LCD Soundsystem have a new song, “New Body Rhumba,” featured in Noah Baumbach’s Netflix adaptation of White Noise. “New Body Rhumba” made the Best Original Song shortlist for this year’s Academy Awards, and James Murphy recently talked to IndieWire about its chances to actually get nominated for an Oscar when the final nominees are revealed next week. After joking that he doesn’t actually care whether or not they pick up a nomination, Murphy expanded:
I care because I think the film’s great. It’s a confusing film for some people and I want them to feel compelled to watch it. It does this weird thing where it’s pretending to be a simpler film than it is. There are moments where you think you’re watching Uncle Buck and it’s actually fucking insane. It’s oscillating above reality until the end, when it fully escapes from reality, with the song in the last bit. I want to make sure people feel like they need to watch it to understand. In years to come, people will understand how dense it is. For that, I would love to get an award. Also, everyone in the band would find it funny. I’m working on my EGOT. I got a Michelin star next door so it would be a MEGOT. But in general I don’t care about stuff like that.
Murphy, who previously collaborated with Baumbach on the soundtrack to Greenberg, was asked to provide only one song for the soundtrack, and it was always intended to wrap up the movie with an elaborate dance scene. Murphy said that the choreographer for the sequence ended up using one of LCD Soundsystem’s other songs as a guide to putting together the scene.
“I didn’t know this at the time, but the choreographer used a song as a guide track that was one of my songs,” Murphy said, while demurring exactly what song they used. “It’s not that hard to figure out. But we talked about using some different music beforehand, like ‘Higher Love’ and ‘Lay My Love’ by Cale and Eno. I was working on some music at this studio in Copenhagen and sending some ideas, but then the choreographer set it to a different song of mine and it was like, ‘Oh, we shot the dance scene at a different tempo.’ I was like, ‘Aw, fuck!’”
“Normally, if someone gives you a guide track, you’re like, ‘Alright, this is the tempo,’ and you figure out how you’d approach it,” Murphy continued. “But I knew how I’d approach it, because there was my song. So I had to get away from my own song. It was very strange.”
He also talked a lot about the breakup and eventual reformation of LCD Soundsystem — they just wrapped up another residency at Brooklyn Steel in December. And he made it clear there’s no new music in the works: “I don’t have a new album now. No album panic. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. I’m just not in the process of it.” But he says he’d “love to make a record” … someday. Read the full interview here.
