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How 'Nirvanna the Band's Jay McCarrol Scored Matt Johnson’s New A24 Anthony Bourdain Biopic, ‘Tony’
The Toronto actor, musician and composer explains that he had recently wrapped up the score for Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie with Johnson when he started on Tony. A feature-length extension of a decade-spanning quest to play the Rivoli in Toronto, builds on the meta-comedy series they started in the late 2000s first as a web series and then as a TV show on the Viceland network.
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The film was a success, widely expanding the cult following of the show. Recently, Johnson and McCarrol even made a surprise appearance onstage with actor and singer Finn Wolfhard in Toronto. While McCarrol might be best known for his comedy role, or his earlier music in the indie pop band Brave Shores (whose song "Never Come Down" plays a pivotal role in Nirvanna), Tony lets him indulge in the darker, more meticulous aspects of his process.
“[Tony] felt especially different coming off of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie because that was a huge, sweeping adventure score made with a huge orchestra,” he says.
Rumours swirled that McCarrol crafted Nirvanna's film’s score in one day, which he confirms was a joke. “I had insane sessions on my computer with like 300 tracks that I was meticulously chipping away at for months.”
Creating the score for Tony took a similar amount of time, but for different reasons. “I would toil over the small choices of the single notes to choose for his main [sonic] motif. That took the longest time, figuring out what the piano score [would be] to capture an appropriate Tony Bourdain theme,” he explains.
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The result was a sombre piano track that flows throughout the film. “I didn't want a lot of frills or big things going on with it. It’s often said that the fewer notes that you have to work with, the more challenging it is because there are fewer options to dress it all up to sound cool.” The decision to take a more subtle approach, McCarrol says, was “what the movie was calling for.”
Dominic Sessa & Emilia JonesA24
In Nirvanna and other films, McCarrol and Johnson have used parody law to get around copyright laws while paying playful homage to their inspirations in their work. But for Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, McCarrol says they needed to be careful and “buttoned up.” He recalls using Alan Silvestri’s Back to the Future score as a jumping-off point, but creating their own score was its own journey.
“I wanted to take some of the key parts that would evoke that feeling of the good old age of Hollywood adventure and use those tools to create something original,” he says.
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As longtime friends and collaborators, McCarrol has scored all five of Johnson’s films, including 2023’s Blackberry — which earned him a Canadian Screen Award.
Set in the 1970s, Tony follows Bourdain (played by rising star Dominic Sessa) at a pivotal point in his life. An impressionable 19-year-old, he stumbles into the chaotic world of working in a restaurant kitchen while balancing a romantic courtship with his love interest Nancy (Emilia Jones). That one summer changes the trajectory of everything for Bourdain as he comes of age before he becomes the figure we all know.
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“This is the beginning of a man being built to be really dressed up and adorned with a lot of different experiences. This is the start, so it needed to have space,” McCarrol says of the score. Then, the editing team used it to settle on the tone of the film.
While the score leans on the moodier side, McCarrol did have a handful of opportunities to play. He pinpoints a scene where Bourdain joins his mentor, Ciro (Antonio Banderas), to fish on the beach.
“I think there are 20 tracks of piano that are dancing around, and it really comes out of nowhere after you're hearing a lot of darker musicality throughout the movie,” McCarrol explains. “This feels a lot more optimistic, and gives it a nautical feel.”
Dominic Sessa & Leo WoodallA24
McCarrol was privy to some of the film’s first takes, so he could continue to craft based on the actors’ performances.
“I was able to watch dailies as they came in, so I could see what it looked like and how scenes were coming together in the roughest of forms,” he explains. “As the sequences got edited together, I would start to score things to picture and map things moment to moment the way I want.”
While McCarrol’s score serves as the film’s silent giant, it’s overtly elevated by the period-specific soundtrack, programmed by music supervisor Mandy Mamlet. Some of the palpable needle drops include Brian Eno’s “Everything Merges With the Night” and The Brothers Johnson’s “Strawberry Letter 23,” which flow through tense moments, while The Action’s “Brain” closes the film.
“Once we had established the vibe of my score, it naturally fit with the rest of the music. It started to feel like it couldn't be anything else.” The original soundtrack for Tony is out now via A24.
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McCarrol will be a producer for Johnson’s next film, Journalism 101, inspired by true events surrounding the bust of Vice Canada music editor Slava Pastuk, who was convicted for recruiting Vice interns for a drug smuggling operation in the late 2010s.
He can’t share any details yet, but it wouldn’t be surprising if he’s already thinking about music from that time period.
We asked McCarrol to share his favourite film scores — here's what he said:
Back to the Future, Alan Silvestri
“It's probably the best and most popular use of the octatonic scale or the diminished scale. When you dance around these chords, it sounds like it's flip-flopping on itself. It's so evocative. It heightens reality. “
E.T., John Williams
“It was a movie score that, when I saw it married with [E.T.] as a kid, proved to me that movies can literally be magical. The chemical reaction that happens in your brain when those things come together the way it does with that movie. I cannot watch the last 10 minutes without crying. It's like a magic trick.”
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The Shawshank Redemption, Thomas Newman
“It would be almost too on-the-nose beautiful if it wasn’t for how he uses these passing notes that act as a counterpoint and give dissonance through otherwise just straight-up nice major diatonic chords. That gives it this depth that's so crazy beautiful.”
Phantom Thread, Jonny Greenwood
“I have to shout [Greenwood] out. He’s a huge, huge, huge influence on me. Not only with Radiohead, but in his work on There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread. I can't believe how good [the score for] Phantom Thread is, how dense the musicality is. It washes over people, and I just can’t believe what’s happening there.”
Tony is out in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver theatres on Aug. 14, and across Canada on Aug. 21.
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