By GRACE DETWILER
Ahead of the August 23rd release of JT Mollner’s STRANGE DARLING, the team behind the film has released a single from the upcoming soundtrack. Equally melancholic and ironic in the same breath, Z Berg and Keith Carradine’s cover of “Love Hurts” sets the scene for the deliciously contradictory film that is STRANGE DARLING.
If you’ve seen the STRANGE DARLING trailer (below), you may have heard the moving duet between Z Berg and her godfather Keith Carradine. Looking forward to the film’s release, Z Berg spoke with RUE MORGUE about her experience working on the soundtrack. In honor of the single’s debut, please enjoy this excerpt from Z Berg’s interview, regarding the choice to centralize “Love Hurts” within the STRANGE DARLING script. When asked about her collaboration, she was happy to disclose the pleasure of working with Keith Carradine to record the song:
“So “Love Hurts” was written into the script,” said Berg, “it was the one thing that I was like, ‘JT are you sure?’ I have a pathological issue with simplicity…I like any record that sounds like maybe this guy has completely lost his shit…like what if there are songs about the devil? That’s where my heart lives. But it was the one time where JT was like ‘No, I want to live in the world of the Gram and Emmy Lou version.’ So I was trying to think…no one has 70s voice anymore. I could not think of any young person who sings like that.”
“I had just rewatched Nashville…and I saw [Keith] singing “I’m Easy,” and I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ I imagined his character from Nashville singing with me now, singing “Love Hurts” for this movie and it just felt like the perfect thing. Lucky for me, Keith is the greatest godfather in the history of all the godfathers who have ever been godfathers. About every decade, I ask him for some truly crazy favor.”
What kinds of favors? “When I was a senior in high school, for my thesis for my European film class we were supposed to make a 5-minute film with a group in the style of a director we studied. I instead made a 45-minute film that was an adaptation of Antigone in the style of Lars Von Trier, starring Keith Carradine, Bitsie Tulloch from Grimm, and Austin Nichols from The Walking Dead. It is deeply demented! And poor Keith, he assumed it would be a couple of pages for a student film, but the script was 50 pages and had a shit ton of monologue, so he stayed up for 24 hours and memorized the entire thing…He nailed it! Then, ten years after that I asked him to play the first [“Z Berg and Friends”] Prom show I did.”
Take the time to listen to Z Berg and Keith Carradine’s “Love Hurts” today, you’ll be glad you did. Keep an eye out for the remainder of Z Berg’s interview with RUE MORGUE, coming next month!
See STRANGE DARLING in theaters on August 23rd. Music from the motion picture STRANGE DARLING to be released by Warner Records the same day.
