The Underground Railroad (Book)

The first time I understood what it is that the composer Nicholas Britell does for a film — understood with my whole body — I was in his studio, listening to a mistake he had made and the way he had fixed it. Earlier, in a cafe off Lincoln Center, I had asked him about the process of making “Moonlight,” the Oscar-winning coming-of-age story he scored for Barry Jenkins. Britell told me about a scene, early in the film, in which the protagonist’s mentor teaches him to swim. “I was looking at the sequence like, ‘Oh, Juan and Little swim,’” Britell said. “It’s a beautiful moment. This will be something special he can carry with him.” So Britell wrote a sweet piece in F major, an orchestral swell with a clarinet singing a variation on Little’s theme on top. He played it for Jenkins. The response was a visceral “nope.”Jenkins urged him to think of the scene as a spiritual baptism. This wasn’t simple optimism or happiness. It was the first day of the rest of Little’s life. “And I still get moved even just thinking about it,” Britell said. “Because I immediately knew.” On the spot, he began improvising something darker, in D minor, with the virtuosic feeling of a cadenza. “I was playing it on my keyboard with a kind of fake violence,” he said. “Barry was directing me from the couch. And so right there, I just made it in front of him.”In his studio, Britell played me the scene. First he cued up his original attempt, over footage from an early cut. It was tender, unambiguous movie music that could have scored any rite of passage; I pictured a high school football team triumphing against all odds. Then he cued up “Middle of the World,” the music he made with Jenkins. The violin plays jolting waves of arpeggios, wild and exhilarating. Little vanishes into the ocean, Juan holding him but somehow not protecting him, only initiating him into a kind of violent abandon. You watch with your heart in your throat: It’s beautiful and also, somehow, terrifying.The studio I was listening in — seated in the same spot Jenkins occupied as the music was written — is the size a New York realtor would market as a child’s bedroom, in an apartment overlooking the Hudson. It’s dark, the walls covered with gray acoustic foam, and Britell often works with the lights off. He shares the apartment with his wife, the cellist Caitlin Sullivan, who “is constantly and correctly encouraging me to take walks.” She also worries that he drinks too much Perrier. There are bookshelves and vintage movie posters on the walls — “Chariots of Fire” greets you at the entrance — and a small sofa, the left side of which is Jenkins’s territory. A huge monitor is mounted over Britell’s keyboard, for projecting rough cuts. (With a movie-size screen, you make movie-size music, Britell has learned.) There’s also a subwoofer the size of a washing machine; Britell’s scores include tones so low that they feel less like something audible and more like approaching weather.Last year, in February, Britell invited me back to the studio to watch him and Jenkins at work. The two hadn’t previously allowed anyone to sit in on their sessions, days-long confabs that involve near-clinical infusions of Shake Shack. They were still early in their work on “The Underground Railroad” — a 10-part series, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, that debuts on Amazon this month. It is Britell’s first television collaboration with Jenkins, and his compositions for it are less a single score than 10 intersecting, fully realized musical universes.The first piece he played me at the session was something the two men made hours before: a dark, inquisitive piano sequence only a few bars long, circling the drain of a few dissonant notes. “One of the things we keep discovering is, for some reason, pianos,” he said. “Really specific pianos, like slightly warped.” He played another sequence to demonstrate. “It’s felted” — the piano’s hammers are padded with extra cloth — “so it’s really muffled. But it’s always like, piano works.”Jenkins sauntered in after finishing his burger in the kitchen. All he had on hand were a few unedited shots, he explained, “but I like to have some kind of picture while we’re working. If it works with this picture, it feels like you can tell if it’s part of the world.” He had been shooting in Georgia since August and flew up to spend the weekend with Britell before heading back to the set. By this point, his voice sounded felted, too. “Ninety-two days, 24 to go,” he said, rubbing his face. “We don’t normally work like this until we’re done. But, yeah, no choice.” In hindsight, this wasn’t quite true; only weeks later, the pandemic would shutter production for months, leaving them to finish their work in a sun-drenched quarantine pod in Los Angeles. Still, by the end of the session, Jenkins had slid down until he was sitting on the floor, slumped against the couch with his hoodie tugged over his face. “You can’t make a meal of how tired I am when you write this,” he warned. ‘I’m a musical Neanderthal, really. Nick speaks Neander.’I was more struck by how comfortable the two men seemed together. Britell’s voice even sounded different when he was with Jenkins, half an octave down, words running together easily. “You have to understand,” Jenkins said, “when we did ‘Moonlight,’ I didn’t really know Nick at that point.” This is the origin of the Jenkins-Britell partnership, the filmmaking equivalent of buying a house unseen. The producer Jeremy Kleiner had arranged an afternoon coffee between the men, which turned into evening drinks, the two of them talking for hours, mostly not about music. “They just vibed the whole time,” Sullivan told me. “And Barry hired him. He hired him never having heard any samples of Nick’s music of any kind.”