Rock 'n' roll in 'Season'

Ex-frontman for The Replacements scores timely hit with soundtrack for animated kids film

Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 3, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Music

More stories »

In a way it was sort of a mutual deception. Acclaimed songwriter and former Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg assured the film studio that he could do a soundtrack for Open Season, no problem.

In return, "they sort of suckered me in by saying they wanted a rock 'n' roll soundtrack. We were going to play rock 'n' roll as the score," he says. "And then two years into that somebody spoke up in a meeting and said, 'It doesn't sound like a film!' That's when they started breaking out the London Philharmonic and all this other (stuff)."

After a bruising couple of years of writing, rewriting and re-editing, the kids' film Open Season was released on Friday, putting Westerberg in a position fans never thought they'd see - a film soundtrack that turns out to be quite the respectable, rocking disc after all.

Early on Westerberg discovered it wasn't going to be a cakewalk.

"They had their test screenings (for kids) and the 'too-scary flag' came up right away," Westerberg says with a laugh from his Minneapolis home. "It wasn't my fault. I didn't draw the villain that scary! I just played some scary music under it. So we had to roll back on all the very intense stuff.

"If I'd known what it was before I got into it, I probably wouldn't have bothered. But now that I've done it - everyone who worked on it said, 'This is the hardest thing I've ever done.' Coming from people who have done 100 films, I guess I got my feet wet all the way up to my neck."

Fans realize what a bizarre twist this is in the story. After years of being ignored by the mainstream both in The Replacements and in his solo career (despite a couple of near-hits like I'll Be You and Can't Hardly Wait), Westerberg suddenly finds himself in demand.

Greatest-hits packages have come out from The Replacements and Westerberg's solo career, and he has re-teamed with The Replacements' Tommy Stinson for a couple of new songs on the soundtrack. Lucinda Williams wrote a song about him.

"I've never stopped doing what I do. I just took a long rest there, then released a bunch of records. . . . This was one of those things I could have easily passed on but on a whim decided to do it. And what a whim it was," he says.

Working in Hollywood meant a constantly shifting set of demands from the filmmakers.

"At the beginning it wasn't even a film. It was merely sketches of animation. I was looking at some moving and some nonmoving sketches with dialogue," he says. "At first the hunter was supposed to be mean and scary and I made him sound that way. Then they wanted to make him a little more bumbling and less scary for the kids. It was weird. All the animals' personalities changed. I had to adapt the songs."

If he'd been paid by the hour, he says, "I'd be set for life by now."

While the songs were written for the film, "the ones they chose were the ones that reflected how I felt and could have been about something else. They could have been on one of my records without the aid of the film," he says. "Not all of it is geared toward the characters."

In fact, the theme song, I Belong, is more a musing on having a home, a place in this world. The studio is giving it a huge Oscar push, translating it into various languages and hoping it will be a hit.

Westerberg, however, is more satisfied that an older song of his, Good Day, got new life on the soundtrack. It's a song he wrote for the late Replacements guitarist Bob Stinson, with the chorus noting "a good day / is any day that you're alive."

It "secretly and quietly is something that satisfies me a lot. That, to me, was a great song of mine on a record. Now it'll get a wider listen. Some people will think of a big bear (in the movie) and others like me will think of the big bear of a guy that Bob was."

That song, like much of Westerberg's work, is recorded in his basement studio, a cramped space that nonetheless produces some of his best work.

"It's priceless and worthless at the same time. I can't get a record that doesn't have noise on it and doesn't have mistakes on it. Then again, that first version I do in the basement is the one we keep coming back to again and again, saying, 'Why can't it have this?' Because I was alone in the basement," he says.

Despite the creative struggle, the studio threw "a magnificent curveball at me" by having Westerberg play at the movie's premiere in Hollywood last week along with Stinson and drummer Josh Freese.

Did working with Stinson on four new songs in the past year give him a better understanding of the spark between the two that created those Replacement gems?

"Um . . . no?" he says with a laugh. " 'No' with a question mark. He called me the other day and apparently he'd been around for a week or two. He calls me and says, 'Hey, Paulie, what you doin'? I've got two hours before my flight leaves.' That's our relationship. He didn't call me the two weeks he was here. He calls me when he's bored and waiting for his plane."

Though it has been years since the two worked together (Stinson has been playing in the reconstituted Guns N' Roses), the spark was intact.

"We're a little more distant than we were at one time. We'll never be as close as we were. He is sort of a Californian now," he says. "He's part of the machinery a little bit. I don't mind that. He has his problems with me. Musically, our playing clicks together probably like no one else. I'd shoot down one of his ideas and hurt his feelings and then he'd come up with another one that was really, really good and we'd do it. So a lot of things are back to like they were a long time ago."

Will there be more work?

"I told them early on that if you can get us a gig on Saturday Night Live we'd go and play Love You in the Fall or one of those songs," he says. "We could call it The Replacements. We could call it the Josh Freese Band if we want to. It doesn't matter to me."

While other artists have made money through their Web sites by selling shows and the like, Westerberg has never even looked at his. A concert, he says, can't be re-created.

"There's something that you can't sell that you can only smell, you know? You've got to be there and smell the smell and feel the sweat. That's something you can't sell on disc," he says. There's money lost, "but I can make money doing other things. I'd rather write a song and have it be put in a movie rather than release a half-a---- performance. I just keep the real stuff close at hand."

Brownm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2674

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News