Three Questions With Friendship Composer Keegan DeWitt

Recently saw Friendship in theaters, directed by Andrew DeYoung and starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. As soon as I heard the music, I knew I wanted to talk to the film's composer, Keegan DeWitt. So after the credits rolled, I walked back to my car and pretty much immediately DM'd him about it.

Below, Keegan talks about the inspirations behind the music for Friendship, what gear he used in the process, his personal favorite soundtracks and more.

Highly recommend catching Friendship while it's still in theaters! More information can be found on A24's site.

Friendship, music by Keegan DeWitt.

Synth History: I really enjoyed the score for Friendship, noticed how cool it was right away in the theater. What were some of your biggest inspirations behind it?

Keegan: Andy, the director, had a really specific vision for the music, and I think that plays along with his idea of saying that he wanted to shoot a comedy like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. It was this broad cinematic language where we are never scoring for comedy. Instead, it’s about this unspoken mood that is just living throughout the film, and I was so grateful to have Andy to clue me into what that was. I was also happy it was so diverse sounding.

From the very beginning, he was sending along such a broad selection of music. Classical, international, experimental, it was really exciting. For me, it instantly aligned with my taste, because when I’m record shopping, I’ll usually take a flyer on one or two records just because they look odd and the cover sparks something. That usually ends up in finding crazy Japanese electronic music, or a classical recording someone has tossed because it was too strange. There are some definite nods to Yellow Magic Orchestra and other environmental music throughout the score, as well as some lo-fi atmospheric synth artists I had never heard of.

Mainly though, it’s cool to swing from like… saxophone, choirs, orchestra to gnarly synths and pads and stuff. So often synths get used for period, like… here we are throwing back to the 80s, and I was super happy that this was not that at all. It was using synths as this transgressive commentary on his spiraling out.

Synth History: What were some of the go-to synths, or other pieces of gear, you used for the music?

Keegan: Some of the earlier cues were using mallets, which instantly drew me to the DX-7, of course, but then I felt like there was something I was missing. Some artifacts and dust maybe. I ended up gravitating toward the Arturia E-MU recreation. I love how it instantly feels like it’s got a weird bit-rate thing happening, but then you can transpose sounds down an octave and increase that feeling even more. I also have a bad addiction to Sansamp, probably from obsessing over Tchad Blake and his mixes for so long. So often I’m running things through the E-MU or the Arp 2600, and then printing it, and then taking it down an octave, and then throwing it through some Sansamp. I have a lot of synths in the studio, but I really enjoy the process of messing up soft synths so they become their own unique thing.

Keegan DeWitt by Brett Warren.

Synth History: Can you tell me about the process of scoring a film like Friendship? How did you come onto the project and what was it like scoring it?

Keegan: I first found out about the project from the amazing music supervisor Rob Lowry. We’ve worked together on a few things and as soon as he mentioned I was really interested, for all the obvious reasons. I went at it pretty hard, I had my close friend and fellow filmmaker, Chad Hartigan, send Andy an email, and I was able to wrangle a meeting. I was instantly really fascinated by Andy’s voice as an artist. That’s what everyone kept saying before I met him, “Andy’s got such a specific POV”. It was something totally surprising to me at every turn, in a good way. Comedy is notoriously hard to score, and I appreciated that every idea he had musically was unexpected to me. It was a huge opportunity to grow and just let his voice, which is so unique and pronounced in the film, expand my talents as a composer. Like the scene where Tim is leaving his garage and breaking into Austin’s house… there are so many very typical ways to score that sequence, but having it be this weird gonzo choir with woodwinds, it really elevates the entire thing, and that’s credit to Andy, for saying we should try something like that there.

The strange thing was–because of our timing–I spent a good amount of the scoring process out of the studio and traveling remotely. I sent some initial ideas, and we met up to talk with the amazing editor, Sophie Corra. But when we really got into the thick of it, I had a tripped planned to Croatia with my family. So I was often up in the middle of the night, on this remote island off of Croatia, on my MacBook with a little Arturia Microlab, creating the score to the film. This was super fun because it instantly took me away from my Prophet and my Juno and all those hardware synths I lean on so much, and made me have to just get creative. So I was working to not only find a way to create these sounds via VSTs, but to then give them that really authentic, flawed sound.

I think this springs from both first learning to make music on a Tascam Portastudio, where you are layering and improvising, bouncing tracks, committing to ideas etc., but then also first coming up on Ableton as a DAW–I work in Cubase now. The thing I still miss about Ableton is how creative it is as a DAW. It felt very much like nothing is sacred. You time stretch, you mangle, you use generative sequencers, you create giant effect racks. So much of the traditional audio world is like, “Why do you have so many plugins on that?!” And I loved with Ableton that it’s all just a means to an end, which is some super creative unique sound you’ve ended up on.

Synth History: What is your personal favorite movie score of all time and why?

Keegan: This couldn’t be more unlike Friendship, but what first got me into film composition was the solo piano work of Michael Nyman. I first heard it used in Michael Winterbottom’s Nine Songs, and he’s since reused it in The Trip series. I was really struck by how moving, romantic and sad they were. I hadn’t heard anything like it at that time in my life, and I think I also identified with how they weren’t reinventing the wheel. They were these simplistic structures, but with deep deep meaning. Paul Buchanan’s solo record is very similar in a lot of ways. Incredible heart-wrenching melodies, but so simple it seems like a trick, like, “How did he do this?"

Synth History Exclusive.

Interview conducted by Danz.