“We had one meeting,” Jenkins said. “We went off and shot the film, and then it was like, ‘Oh, just come to New York.’ And so I walk into this place,” he said, giving considerable side-eye to the premises. “ ‘We’re gonna work in your bedroom? How’s that gonna work?’ But he made all this wonderful music. So, yeah, now it’s like a little home away from home.”“It’s a little mystical,” Britell said, deflecting credit to the tiny studio. “I think a lot of it is just feeling like it’s a safe space where you can kind of zone off and go on these little journeys.” He sat back and smiled, happy to vanish into the acoustic foam.You have almost certainly heard Nicholas Britell’s music, even if you don’t know his name. He is one of the hardest-working film composers of the past decade, despite having spent its early years wrapping up a career at a hedge fund. More than any other contemporary composer, he appears to have the whole of music history at his command, shifting easily between vocabularies, often in the same film. You may have seen “The Big Short” (2015), the manic, Oscar-winning story of the 2008 financial crash, whose score tried to musically embody subprime mortgages. Or maybe “Moonlight” (2016), narrated by a violin-and-piano theme that matures with the protagonist, tugged lower and richer by techniques borrowed from Southern hip-hop. Maybe you remember Bobby Riggs’s sleazy upright piano competing with Billy Jean King’s majestic concert grand in “Battle of the Sexes” (2017), the vinyl-soft crackle of “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018) or the alluringly deranged sweep of “Vice” (2018).Britell also scored HBO’s “Succession,” whose title sequence would become the most unexpected hit of 2019 that wasn’t “Old Town Road” — a piece initially indistinguishable from the period music for froufrou costume dramas, except that in the background, maids are carrying value packs of Bounty and wealthy sociopaths are making penis jokes. The theme is dementedly catchy, classical phrases capped with an industrial fizz that sounds like a can of La Croix popping open, or a cash register. “Why is the ‘Succession’ theme so meme-able?” the website Vulture asked, on the same day the rapper Pusha T put out a remix with Britell’s enthusiastic collaboration.“Nick Britell,” the film-music historian Jon Burlingame told me, “is a fascinating example of where film music has gone.” Consider what movies sounded like in their earliest years: the swashbucklers that Erich Korngold scored in the 1930s, or Max Steiner’s lush “Casablanca,” or the sweeping historical epics, like “Ben-Hur,” that Miklos Rozsa wrote for in the ’50s. These composers had been classically taught and turned out symphonic, romantic scores. By the ’60s, film composers like Henry Mancini and Quincy Jones were coming up through a different musical education, rooted in jazz and pop. The next few decades featured competing visions of what film music could do — Vangelis’s triumphal synths, but also John Williams, whose blockbuster orchestrations wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to Korngold. Hans Zimmer managed to do both, inflecting his classical scores with a menacing buzz. “And then,” Burlingame says, “you get to Nick Britell.” His classical training gives him “a fairly large toolbox from which to draw,” including the traditional orchestra, like the 90-piece ensemble in “Vice.” “But his age and experience have also informed him in terms of much more contemporary musical forms,” Burlingame points out. From hip-hop, especially, Britell learned how to make sounds speak by ripping them open, warping notes to convey an affecting emotional arc rarely heard in cinema.The composers and filmmakers I spoke to about Britell emphasized the poetic intelligence he brings to his work. But his emotional reach is equally important. Part of his job is helping directors and producers feel things they can’t explain but know they want to feel. As Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner for “Succession,” told me: “I’m a musical Neanderthal, really. Nick speaks Neander.” Dede Gardner, who produced “The Big Short” and “Beale Street” and is an executive producer for “The Underground Railroad,” told me that when you introduce Britell to someone, “it’s like the air starts to vibrate and hum.” He is, she says, “the perfect person. He’s