Film on the Radio

28 Jan 2020

Sia – Transcript

CARLA: Hello and welcome, I’m Carla Donnelly and this is Film on the Radio – your weekly deep dive into the scores and soundtracks of the films you love. Thanks to This Australian Life for bringing us in with their intimate stories from our community. I really appreciate the work that you do! This week we’re going to do something a little bit different and cover the work of an artist over many different films, instead of just a single film. I’ve been working really hard this season to highlight female musicians in soundtrack and film scoring… and one of the most successful is our very own, Sia Furler.

Her Twitter bio is a pithy single sentence “I belong in diapers” and she apparently answer the phone “Squiddly-diddly-doo!”. Most of us now know that eccentric character that is hidden behind the half-black, half-blonde giant wig… but a lot of us over the age of 35 would remember her big break out moment – the song “Breathe Me” in the finale of Six Feet Under.

I knew as soon as I picked Sia for this episode it would be the first song I played. Talk about cultural canon, I almost felt over the top thinking about how much that show changed everything how in love we all were with the Fishers. It felt almost unreal in its intensity… But no… this moment was so pivotal, culturally and for Si,a that Vice has written an entire article on it. Here’s an excerpt that sums up my feelings so perfectly, especially about how music and imagery paired together can be so powerful:

“The show led a quiet revolution in terms of how music was used in television. At the turn of the century, the opening sequence was just beginning to find its way as a distinct artform. Most opening sequences were simply montages of faces, promoting the characters and actors who played them. More “serious” shows like Homicide and The Sopranos avoided this cliché, but their sequences were handheld affairs, a vérité of shakiness that set a distinct tone.

Six Feet Under gave us something different. Its curated opening was polished and deliberate, artistic and earnest. No fast cuts of life on the streets here: in studio conditions, hands pull symbolically apart, flowers wither and die in fast motion. All these images set to a theme dripping in prestige, and it’s that music that immediately set this show apart from the rest.

The theme was composed by the Oscar-nominated Thomas Newman, who was coming off the success of American Beauty, a feature film written by Six Feet Under’s creator, Alan Ball. The music was bold and Brechtian, a melody that led the images. The orchestral strains, shifting and modulating, were addictive and joyous, and doubtless contributed significantly to the success of the show. Before YouTube allowed for the instantaneous delivery of your favourite opening sequences, you had to wait a week to see Six Feet Under’s phenomenal intro. And nobody who loved the show would dare come in late and miss that opening.

The influence of Six Feet Under’s opening was undeniable and immediately apparent. There was Showtime’s Huff, essentially a Six Feet Under tribute act, but also many successfully-rendered sequences that were less overt about their inspiration: Carnivale, True Detective, The Crown, Daredevil and Westworld. Abstract symbolism has become the norm for opening sequences, now works of art unto themselves, created by a burgeoning generation of Saul Basses.

Five years later, the show that had opened with one of the most striking pieces of theme music ever, concluded with one of the great closing sequences of all time. As Sia begins to sing, Claire begins to sob, and—knowing what’s to come—so do we.

Her road trip is intercut with glimpses of the future. Birthdays and weddings and days of no particular note. Everyone greys. Lovers reunite. There’s a dreamlike quality to the cinematography, and it’s unclear if we’re witnessing the actual future or Claire’s dream of it.

Each episode of Six Feet Under began with a death, most often that of someone the family was to perform a funeral service for. Each death accompanied by a card that indicated the closure of a life: 1957-2004. The final sequence provided such cards for each of the main characters as they pass away either peacefully or violently, often at unexpected moments, the banal moments as common as the profound ones.

It’s a finale that lands hard, not just because of the connection we feel to these characters, but due to the perfect choice of music.

At the time, Sia had been disappointed with the sales of Colour the Small One, the album on which ““Breathe Me”” first appeared. Its inclusion at such a critical and unforgettable moment of Six Feet Under meant she was indelibly linked to the biggest moment from one of television’s most popular dramas, and the success she’d sought finally arrived.

Not all of Sia’s success can be attributed to the show, but it served as a flashpoint that she capitalised on well. Even though Six Feet Under has slipped a little from public consciousness—possibly due to the fact that its episodes are not as “fun” to return to in isolation, and that bingeing this particular show takes something of an emotional toll—its legacy remains.

