Interview: Mike Patton (2011)

Interviewed for Prog magazine, it was a retrospective chat over the telephone between London and California upon the release of a soundtrack he'd written for an arthouse Italian film.

Mike Patton is one of the most technically gifted, versatile and influential vocalists of the past two decades. It’s a bold statement but if you look at the number of different bands and musical projects the Californian has worked on over his career and the critical acclaim that he has cumulatively amassed then it’s not really a stretch.

Having made his name in the 90s with seminal metal act, Faith No More while he was singer of the avant-garde, genre straddling Mr. Bungle, Patton has gone on to work on a variety of projects since, the vast majority as a vocalist and each completely different. If we are to expect the unexpected with this man, it’s no surprise that 2011 sees a solo album that is far from the jarring and erratic or smooth and operatic sounds that we’ve come to know and love. He doesn’t even sing on it.

“It was mostly just organic instruments,” Patton says about The Solitude of Prime Numbers from his San Francisco studio. “I still use a lot of sampler but basically what I was trying to do was give traditional instruments centre stage. I really wanted the melody to be singular and the narrative to be melodic.”

This is Mike Patton’s third film soundtrack and it’s a dark, delicate affair. The description of his aims are about as far removed as you can get compared to his last soundtrack, Crank 2: High Voltage – a Hollywood blockbuster action movie set at breakneck speed. The collection of 32 skits reflected the high-octane nature of the film completely by containing harsh noises and never lingering on one moment for long.

“With Crank 2 there wasn’t really a lot of room for melody,” Patton laughs. “It was more about sound and stark contrast. The visual style of the movie was very jarring and was very hyper-edited and stylised. I wanted the soundtrack to reflect that.”

“The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a lonelier affair and when I initially started out I wanted to write it for piano only but the director wasn’t so crazy about that idea so I had to modify it. I just wanted to create a desolate and melancholy atmosphere.”

The film is based on an Italian novel from 2008 of the same name (Italian: La solitudine dei numeri primi) and is a tale following the lives of two people from their youth into young adulthood and the traumas they suffer. The idea is that the characters are like twin primes – prime numbers that are separated by a single even number. They are forever close but never quite touching. It’s a sad theory and one that Patton’s stark, atmospheric soundtrack reflects perfectly.

This isn’t Patton’s first dalliance with Italian culture. He is fluent in the language after being married to an Italian artist for seven years and owning a home in Bologna until 2001 – the time of the break up. Then in 2010 he released Mondo Cane, an orchestral album of cover versions of Italian pop songs from the 1950s and 60s. The title translates to ‘a dog’s world’. Knowing this, it seems less obscure for Patton to soundtrack the adaptation of an Italian best-selling book.

“The director [Saverio Costanzo] was a friend of a friend. He called me and asked me to meet with him,” explains Patton. “I saw his other movies and was really impressed by them. Then I checked the book out and I was completely sold because the book is really wonderful. I read it in a day or two. I couldn’t put it down and then I re-read it and re-read it. It immediately spoke to me in a musical way. No matter what the film ended up coming out like I knew that I would be able to contribute something worthwhile.”

The author, Paolo Giordano is a 29-year-old currently working on a doctorate on particle physics. The novel has sold over a million copies since its release in 2008. With the film adaptation coming just two years later it’s little surprise that the soundtrack has arrived a year after the film’s release. Regardless, it’s a curious timeline, fraught with unorthodoxy from the storyline to the author to the nature of the music and artist.

Having spent the majority of his life in bands or working on other solo or collaborative projects, the process of creating a movie soundtrack is distinctly different.

“What I’ve found is the trick to doing any film score – and hopefully I’m getting a little bit better at it – is taking a back seat and realising you’re one small fragment of this gigantic mechanism and the music cannot be screaming, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’” Patton explains. “It’s definitely a challenge because the music that I grew up with is all about yelling and screaming and drawing attention to itself.”

“For this, basically, my band is the movie or the book so I’m not writing for a specific person or player with specific tendencies or abilities. I’m writing it all myself,” Patton says. “For a movie like this, I don’t think that collaborating was an option. I needed to be alone and do it by myself”

“The first couple of things that I wrote, I was in Indonesia, oddly enough on a vacation by myself,” he laughs. “It was in-between tours, I had about a week and a half off and I’d always wanted to go to Indonesia so I did a little homework, found a cool little place and just shacked up and wrote a bunch of the music there. I finished it up here in San Francisco, where I live but I’d say the initial ideas came on a lonely vacation.”