so expansive.”The director Adam McKay, who worked closely with Britell on “The Big Short” and “Vice,” likes to joke that “you can’t talk about Britell in factual terms, because all you’ll do is gush about him.” Britell’s only flaw that he can think of, he says, is that the composer doesn’t have true perfect pitch — “he has relative perfect pitch.” McKay delights in reciting Britell’s C.V., which reads like a setup for one of his comedies: a Harvard-educated, world-class pianist who studied psychology and once played keys in a moderately successful hip-hop band. “And then he graduates, and you think, Oh, he’s going to go into music. No.” Instead, McKay says, Britell winds up managing portfolios at “one of the biggest currency-trading hedge funds on Wall Street. And then he goes and starts scoring movies. And within five years, he’s nominated for Academy Awards.” You could practically hear McKay shaking his head through the phone. “Brutal.”Britell, who is 40, grew up mostly in Manhattan, in a home with the kind of devout enthusiasm for the arts characteristic of many Upper West Side Jewish families. His father, a lawyer, had a layman’s love of music, and Britell remembers figuring out the distinction between Bach and Mozart as his dad toggled between classical stations on the car radio. His mother was a musical-comedy actress before becoming a teacher — in the 1940s, in West Palm Beach, Fla., she was a child star on a local television program called something like “Aunt Lollipop’s Story Hour” — and the apartment was filled with old books of Rodgers and Hart show tunes. Britell learned to play on a broken player piano that his grandmother picked up from a neighbor; he began tinkering with it when he was 5, driven by an overwhelming desire to figure out “Chariots of Fire.” Slowly he started writing his own boyish pieces — he and his younger brother each fondly remember a repetitive number called “The Train Symphony” — and then, as an adolescent, imaginary scores. “I would write fake TV themes for myself all the time,” he says. “This is a fall drama on ABC, or this is a family comedy, or this is a detective story.”He went to private school in New York City until he was 13, when the family moved to Westport, Conn. On weekends, he commuted into the city for the Juilliard precollege program, where he trained as a pianist. He commuted too between musical worlds. It was the early ’90s, and Britell was transfixed by the hip-hop swallowing the city: the lyrics, and the beats you could feel in your chest, and the mystery of early samples, recordings of recordings that gradually morphed, leaving a fossil record of every person who touched them. He thought of hip-hop as otherworldly in the same way that he found Bach otherworldly. He remembers being walloped by the opening of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions”: the almost-muddy double-bass sample, the way Q-Tip drops in, the drum break adding some final alchemical element. It was like learning, as a teenager, that there were more letters to the alphabet than he’d been taught.He arrived for his freshman year at Harvard loving everything — math and history, Brahms and Gang Starr — and was abruptly confronted by the necessity of choice. Lost and unsure, he left. For a year he tried to see if he was meant to become a concert pianist, living with his parents and scraping up work around the tristate area: cocktail gigs, the Jewish organist at the Episcopal church. The loneliness was sharper than he had anticipated. After a year, he went back to Harvard with the same sense of indecision, only now with the understanding that he couldn’t work alone.At a party soon after he returned to campus, he approached two guys rapping along with a D.J. and drums and asked if they needed keys. The group they formed, the Witness Protection Program, consumed his next three years. At its height, the group toured the Northeastern college and club circuits and opened for acts like Blackalicious and Jurassic 5. At the same time, Britell became close with another classmate, Nick Louvel, who was working on a film and invited Britell to write the score. They spent hours together watching films John Williams worked on, pausing often to interrogate the music. Britell thinks about Louvel often; he died in 2015, in a car accident, just as Britell’s musical career was taking off. He was the first person to ask Britell to write a score, and the question proved transformative. “We were always working on this movie, and I was always with the band, and those experiences really defined my life,” Britell says.But the band broke up after college, and the film he’d done with Louvel wasn’t headed to theaters anytime soon. A classmate who worked at Bear Stearns suggested that Britell consider interviewing. He got an offer and took it. “I was thinking to myself, Oh, in six months, I’ll probably go,” Britell recalls. Louvel’s film would break out; people would snap up the beats he was sending around; someone would hire him to produce. Except none of that happened, for years.Caitlin Sullivan, Britell’s