Demonstration Tapes: One Engine

The one that (barely) got away

You didn’t imagine it. This was not some dream-fragment that made its way into your waking life. The Decemberists, at one point in time, were asked to contribute a song to the Hunger Games movie soundtrack. And not just one song, initially: I have a distinct memory of sitting in the backstage of the Egyptian Room in Indianapolis, talking to someone (was it the film’s director, Gary Ross?) about writing a lullaby for the main character to sing. Was there also discussion about an end-credit song? It’s all a bit fuzzy — but suffice it to say, once the fog of movie development had cleared, a lot of the stranger ideas the director had (including hiring me to write songs) had hit the cutting room floor and our contribution to the music of District Twelve would be a single song relegated to a collection of tunes that, as far as I know, do not actually appear anywhere in the movie.

I’m not mad about it; these things happen that way a lot. One should always treat early discussions with creative leads on big projects as aspirational things, ideas that need to float a bit before they are subject to the gravitational pull of outside interests, mainstream expectations, and budget restrictions. It did introduce us to T. Bone Burnett, however. T. Bone was doing the music supervision on the project. I was keen to work with him; I’d always been a fan of his production — I remember first seeing his name on Los Lobos’ By The Light of the Moon and again, later, on Gillian Welch’s debut LP Revival.

This would’ve been in 2011, I think. 2011 was a busy year for the band. We had a number one record in The King is Dead and had a big tour schedule in front of us. I was also finishing the last edits on the first Wildwood book which was set to be published in the fall of that year. The Hunger Games people still wanted to include the band on the soundtrack, so I dug around for a song. I came up with this strange little thing called “One Engine.” I recorded it at home, just me and a drum machine. It sounded like dystopian chase music, which seemed fitting for the movie. I turned it in; people liked it well enough that we recorded it at Flora Studios with T. Bone producing.

The demo is interesting. There’s an argument to be made that it’s a better arrangement, just acoustic guitar, voice, and drums. It’s a simple song and doesn’t require that much adornment. I remember T. Bone, when we recorded the band version, sitting fixedly at the console during the basic tracking — drums, bass, guitar and vocals — and only stepping away when we jumped into overdubbing, saying, “And then they’ll just put all their shit all over it.” He didn’t say it in a disparaging way (I don’t think); I imagine he mostly wanted to get out of our way. We definitely got some great things out of those overdubs — I particularly like Chris Funk’s Gang of Four-adjacent electric guitar shapes — but you might be curious to hear it without “all that shit.” Here ‘tis for the paid subscribers: