Dean Wareham (Margot at the Wedding) Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Dean Wareham — best known as the singer and guitarist of the Boston-formed band Galaxie 500 (1987–1991) and the New York band Luna (1991–2005) — composed the sparse score for Margot at the Wedding with his partner Britta Phillips. The score is unusually minimal: brief instrumental cues, mostly piano-and-guitar, deployed sparingly. The film leans on diegetic sound and silence for most of its runtime, and ends on Karen Dalton's "Something's on Your Mind" over the credits.
Galaxie 500 and Luna
Wareham co-founded Galaxie 500 with Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang in 1987 while at Harvard; the band's three records — Today (1988), On Fire (1989), This Is Our Music (1990) — became foundational documents of slowcore and dream pop, influencing Yo La Tengo, Slowdive, and Low. After Galaxie 500's acrimonious 1991 breakup, Wareham formed Luna, which ran for fourteen years and seven albums and split in 2005. By 2007 he was working as Dean & Britta with Britta Phillips (Luna's bassist and his partner), composing for film and performing the Andy Warhol 13 Most Beautiful... Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests live score commission.
"I'd been making records for twenty years. Film scoring was a different animal. You're working in service of someone else's story, and you have to figure out where your music wants to disappear." — Dean Wareham, Pitchfork (2007)
A score that mostly stays out of the way
The Margot score reads in the tradition of post-2000 American indie film music that refuses orchestral underlining: the Jon Brion / Aimee Mann Magnolia approach (a song-driven score rather than a thematic one), the Jonny Greenwood / Paul Thomas Anderson partnership (which began the same year on There Will Be Blood), and the broader 2000s indie tendency to use small instrumentation and silence rather than swelling strings. Baumbach has said he wanted a score that would not tell the audience what to feel.
"The film is so verbal — every scene is people talking to each other. The last thing it needed was a score telling you what the talking meant." — Noah Baumbach, paraphrased from interview with Pitchfork (2007)
Karen Dalton's "Something's on Your Mind" closes the film
The closing-credits song — Karen Dalton's "Something's on Your Mind," from her 1971 album In My Own Time — is the most-discussed musical choice in the film. Dalton was a Greenwich Village folk singer of the early 1960s, championed by Bob Dylan and Fred Neil but never commercially successful in her lifetime; she died in 1993. Her voice — wounded, broken, halfway between Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith — closes the film over Margot and Claude's bus ride. The placement helped restart Dalton's posthumous reputation: the film coincided with the 2007 reissue of In My Own Time on Light in the Attic Records, and Margot is sometimes cited in subsequent profiles of Dalton as the moment her music re-entered general circulation. (pitchfork)
"Karen Dalton was a singer Bob Dylan said had the only voice that broke his. The song over the credits of Margot is one of those rare cases where a needle drop is the right ending." — Lindsay Zoladz, paraphrased from The New York Times (2018)
After Margot
Wareham scored Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (2005, with co-composer Britta Phillips) and contributed to Mistress America (2015). He has continued performing and recording with Phillips as Dean & Britta, and has written two memoirs — Black Postcards (2008) and I Want To Be A Dean (forthcoming) — that include accounts of his film-scoring work.