wife, has played on nearly all his scores, including a melody symbolizing love in “Beale Street.” She is also the reason Britell is not currently researching emerging-market currencies in a Midtown office. The two first met when they were 18, studying music at a summer program in Aspen, Colo. — this despite years attending the same Juilliard program. They reunited after college, when Sullivan was embarking on her career as a professional cellist. She took Britell out for a birthday dinner in 2005, and they have been together ever since. By that point, Britell had been in finance for about a year, traveling to interview central bankers and people in finance ministries in Europe and East Asia. He thought he was happy. If you’re a curious person, Sullivan observes, a hypercompetent person, “it’s sometimes hard to actually parse out your true feelings.” For years she watched him come home and play the piano, or improvise beats on his old keyboard. “He’d be up, in a suit, gone around 7:30 a.m. every day and home around dinnertime,” she says. “But he would need to touch the piano.” He scrounged time for projects with friends, including short films for a former classmate, Natalie Portman. (In one of her films, he made a cameo as a cocktail pianist, tucked discreetly behind Lauren Bacall.)In 2008, on a vacation, Sullivan watched the heavy way Britell would pull out his BlackBerry to check the markets. For months, he had been so depressed that it felt like vertigo, but until Sullivan told him he was unhappy, he hadn’t fully known it. The markets, meanwhile, had guttered, Bear Stearns had folded in front of his eyes and, terrifyingly, the smartest people he knew had no idea what was going on. “People were traumatized,” he says. “It was scary to see that end to what I knew about the way that the world’s economy worked.” The demolished instrumentals leading up to the market’s implosion in “The Big Short” are the closest Britell gets to a vocabulary for what it was like to watch the world crash down.In 2010, Britell proposed to Sullivan; a month later, he gave notice. By the time they married, he had started to make trips to Los Angeles, a two-year odyssey of “bouncing couches” and trying to arrange coffee dates with directors and producers. “I was down to do anything,” he says. “I wrote telephone hold music for free. For free.” One evening, Jeremy Kleiner, an executive at Plan B Entertainment, attended a party and noticed someone playing Gershwin in the corner of the room. “We had just gotten a green light for the script of ‘12 Years a Slave’ and hadn’t really gotten into the question of composers,” Kleiner says, “and here’s this guy playing on a grand piano at a cocktail party.” Kleiner introduced Britell to the film’s director, Steve McQueen. Then Plan B introduced him to McKay, and then to Jenkins, and within five years, Britell was being nominated for Oscars.If there’s a through line across Britell’s work, it may be his fascination with winding melodies that make harmonic missteps. The most ambitious example is “Vice,” a kind of antiheroic symphony with an evil heartbeat at its center. It’s a profound technical achievement — buzzing with double fugues and allusions to multiple styles and genres, gesturing toward big-band jazz before ducking away into solo piano or full orchestra. But it’s also a statement about how much Adam McKay trusts Britell. “I don’t even know how to describe our working relationship,” McKay told me. “He’s almost like a producer, because I’ll tell him the idea from the second I have the premise, and he and I will just start kicking it around.”When McKay was beginning to think about a Dick Cheney mocku-biopic, Britell sent him a note about Mahler’s Ninth. The symphony was the last Mahler completed — while working on it, he was slowly dying from a heart condition. Leonard Bernstein suggested that the symphony’s skewed percussive opening was a reflection of Mahler’s own uneven heartbeat. This seemed like an appropriate reference point for a movie about a man whose life has been framed by repeated heart attacks. McKay began listening to the Ninth constantly, writing the script to it, and when he finished, Britell wrote a twisted, magisterial, Ninth-like score. “Vice” sounds like “Peter and the Wolf,” if Peter were also the Wolf.Britell and Barry Jenkins working on the music for “The Underground Railroad” in Los Angeles in November.Emma McIntyre/Getty Images“Dick Cheney’s heart is central to understanding his story,” Britell told me in his studio. “What is a malignant rhythm? How, rhythmically, could you play with it? And then I started doing that harmonically as well.” He turned to his Triton keyboard, the same one he used in the Witness Protection Program, and played the theme slowly, landing hard on the dissonant chords and staring at me intently, as if he were channeling either Dick Cheney or the Phantom of the Opera. “It has the shape of something strong,” he said, and yet it has a deadly flaw. You’re reeled in, then repulsed.There are intriguing parallels between Britell and George