How a Series Of Emails From Francis Ford Coppola Led Electronic Artist Dan Deacon To Film Scoring: ‘It Was Never My Goal To Be a Touring Musician’
Categoria: Musica
The Baltimore musician made his name with his vibrant electronic records and energetic live shows — but now, listeners are most likely to hear his compositions in hit movies and TV shows.
Por Billboard | 07/08/2026
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