The tagline of Six Feet Under’s final season was the existentially poignant “Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.” As Sia’s ““Breathe Me”” ramps up over one of the best montages in television history, the show assures that it’s okay to lean into those feelings.”

CARLA: So grab some tissues and settle in for “Breathe Me”, and I’ll also play a track from the Australian film “Lion” called “Never Give Up”. You’re on Joy.

MUSIC: “Breathe Me” – Sia, “Never Give Up” – Sia

CARLA: You’re on Joy, and this is Film on the Radio. Those tracks were “Breathe Me” and “Never Give Up” by Sia, and this is the artist we are profiling today.

To continue on with the history “Breathe Me” becoming the Six Feet Under season finale song, I promise I won’t bang on much more about it but truly its one of the most iconic music and image moments of the last 20 years… this is taken from an oral history of the death montage in Six Feet Under as reported in Vulture:

“Ball: I went up to Lake Arrowhead and took a couple of my dogs with me — I sort of shut myself in. I was crying when I was writing that ending. The dogs were looking at me like, What? What did we do? What’s wrong? I was aware that I was writing something very cinematic. There’s no dialogue, it’s all about image. It had to be a montage. And we had to find precisely the right song.

Gary Calamar (music supervisor): We chose the Sia song for the fifth-season promo. Alan did tell me it might lead to what’s going to happen in the final episode, but he was very vague about it. The direction he gave was, “They’re driving to the final journey of life, for the characters and for the show.” He wanted something hopeful and wistful, but with a certain feel that they’re searching for something.

Ball: Gary brought in eight or nine songs for us to listen to.

Calamar: I think I gave him a CD. I didn’t actually sit with him. But one interesting thing is, we had Arcade Fire write a song for that promo. This was when Arcade Fire was a little more open to things like that. They wrote a song called “Cold Wind,” which we actually got a little late or it might have been in that promo.

Ball: There was another one by Iron & Wine. It wasn’t quite as poetic or as poignant as the Sia song was. I can’t remember any of the others. When I heard “Breathe Me”, I was like, “Okay, that’s it. That’s the one.”

Calamar: I had been playing it on my radio show for a while — I’m a radio DJ in Los Angeles, at KCRW. It never really became a hit, obviously, but I played it on my nighttime show often. Thomas [Golubic, the co-music-supervisor] and I went to see [Sia] play at the Hotel Café here in town, soon after the whole thing hit, and from the stage, she goes, “I understand Gary and Thomas are in the audience tonight … I’ll have to give those guys a blow job” [laughs]. I think she knows it was her big break. I’ve been praised for it throughout my career since then, too: “Oh, that was the best use of a song on a TV show!” I jokingly say I’m going to have it playing out of my tombstone when I’m dead.

Lauren Ambrose (Claire Fisher): I cry when I hear the song. It’s Pavlovian. If it comes on when I’m at yoga or something, I’ll cry. I’m always worried people will notice and be like, Oh, is that the girl from the show? But I live in the woods in the middle of nowhere.

Hall: I just associate it with an image. I see Claire backlit by the sun, driving, right on the crest of crying. It’s that image — boom — it sweeps into me.

Ball: I wrote the scene to fit that song, with that music in mind. I didn’t, like, time out each shot to the song, because you can’t do that. But every shot was pretty specific. It’s not like we shot tons and tons of film and whittled it down to these seven minutes. We knew what we wanted those seven minutes to be.

Michael Ruscio (editor): That was a lot of the challenge. A lot of times in editing people say, “Oh, we had 400,000 feet of film” or “We had 300 shots” — and that’s a challenge. It’s also a challenge when you don’t have that much.

Ball: I knew I wanted the wheels on Claire’s Prius to start turning right at the moment the music sort of amps up, which was a reference to the gurney wheels turning in the title sequence.

Ruscio: Certain things like that were storyboarded. And there were certain things that I wanted to preserve for specific areas of the piece. I love the part at Ruth’s funeral where Claire sees [her ex-boyfriend] Ted, Ted sees her, and then there’s a close-up of Claire that hits just when Sia is singing “Be my friend.” That’s really poignant.

