Last week, I talked, by phone, to Richard Buckner in advance of his show tonight at Vino’s about singing with himself, his philosophy on making albums and what makes a good performance.
You hadn’t put out a record in nearly three years. All your fans want to know: What have you been up to?
I scored a film. It’s [“Dream Boy”] is finally coming out this fall. The score will probably coming out then, too. I spent like a year and a half working on a score after I finished by last one. Since then, I’ve also done some one-off projects. A song for a PBS documentary on sacred harp singing.
Cool. I love sacred harp singing.
I already had a couple of compilations, so I had an idea of what I wanted to do. It was amazing. The producer sent me all the parts. You know, like alto, tenor, treble, bass parts that I had to separate and create an arrangement, at a certain rhythm. It was really trippy. But I learned a lot about theory.
So you sing with yourself?
Yeah, it was me on 10 tracks. Doing all the parts.
That’s awesome.
It was really fun. But it was hard. Not hard in a bad way. It just took me a long time to wrap my head around it and get the arrangement. It turned out pretty…weird. It’s like ten of me yelling about “broad is the road that leads to death.”
So you like doing different projects like that?
I really like getting assignments. Sometimes when I record, I give myself a handicap or two to make it seem like an assignment. Hopefully, I’ll have another film score coming up. I’d love to do it again.