Giosuè Greco Interview

Giosuè Greco starts a cue with one question: short sound or long sound. A short sound he can pull from a shelf of odd instruments. A long sound, for him, is usually a reed, and it gets complicated. Film scoring is not one category, so the mix is freer than a song with a topline. When a voice is in the cue, it sits about 6 dB up or down and the words stay clear. If something is too loud, he keeps it and calls it the statement. He hears the same freedom in Rosalía, far enough from the old pop pattern that the usual marks no longer apply.

Luke has spent the last six weeks in Japanese music, after producing bed and CHAI. A lot of it still sounds like a band. That is the alternate universe in the title. Greco's account of how the decisions get made is time. The fastest thing he writes is often the best, because there is no room to second-guess. An anthem, the way he builds one, wants a few notes, a pentatonic line, four chords, open strings, and then the saxophone, because he plays it and nobody does that job better than Bon Iver. A good song still holds if a small-town marching band plays it, or if someone whistles it. He points listeners to Carey Clayton, whose guitar can sound like whatever he needs, and says he is always chasing that. His own saxophone often goes through VocalSynth until the reed is gone and what is left reads as strings. Luke's side of the same story is learning saxophone solos on guitar, including a gig where the saxophonist could not make it and the solo was whole-tone and hard to finger.

He came to Los Angeles to be a recording engineer and found the ceiling was a decade away, and that he could not afford to wait it out. Producing, and helping other composers get from the session to the stems, fit better. A short he scored won the Oscar for best documentary short in 2018, and that year's class became people he kept working with. Before Dìdi he scored the Disney+ short that led into it, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, and he had known Sean, who made both, for five or six years. Sam, Sean's cinematographer, had just won an Oscar for a live-action short. In the same stretch, The Offseason worked as a prototype, and the director of Welcome to Wrexham asked him to demo. He wrote tracks, they landed, and he was not ready for how present the show became. An agent and a manager followed. He is plain that none of the introductions matter if the work is not there: on the order of 45 minutes of music every five days.

Olmo, the Plan B film, is one of the slimmer scores he has written. There is a lot of music in the movie and less of it is his, between the songs already in the picture and the score. Fernando sends playlists and then says not to copy any of it. He will talk basso lamento, the line walking down, and then decide it does not work. Crystal Lake, the A24 show for Peacock and a Friday the 13th story, he had just finished mixing himself, about five days on headphones while he was moving, with the players live and a runtime past an hour. He was nervous he would find noises. He did not. Steven Marsh approved the album that day. Asked why he keeps at it, Greco says it is the only thing he has ever known. Luke, after hearing this answer about a hundred times, says he stays because it is easy to start and never finished, the same way language is. He had just been talking with Logan Kane about writing fast enough to outrun doubt, and Greco lands in the same place: this is not brain surgery.