Calamar: That part always kind of gets me. It’s the power of music. And Michael, he was a big part of making everything hit like that. He extended the song almost twice as long in the scene through editing.

Ruscio: I doubled up the intro and I was sometimes able to delay where her vocal came in. A lot of it was mathematical.”

CARLA: So there you go, it was so absolutely considered at such a granular level. And it shows. What an absolutely perfect moment. And a footnote to this is that Sia wrote “Breath Me” after a suicide attempt. So there was obviously deep feelings about life and death impregnated into that song.

The second song I played was from the 2016 film Lion which is a true story about an Indian boy who gets lost and is not able to find his parents. He becomes adopted by an Australian couple. He uses Googlemaps to calculate where abouts he could be from and 30 years later finds his parents. So, there’s the obvious Bollywood vibes to that track.

Sia is one of the most in demand song writers working today. I had more than 26 soundtracks to choose songs from so of course I had to whittle them down to fit into this timeslot. A lot of her music can sound quite similar… a piano opener with her soaring voice… So I’ve tried to choose tracks that sound a bit different to show her range. Coming up is “Opportunity” from the reboot of the musical Annie and “To Be Human” from the Wonder Woman soundtrack. You’re on Joy.

MUSIC: “Opportunity” – Sia, “To Be Human” – Sia

CARLA: You’re on Joy 94.9 and this is Film on the Radio, we have been working hard each week over the summer to bring you soundtracks and scores across the spectrum of popularity and listenability. This is our last episode today so thank you for all your support! We will be back later in the year so don’t fret! The elves here at Joy and Film on the Radio HQ are going to spend a lot more time in preproduction in the first half of the year to hopefully get live interview with artists and lots more amazing music for your listening pleasire.

This week we’re focusing on Sia’s soundtrack work. As said she has contributed to over 25 soundtracks and has been nominated for two Golden Globes for Best Original Song in the process. One was for 2015 Opportunity from the Annie soundtrack which we just played, the other was in 2010 for “Bound to You” on the Burlesque soundtrack – sung by Christina Aguilera. Let’s listen to that and something on the complete opposite of the Sia spectrum – “Waving Goodbye” from the Neon Demon soundtrack, you’re on Joy.

MUSIC: “Bound to You” – Christina Aguilera, “Waving Goodbye” – Sia

CARLA: This is Film on the Radio and I’m your host Carla Donnelly. That was “Bound to You” performed by Christina Aguilera, written by Sia and “Waving Goodbye” from the Neon Demon soundtrack. This week we are focusing on Sia and a small curation of her enormous film and television work.

We’ve been talking today about the pivotal moment of the Six Feet Under finale pushing Sia into the mainstream. The album she made after that “Some People Have Real Problems” was her first to really take off and was certified gold here in Australia and was the first to chart on the American Billboards, landing at number 26. This was at the point she was approached by Christina Aguilera to co-write songs for her next album Bionic. This kicked Sia’s career into the stratosphere of writing hits for other people. It also aligned with her gaining fame to the point it made her extremely uncomfortable and she withdrew. According to Wikipedia (which seems to have the most up to date list) Sia has written 137 songs, most for other artists, and had some phenomenal hits… she wrote “Pretty Hurts” for Beyonce, “Diamonds” for Rhianna, “Perfume” for Britney Spears, “Boy Problems” for Carly Rae Jeppesen, “Breathe” for Jessie J.. the list goes on. Is she the Carol King of our times?

I can live happily knowing she is so minted from writing so many number hits. Her net worth is apparently $25 million.

I’ll link all these articles in the show notes, that can be found in the podcast description or on our website www.joy.org.au/filmontheradio. Also, if you love our show please tell your friends! Grab their phone and add us to their podcatcher, we have 7 other episodes in our library waiting for your ears. We may be going on hiatus but our social media will still be active, you can follow us on @filmontheradio on Twitter and Facebook. Send through your favourite soundtracks and scores while you’re at it! Thank you so much for listening, it’s been the greatest pleasure in my life to present this show for you. Coming up next is Triple Bi-Pass but before that I’ll play us out on a couple Sia tracks, one from the Dolittle soundtrack called “Original” and my absolute favourite, her duet with Dolly Parton from the film Dumplin, the song “Here I am”.

MUSIC: “Original” – Sia, “Here I am” – Sia