’s why I didn’t understand the Elfman comparisons before, because I felt I was approaching this in a totally different way than he does. But it now seems clear that people are left thinking that only a part of the score was the entire score. It doesn’t matter really if people don’t make those distinctions.

The main idea was to have all these different parts that made a cohesive whole, and fit the tone and purpose of the movie, as well. I feel we accomplished it, so what more could we ask for? And hey – if Danny Elfman’s what my first real score is compared to, I’m not gonna complain. (laughing) We got nominated for a music award in Spain and reportedly came in second only to Sonic Youth. I consider it a privilege if this is the company we’re included in.

ARROW: Did you have a say in any of the potent punk/rock bands that wound up contributing to the film? The Breeders, The Kelly Deal 6000…GREAT STUFF!

JAYE: Yes, indeed. The Breeders were one of the bands that Lucky and I bonded over when we first met, and we are both mutually huge Amps, Pixies, and Kelley Deal 6000 fans. Kim and Kelley Deal are just the coolest, and I think it’s a mission that both of us have to make sure other people know it. It feels good to know that a few more people have either finally discovered them or gotten more heavily into them as a result of watching MAY. I get emails about it all the time. Nirvana is another one that we bonded over and was a huge influence on us both.

Originally, we pretty much knew, even in our dreamy school days, that Breeders and Nirvana were necessary to the movie. Well… even if I had not agreed, while slobbering over the thought, Lucky would have chosen those two bands anyway, along with some of my own stuff. But it became apparent very early into the production of MAY that there were huge publishing rights problems with Nirvana’s music, and we probably couldn’t get the rights to anything. We still had hope for The Breeders, though. And somewhere in the middle of production, we both realized it was only natural to use songs by The Kelley Deal 6000, who both of us owned CDs by. That band is no more, and Kelley’s back in The Breeders now… we were anxious for them to release their third record, so it was impossible to forget paying tribute to them in our own way.

Outside of the ATE 13 stuff, which you hear in many different forms in the movie, Lucky and I then started from scratch with our record collections once the crunch period hit. He trusted me to pick specific songs, and we then sat down and walked through the film together, spotting everything. Most of the music in the film comes from people who are friends and acquaintances, awesome musicians and people. We happened to have their CDs and tapes when we needed them, the songs fit perfectly, and they were reliable enough to respond to my last-minute call/email over the holidays.

We were very fortunate to have things come together as they did. I was so afraid that Lions Gate was going to replace all of the music with inappropriate Top 40 big label stuff when they bought the movie, but they didn’t. It’s all diverse and yet all fits together perfectly, making for a really atypical soundtrack. It’s very cool that people have been going nuts over the music. Now about that soundtrack album…

ARROW: You attended a Fango convention in August 2002 with the “May” cast and crew. What would you say was the highlight of the event?

JAYE: The best feeling from that convention, for me, came from witnessing Lucky meeting George A. Romero. I didn’t meet the man personally, but when I found out he was going to be there, all I wanted was for Lucky to meet him… because he’d been such a big influence… And it happened in a beautiful way, just two guys shooting the beans.

Just seeing Mr. Romero standing there a few feet from me was an honor to begin with. I kept giving Lucky a hard time, because earlier, he interfered with me buying batteries for my camera before the convention. I reminded him, “That was cool that you met George Romero. Sure would have been nice to capture it on film… but oh yeah, that’s right… I don’t have any batteries for the camera.” Earlier, we’d met Stuart Gordon, and also Bill Moseley who played Chop Top in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2.

The funniest one was that for the MAY event, Tony Timpone, the head of Fango, was a very kind and cheerful man, but couldn’t remember my name for the life of him and kept referring to me by the name of “Joyce”, which I thought was hilarious, because he’d been corrected a few times by some people. A couple of times he said, “Thank you to Lucky McKee, Angela Bettis, Anna Faris, Nicole Hiltz, and… … …the composer!” Once, he even referred to me as “and…… friend!”. It didn’t matter really, because when you’re standing there with Anna Faris, I don’t think boys care much about anything else anyway. They wouldn’t have known if Tony had called me a porn-loving Velociraptor. Tony wouldn’t have known if I told him that’s what my name was. (laughing)

A few people recognized Angela from other work, but the rest of us were pretty foreign to the crowd. None of the trailers shown at The Weekend of Horrors – or since – had any of my music in it, so no one knew what the hell I did, let alone my actual name …and there I was sitting next to Anna Faris giving autographs. People were asking me how to break into showbizness, when my friends and I were still struggling to pay our rent and wondering when our movie was coming out, and I was taking the city bus to my day job the very next morning. The difference between reality and what is perceived was pretty damned clear and I’m glad I had that in me to see.

So I said fuck it and decided to have some fun, since my presence was otherwise pointless and I looked like a huge dorkfin sitting there. I made my main purpose to offer my photo-taking services to those who really wanted to be in a picture with Anna and Angela, but had no one else to take the picture for them. I was stoked to be able to do that. It just meant more to me and felt more like me to help some kid take that picture home for his collection, then to be posing like I was “somebody”, when I clearly was not. I was just the music chick, not “The Hot Chick”. (laughing)

ARROW: When you want to hang back…what CDs enter your player?

JAYE: Ah, that could go on for days on end. It’s always going. I think everyone who knows me would agree that I have one of the wildest collections of music. I’ll make a mixed tape or CD that might have show tunes, hip hop, new wave, metal, pop, classical, old country, old jazz, and Indian ragas, back to back.

My old standbys though, are things like The Beatles, Nirvana, Bjork, Modest Mussorgsky, Sonic Youth, Mozart, The Breeders/Amps, Pixies, Babes In Toyland, Portishead, Juliana Hatfield, Billie Holiday, The Police, The Doors, Roth-era Van Halen, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, and my friend Eriq’s band Parae. Lucky doesn’t have anything on CD right now, but sometimes I put in old tapes of his. Put any of those in a grab bag, pull one out, and I’m all set, no matter what mood I’m in.

ARROW: What’s next on your plate touring-wise or film biz wise?

JAYE: I would love, love, love to tour, but still don’t have the resources to at the moment. But I’ve recently started playing shows in Los Angeles again, now that my schedule’s a bit more free. I also don’t have a day job anymore, and have better equipment and resources than I did at the start of MAY, so I’m working on music full-time, trying to get Go Little Records moving further ahead.

Alien Tempo Experiment 13 and GLR are my main priorities as an artist, but as far as soundtracks go, MAY’s been very good for me, as it’s brought ATE 13 more attention, as well as myself as a composer, songwriter, and publisher. I’ve been asked to contribute to some other projects. I’d be content with just recording and releasing my albums, and writing songs for other people, but I’ve found that I enjoy scoring and supervision as well. It’s a whole different creative process and outlet for me, and if that helps to pave the way for my other projects, then I am all for it. I’ve already learned so much from MAY, and I think it’s really unlocked another side of myself creatively, and it’s only getting better. We all really have just gotten warmed up.

I’d like to thank Jaye for kicking it on the site. I’m looking forward to her upcoming record, the MAY score, and hopefully more badass film scores along the way. Keep ‘em coming, Jaye!