Gershwin, another brilliant, energetic Jewish kid who infused the classical canon with the buoyant new genre he loved. Britell’s most arresting scores tend to fuse both ends of his musical education. “Succession” is 18th-century court music married to heart-pounding beats; “Moonlight” chops and screws a classical piano-and-violin duet as if it’s a Three 6 Mafia track. “What I’ve found in the past,” Jon Burlingame told me, “is that people have found it impossible to incorporate such modern musical forms as hip-hop into dramatic underscore for films. When Nick did it in ‘Moonlight,’ I was frankly stunned. I didn’t think it was possible.”Hip-hop was Britell’s initiation to the fragility of sound — how it could be sampled, stretched and broken and somehow, through the breaking, made more powerful. He loves hearing a story in the sounds around notes: the hiss of spun vinyl, or the musician’s breathing. Britell’s signature may be music that’s been through something: As Barry Jenkins puts it, a productive line of inquiry for the two of them has been: How can we break this?Take the scene in “Beale Street” when Daniel struggles to tell Fonny what happened to him in prison — a rape, unmistakable in James Baldwin’s novel, that the movie seems to allude to through Britell’s music and Brian Tyree Henry’s remarkable face. On the surface, Miles Davis plays coolly on a record player. But underneath, Britell has taken the cellos from “Eros,” which scored an early romantic scene, and bent them. “We talked about it almost like we were harming them,” he told me. “Hurting the sound, making it feel like the sound is damaged.” You find similar damage in Britell’s breakout score for “The Big Short.” As the movie opens, in the 1970s, funky horns are the sound of irrational exuberance; later, when Steve Carell’s character realizes the industry is built on 40 years of sand, they return as a faint whine, like a chastened mosquito. “That’s what’s happened to his understanding,” Britell said. “It’s been mangled and stretched out and transformed.”The question of what hip-hop means for Britell may come together most concretely on “Succession.” He had read the pilot script and visited the set with Adam McKay, who suggested him for the project. The show had to have gravitas, Jesse Armstrong told him, but it was also deeply absurd, and the music would have to say both these things at once. It wasn’t clear how Britell could make that happen. Then he started thinking about Kendall Roy, one of the heirs apparent who anchor the show.“The first thing you see,” Britell said, “is he’s in the back of this car rapping to the Beastie Boys.” It’s hard not to think about Kendall as a failed Britell, a parallel-universe version of what he might have been if he had stayed in finance: a Wall Street bro who hides inside his headphones and disconnects from the world he chose. The scene — a young man rapping earnestly inside a chauffeured car — offered a window into how the Roys’ self-conception might contrast sharply with their destructive incompetence. “What if the sound that they imagined for themselves was this dark, courtly, late-1700s harmonic sound?” Britell asked himself. “I played Jesse some of these chords,” he said, “and he was just sort of like, ‘Yes.’”“It was just a wonderful, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling that you don’t often have,” Armstrong told me. “To get that feeling, to feel like, Oh, my God, this is something which just feels like the show.” The waltz-like rhythm, reflecting the unsteady dance between the three central siblings, was “a smart insight” that continues to shape the way Armstrong writes the series.The show’s addictive title sequence was the last recording Britell made for Season 1. He had structured the season’s music like a symphony; the title theme, like an overture, introduces you to all the elements you’ll hear in the show, which Britell recited for me. The beguiling melody. The detuned pianos. “The cello melody, the idea of these huge beats, the weird sleigh bell — ” The sleigh bell? “That’s its own thing,” Britell admitted. “That actually doesn’t appear in other parts of the show.” The main theme is everything, but brighter. “You’re presented with these ideas so you will both recognize them but also notice how they change, and you’ll have this set of expectations. This is the world you’re about to enter.” When Britell sent the title theme to the production team, he reminded himself that the nature of his profession is adapting; he’s used to coming up with a hundred ideas, presenting a director a few dozen and possibly seeing them all rejected. But he also thought, I really don’t know what to do if they don’t like this.