KT Tunstall interview: Composing for film behind the scenes

Listen to the colliding sonic atmospheres of the film Be As You Wish To Seem, and you’d never know that the renowned singer-songwriter KT Tunstall wrote the soundtrack. Some parts of the score are ominous and distressed, some parts are airy and meditative. The twisting contours of her electronic soundscape nowhere hints at a voice that is instantly recognizable to fans of Tiger Suit, KIN, and other chart-topping albums. That is just how KT prefers it to be.

“With my own music under my name as a solo artist, there are parameters that I sometimes wish weren’t there,” she says while meeting up at London’s Century Club.

“I love electronic dance music for instance. But it wouldn’t work to do a completely electronic KT Tunstall record. With film scoring, there’s no need for me to sound like me. I can sound like whatever the director is asking for and whatever I can present to the director. It doesn’t have to be anything to do with a guitar-playing singer-songwriter.”

Now working on a new KT Tunstall album, she took five days away to score Be As You Wish To Seem, a short film that premiered in London this month. The film follows the story of a young woman trying to break away from a stressful and addictive city life and find refuge on a farm. While she reconnects with a purer natural world, her transition does not appear to halt her slide toward a mental breakdown. The intensity of the film rests in its focus on one person’s emotional turmoil. There are no other characters and no dialogue to explain her emotions in words.

“The director John Turner wanted to try and express the difficulty of this kind of transition — that it’s like a drug addiction,” KT says. “She’s got to rip herself away from the city and the whole energy of urban life. Everyone can relate to that feeling in some way.”

She jokes that the worst nightmare of any film composer is to hear a director say, “Do whatever you want.” That is exactly what John Turner told her. Her first draft didn’t quite cut it. “He said, ‘This is a terrible struggle for her. I want this music to be the soundtrack of her brain. I want the music to reflect the dis-ease that she’s experiencing but not showing.’”

“That’s what fascinating about film composing: the influence over the scene. You can show a picture of trees swaying in the wind. It’s a beautiful, serene picture. Then you put dark, metallic, throbbing, dissonant tones beneath it, and suddenly people think, ‘Something terrible is about to happen! The trees are alive — and full of malcontent!’ It’s the classic trick of a film score leading the viewer down a path they weren’t expecting.”

The soundtrack of Be As You Wish To Seem is broken into four movements, and the territory covered by these distinct musical sections seems larger than the 20-minute film itself. It took her only three days to compose. The reason she wrote so quickly, she says, is that she was using a Seaboard RISE 25 — more or less for the first time.

“I didn’t set out to only use the Seaboard, but it ended up that 85 per cent of the work was done with the Seaboard and Equator sounds. I’d had one when I was working on my last album, but I didn’t have a chance to use it. So I thought this was the perfect opportunity.”