DANIEL HART: THE MUSIC IN HIM

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A product of Lake Highlands, this gifted artist made ‘S-Town,’ ‘Pete’s Dragon’ and ‘A Ghost Story’ even more magical

By CHRISTINA HUGHES BABB

Daniel Hart chuckled when the woman on the phone said she was Ira Glass’ assistant. Could he spare a moment to speak with Mr. Glass, she asked.

It’s a friend pulling a prank, Hart figured.

The Hart family reveres the radio broadcaster who hosts “This American Life” on National Public Radio, says Daniel’s father, Kenneth Hart, laughing softly, “So, I can imagine his disbelief.”

Then Glass’ venerated voice was on the line. He was working on a new project, a podcast called “S-Town.” He wanted Hart to write the score. wasn’t something the 41-year-old composer from Lake Highlands had done but that never stopped him. traveled a winding career path, learning something significant from every endeavor, he says.

Carried along on a current of Daniel’s music, the “S-Town” series was a hit which listeners downloaded a record-breaking 10 million times in the first four days following its March 2017 debut.

The call from NPR shouldn’t have been a shocker, really.

Hart’s sundry achievements include a stint with pop rock choir Polyphonic Spree, a solo album produced by singer-songwriter sensation St. Vincent, and several musical beds for programs and movies. He composed the score for “The Exorcist” on FOX; for the documentary “Eating Animals,” produced by Natalie Portman; and for four feature-length movies by Dallas-based director David Lowery, including Disney’s “Pete’s Dragon” and “A Ghost Story,” starring Academy Award winner Casey Affleck.

Now Hart is preparing to tour with his band Dark Rooms and arrange the music for Lowery’s upcoming film, “The Old Man and the Gun,” whose notable cast includes Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek and Elizabeth Moss.

When we spoke in late summer, Hart’s parents, both professional church musicians, had just returned from the Los Angeles premiere of “A Ghost Story,” which dad Kenneth Hart calls “profound and thought provoking.” And that is not a father’s bias; the critics love it too.

The indie explores the enormity of time, space and loss. While it stars powerhouse actors Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, Daniel Hart’s music is as pivotal a player.

In a flashback scene, a centerpiece of the story, a musician plays for his wife the song he’s been slaving over, his final artistic bequest, as it turns out.

Headphones on, unmoving, she hears in its entirety “I Get Overwhelmed,” written and performed by Hart and his band Dark Rooms. The song also serves as the track for the movie’s trailer, which has been viewed some 2 million times on YouTube. The piece has this mesmerizing, habit-forming effect — Lowery told music magazine Vents that Hart sent him the song before he began shooting.

“I listened to it over and over again, in the car, at home. After about three days of this, I called Daniel and asked if I could use the song in ‘A Ghost Story.’ ”

In a later scene, Affleck plays a brief ditty on an old piano — Hart taught him how.

“Daniel taught Casey enough piano for him to look like he knew what he was doing in those short scenes,” says Kenneth who has lived in Lake Highlands with Daniel’s mom, Ellen, for 30 years.

St. Vincent, formerly known just as Annie Clark, happens to have lived on Kenneth and Ellen’s street, right off Ferndale, though Daniel, who is a few years older, would not become friends with her until later in life.

Daniel and his brother Justin began their musical education at an early age, with Daniel playing the violin before he was 3. Music was a family pastime, “something we all wanted to do,” Kenneth says.

It did not take long to realize Daniel had a gift — specifically, two lessons, Kenneth says. Daniel had a unique vocal ability, phenomenal for a child.

Daniel was 10 when the family came to Dallas. Kenneth took a position teaching at Southern Methodist University.

The kids took lessons and sang in choirs, Daniel, from a home studio in Los Angeles, recalls of childhood. For fun, the family played a lot of board games. “And there was religion, and religious music, and Bach, which is also religious.”

Daniel attended Northlake Elementa-

Lowery pressed until Disney hired Hart, a virtually unknown composer, to score the big-budget picture.

It was a risk, Hart says.

For him, it meant going from arranging music for a six-piece ensemble to a 104-piece orchestra.

It was high pressure and he worked tirelessly and learned as he went along, he says, “but we were really proud of the work we did.”

It also was the first movie “Uncle Dan” made that his 8-year-old niece, brother Justin’s daughter, could watch. (Justin is now associate chair of the history department at Texas Tech University.)

“S-Town,” the PG name for the Ira Glass-produced nonfiction series about

Marketplace

a place one resident nicknamed “Shit Town,” is decidedly not kid friendly.

The darkly entertaining audio series follows the brilliant, disturbed, immeasurably complex John B. McLemore and a parade of characters from his southern Bibb County town.

Hart wrote the music upon listening to each segment.

Though vastly different from the approach to movies, the type of music composed for S-Town comes most naturally to Hart, he says. Complex, nuanced, enigmatic, captivating in its twists and turns, in its fits and bursts of jauntiness and intensity. In the hands of a less-capable composer, S-Town’s score easily could have played on southern stereotypes, but,

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972.639.6413 stykidan@sbcglobal.net as Hart told the Columbia Chronicle, “In a time of oversimplified and often exaggerated, headline-grabbing lives we live, I am searching for the complexity I know to be actual human existence.”

Hart excels at and prefers darker, soul-searching sound, one might assume. Not entirely true, he says. While that indeed comes most easily to him, he also loves the big, epic, inspirational, feel-good stuff. “Like ‘Enchanted.’ Have you seen ‘Enchanted’?”

It’s a live-action, musical, fantasy, romantic comedy, and Hart calls composer Alan Menken’s score one of his favorites.

The new Lowery collaboration, “The Old Man and the Gun,” is slated to hit theaters in mid-2018.

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