In 2009, about a month after appearing on NPR to promote his new album, the experimental electronic musician Dan Deacon received an email from the legendary director Francis Ford Coppola — or at least, someone claiming to be him.
The sender’s email address had “a bunch of letters and numbers that looked like spam,” Deacon says. “I think it’s a new, Nigerian prince, you’ve got $43 million [scam]. I’m like, ‘There’s no way this is real,’ so I ignore it.
“A week goes by, and I get another email from a different email address that has a similar, just bizarre nature to it. It’s like, ‘Trying to reach you, this is Francis Ford Coppola, I would love to connect,’” continues Deacon, who once again ignored the note.
Eventually, Deacon received an email affiliated with the consulate of Belize — where Coppola is an honorary consul — reiterating the ask. After Deacon gut-checked with his agent, he responded, and the film giant invited the musician, then in his late twenties, to his estate in Napa, California.
Listening to Deacon’s NPR interview, Coppola had been struck by a tangent he’d gone on about composition, recording and performance — about what exactly constitutes a “definitive” version of a piece, and how that changes between popular music and theater — and once Deacon made it to Napa, Coppola just wanted to talk. “There’s no discussion of a project,” Deacon recalls. “It’s just all theoretical and conceptual and riffing.”
But a couple months later, Coppola did pitch Deacon on a project: scoring his 2011 horror film Twixt. The project wasn’t the smoothest for Deacon. Coppola had him co-composing with the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, who wasn’t aware Coppola wanted Deacon “to take his recordings and chop them up,” and moreover, “I very, very quickly realized I didn’t have any idea what I was doing,” Deacon says.
Still, the experience set a career path in motion for Deacon, who today is among the growing cohort of indie musicians who have found fertile ground – creatively and financially – in the world of scoring films, television shows and video games. Since 2016, when Deacon began working in the space regularly, he’s scored more than 20 movies and TV shows with increasingly high profiles, including the 2024 Marvel flick Venom: The Last Dance, HBO crime drama Task (he’s currently working on season two) and this June’s Netflix comedy Little Brother, starring John Cena and Eric André.
Scoring film and TV isn’t new for popular musicians, of course. Coppola himself enlisted the Grateful Dead drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann to record drum music for his 1979 war epic Apocalypse Now, Neil Young soundtracked Jim Jarmusch’s avant-garde 1995 Western Dead Man and, this century, major names from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood to Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor have earned acclaim for scoring blockbusters. But as the streaming boom has created more scoring opportunities than ever — and the margins associated with recording and touring become tighter and tighter for musicians — it’s not uncommon to see the name of an indie fave in the closing credits, from Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin (Marty Supreme, Uncut Gems) to the avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson (Hereditary) to indie-pop artist Michelle Zauner (the 2022 video game Sable).
Deacon, who is renowned for his high-energy live shows, admits today, “I’m 45 years old, and I’ve got two kids, and I don’t want to be on the road 300 days out of the year.” The paychecks can be better on the road, at least relative to the amount of work required for a scoring project, he continues, and creatively speaking, the collaboration and openness to criticism that composing demands can frustrate artists. “But I’ve got a day job,” he says with satisfaction, “and I love it.”
Plus, what some musicians may consider drawbacks appeal to Deacon. “Since I like puzzles and solving problems, it clicked with me,” he says. “I like the non-musical side almost just as much [as the musical side].” Before scoring films, “I had no idea how to collaborate,” he says. “The collaborative nature [of film scoring] is what I feel in love with.” But that comes with a caveat for Deacon, who likens vetting film projects to vetting potential roommates: “Could I live with this person? Would we drive each other insane? Do I like their friends?”
“I like to find a bespoke sound for each project, and I try to work with collaborators that are trying to equally push the envelope,” he says. “I don’t expect it to all be like, ‘This is great, Dan.’ But I also want to know that when it doesn’t work, the critique is going to be from a place of improvement — rather than just wanting to have an opinion.”
This year, Deacon has scored two wildly different projects: Time and Water, a documentary revolving around Iceland’s melting glaciers (its soundtrack arrives on streaming platforms Aug. 7), and Chili Finger, a black comedy starring Judy Green, Sean Astin, Bryan Cranston and John Goodman about — you guessed it — a woman who discovers a severed human finger in her bowl of fast-food chili. (The films premiered earlier this year at Sundance Film Festival and South By Southwest, respectively.) But Deacon wasn’t the only thread uniting the disparate films.
“Friendly, approachable, so creative and also like willing to listen,” is how Melissa Chapman, music supervisor on both films, describes Deacon. Via her company, Groove Garden, Chapman has experience with all sorts of composers — and has come into contact with plenty of musicians who want to try their hand at scoring. “Just because you’re making music for a band or something like that does not mean you can score an entire film,” she says, nodding to the technical, organizational and interpersonal challenges that come with the work. And, she adds, for many artists, “it’s really hard to get your voice heard, but still accomplish what the director and producer want you to accomplish.”
Which is why directors and producers covet composers like Deacon: eager and responsible collaborators who manage to infuse their soundtrack work with their unique artistic point of view. “What makes him really special is that he can go into these weird styles and corners, and just go off,” says Chapman, who is also vice president of the Guild of Music Supervisors. “For Chili Finger, the directors were like, ‘We want polka, but cool.’ And somehow, he really made it! He distilled the elements that were cool and brought them out.”
But while Deacon’s scoring role is critical, he realizes that it’s also supporting in nature — and likens the process to baking a cake. “I supply the eggs for the cake, and I want the most high-nutrient, dense, organic eggs to go into the cake,” he says. “But I don’t want anyone to bite into the cake and be like, ‘You can really taste the eggs.’ I’m trying to be neutral eggs in the cake; I don’t want anyone to be like, ‘Oh, those Dan Deacon eggs!’”
As prolific as he has been in scoring this decade, Deacon hasn’t released a proper album since January 2020, though he still plays shows periodically (and has contemplated if he’d ever integrate his film compositions into them, and what that would even look like). But, he says, “the reason why I like doing this is because it was never really my goal to be a touring musician. My goal was to just write music every day until I don’t have any more days.”
