Sound and Vision

There’s always been something cinematic about Califone, but
not in the traditional Hollywood widescreen sense. Instead, Califone’s
music flickers dimly, as if thrown from a rickety old projector, with
threads shaking at the edges of the screen, colors bleeding and
saturated. Their songs tumble forward with a rusty momentum,
accompanied by the threat that a reel is coming loose or the projector
is about to strip a gear.

“I always write in front of a movie,” says Tim Rutili, the band’s
singer and chief songwriter. “Sometimes I turn the sound off and just
sit there with the guitar and zone out with an image and write. I know
a lot of songwriters who do that, actually—it keeps you from
thinking too much about what you’re doing. And sometimes if you think
too much about what you’re doing, nothing happens. You think it to
death.”

Rutili studied film as an undergraduate, but he left school to tour
with Friends of Betty, the band that eventually became the legendary
Red Red Meat. Now, with Califone, Rutili has returned to his original
field of study with All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, the new
Califone album that serves as a de facto soundtrack to a full-length
film of the same name, which Rutili wrote and directed.

“The whole idea, once we figured out what we were doing, was to make
an album that stands alone as an album,” Rutili explains. “So it’s
pretty much song based. Unlike a lot of the other film work we’ve done
with Califone, it’s not drone based or improvised so much. And we
wanted to make a film that stood up on its own, too—it uses the
music but it doesn’t depend on the music.”

All My Friends Are Funeral Singers—the film—stars
Angela Bettis as a clairvoyant living in an old house populated by
ghosts. Some of these ghosts include the members of Califone making
their cinematic acting debuts. “They’re all young Montgomery Clifts.
All my bandmates are amazing actors—amazing actors,”
Rutili laughs.

The album, meanwhile, easily ranks with 2006’s Roots and
Crowns as the best work Califone has done. Their loose-limbed folk
instrumentation is still present, with ragged acoustic guitars, pianos,
and fiddles lining the edges of a more industrious sound; machines and
drones whir alongside electric hums, and amplifier cabinets emit
fragmented, processed lines. “Funeral Singers” is the obvious point of
entry, with a banjo and harmony vocals boosting its careful, hymn-like
melody. And “Buñuel” may be their finest hour yet, a shambolic
jam that stops and starts in fits before fully igniting in a blunt,
squealing instrumental climax.

“I was kind of obsessing over [Spanish director Luis] Buñuel
films,” says Rutili. “A lot of the songs were written as the script was
being written. Some of it is about the process of making a film. It’s
very strange, I’m kind of realizing what a lot of this stuff is about
now, a little after the fact.”

Califone’s current tour has them performing an abbreviated
conventional set, but the rest of the performance is dedicated to a
live soundtrack of All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, which
screens over the band’s heads. “It’s really strange how different
cities are reacting to this thing,” says Rutili. “Some people laugh
like crazy and some people don’t. That’s probably another thing that a
normal filmmaker doesn’t get to experience—touring with your film
and feeling people push and pull it in their own direction as they see
it. It’s pretty interesting.”