“I’ll never forget it,” Britell said. “Jesse sent an email back, and he was like, ‘I think the right words for this are [expletive] yeah.’”As Jenkins and I sat on the little studio couch, Britell played an early sketch for the opening of “The Underground Railroad.” A violin bent into a brass fanfare, and then a piano waltzed in, suggesting mystery — another winding melody that makes bewitching missteps. At this point, he and Jenkins had about three hours of music drafted, and at least as many still to go. He scrolled down a long list of file names. “Some of these things, we have a sort of very loose, amorphous idea,” he said, hitting play on another piece. “So this is an idea of descending downward — ”“I think this comes from the cicada,” Jenkins said. “Just that one melody.” He started singing softly. Do do do, do do do …Jenkins had been making recordings on set, collecting natural sounds that Britell would pitch down to make instruments. The piano track he’d played me earlier started out as a field recording: the whistle of cicadas and bird noise, an airy crackling that turned out to be cotton. “I just do Play-Doh with some of this audio,” Britell said, filtering out high frequencies and adding reverb until the cicadas sounded blurry and spectral. In one track, an insect caught in the Play-Doh turned into a bell, tolling the same three ghostly notes. “We don’t know what that is, by the way,” Jenkins said. “We just call him Fred now.”Britell started a new piano track.Jenkins: “And this piano was to match — ”Britell: “Trying to match Fred’s melody.”Jenkins: “So Fred the bug has to get a co-producer credit.”Jenkins had also been drawn to the noises of the human environment during the shoot. “We were shooting down in Savannah,” he said, “and there was a construction site next to our set, and I was like, ‘Oh, that drill has a really nice rhythm to it.’ And so I had the P.A.s go out and record it and sent it to Nick.” Britell started laughing. “I remember getting these texts from you in the middle of the day,” he said, “and it was just noise.”Britell and Jenkins.Emma McIntyre/Getty ImagesThere’s a slight Willy Wonka vibe to Britell in his studio, and as I processed Fred and the drill, he and Jenkins grinned like the inventors of the Everlasting Gobstopper. Over time, the two have grown more comfortable with thinking about a score in terms of manipulated recordings, not just a composition for instruments. “If everything’s in context,” Britell said, “the drill is music.” In “Moonlight,” they used ocean sounds; in “Beale Street,” subways. They were looking forward to getting new fire sounds. “We actually do have people on set burning things,” Jenkins said.Aria“The Underground Railroad”Britell cued up early footage from the show: images of an enslaved family in ragged clothing, faces stinging with confrontation; a white-haired Black man standing alone in a cotton field as cicada noises crackled, as if the field were catching fire; two young Black women seated at a dance, a man bowing and offering his hand — a fairy-tale sequence that feels more like a horror movie.“I didn’t mind the fire being out by that point,” Jenkins said. “Right as he reached for her hand.”I didn’t fully understand what they were up to until Britell played me a trailer they made for the Television Critics Association, a summary of the show’s music that starts with frantic arpeggios, almost unbearably high, then moves through the waltzing midrange of the Fred-​the-bug piano melody and settles gradually into a resonant bass. “It’s that descending idea,” he said. “Going underground, going downward.” The final bass notes were made from the sounds of the drill — you literally hit earth. They weren’t drawn to the drill just because they wanted to allude to the show’s title. It was an attraction Jenkins had to a sound that felt right, and then became right. “We start with an idea,” Britell said. “It’s a feeling. It could even be really subtle. That’s why I’m so sensitive to these early things. We need those early places. And the great part is when you start with these things, and you don’t know why, and then they actually — ”“Start to make sense,” Jenkins said.“And you’re just like, Oh, that’s why we’ve been following this.”Sitting in the dark with empty bottles of seltzer, none of us could have anticipated that the world was about to shut down. By the time the show neared completion a year later, Britell and Jenkins would be engaged in their most radical experiments to date. By that point, Britell’s language for parts of the project was bracingly tactile: He spoke of “stripping sounds down” to an “abrasive” raw surface, peeling them to their bones. When he bent notes enough, he says, “they revealed whole other characters.” “The Underground Railroad” emerged from last year broken and changed but still recognizable; you can feel that February session still underfoot. “It all winds up somewhere,” Britell had told me. “There’s no wrong turn.”As we wrapped up, Jenkins concluded, “The piano just works for the show.”“It does.”“Like, I can see the episodes when I hear this stuff.”“And what’s so interesting is at no point in any of the other projects did we feel that way,” Britell said.“The piano’s just the bedrock, man,” Jenkins said. “The piano and Fred.”Jamie Fisher is a writer whose work focuses on culture and literary criticism. She is working on a collection of short stories. This is her first feature for the magazine. More