“A movie like this is pretty introspective and pretty sombre and minimalistic,” he explains. “I was basically trying to take a different set of tools and learn something from it.”

Patton makes an interesting point: that he’s learning something from the process of creating a different style of music. It goes a long way to explaining why the range of styles of music that he has created and worked on over the years is so vast and so interesting. So how does he find the inspiration for the myriad of ideas that he transforms into music?

“It’s an elusive thing and it comes and goes and there are periods where there are not enough hours in the day to get things done,” he says. “For me, the best way of putting it is that I have to put myself in almost like a ritual or routine and if I do kinda the same things every day and have a process, work a couple of hours, take a break, work for a couple of hours, it puts me in a comfort zone.”

“The real trick is balancing that with a touring life, which is a completely different animal and is something I hope I can do less of as I get older because it doesn’t put you in a comfort zone,” Patton continues. “It’s wonderful and exciting but it’s difficult to develop a routine when you’re in a different city every day. I like to be home and go through a routine and I find that I work best that way.”

“Some days I sit down to write and there’s just nothing there,” he continues. “I don’t get depressed or anything but it’s still important for me to try every day.”

Is The Solitude of Prime Numbers the kind of album that he would ever tour?

“Not really no,” he says immediately before backtracking slightly. “It would be a hell of a challenge and I’d probably have to hire a strange group to do it but yeah at some point it might be nice to do that. I’ve thought of doing a concert of the films that I’ve scored, selections from various films for maybe a special project, but probably not a tour.”

Special projects are something that Patton’s been involved with in the past and it fits that if he’s trying to pare down his touring schedule that an event like the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, where artistic license is given free reign, would perhaps be the ideal moment to showcase his soundtrack work. It could be an audio-visual feast of his work.

“To me that’s such a worry,” he says. “I can’t be worried about the visuals. I’d probably have my hands full enough just trying to recreate the music.”

Music is something that Mike Patton has created a lot of. With 24 studio albums under his belt and records of 59 ‘other appearances’, to call the man prolific does not do him justice. With any number of projects at various stages of completion on the go at any one time, does he really know how many records he’s released?

“I have no idea,” he laughs. “A few years ago for some business reason I was presented with a challenge of coming up with a discography and I couldn’t do it. I had to actually have a friend help me put all the stuff together and at a certain point I just got bored and tired of it and said ‘You do it.’ I guess I’m not really that interested in knowing how many – it’s more about the process of doing it and learning something along the way. I think there’ll be plenty of time to sit back and count them later.”

Talk of post-retirement relaxation is all well and good but the fact of the matter is that Mike Patton just isn’t done yet. Currently rehearsing for a handful of South American dates with Faith No More, he has also just laid down some vocals for another Italian friend and Mondo Cane colleague, Alessandro Stefana’s latest project, Guano Padano. A more persistent collaborator is Dan The Automator, the notorious hip-hop producer behind the likes of Gorillaz as well as a whole load of Patton projects including the down-tempo trip-hop combo, Lovage, which is ongoing, and Crudo, which is not.

“We wrote a bunch of music and performed live a bunch of times and that’s a project that’s not really mine per se. It’s really Dan The Automator’s baby so I left it to him,” Patton explains. “We had a little bit of a crossroads on how we wanted to handle the project but it’s ok. I think that not everything you’ve recorded has to see the light of day. I’m proud of the music but maybe it’s just not meant to be.”

It’s also been well documented that there are at least two more albums worth of material written for the multi-collaborative trip-hop/experimental rock fusion project Peeping Tom, also with Dan The Automator, but it’s currently just sitting there waiting to be worked on.

“It’s sort of dormant right now. I’ve got a lot of material I need to sort through that is in some stage of done-ness,” he explains. “I need to streamline it and find a real path for the next record because I don’t want to follow the same formula I did for the first one.”

There he goes again, forcing himself to create something new. It’s a state of mind. Acknowledging his refusal to stand still creatively as well as the reception of his work both critically and commercially, there is absolutely no question that Mike Patton is one of the most progressive musicians of his generation. His reaction to such a suggestion is as amusing as it is thoughtful.

“I’ve been called lots of dirty names before. Prog… I’ve heard worse,” Patton laughs. “I don’t really consider myself part of any genre and I think that’s the healthiest way to look at it as an artist. I think that anything that I do is a little bit bastardised and a bit of a freakish hybrid and if people want to call it one thing or another, it doesn’t bother me in the least as long as they’re interested.”

As long as Patton keeps innovating and evolving, there’s little chance of people tuning out any time soon.