It’s hard to define which genre of music the song “In Moonlight” belongs to — a track from the original soundtrack to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners that dances between blues, grunge, and so many other influences. For Jerry Cantrell, who collaborated on the song with Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson, that makes sense. Because “that’s kind of the purpose of the film.”
The box-office hit, now entering its second weekend in theaters, is about a wild night at a 1932 Mississippi juke joint that ends up having a vampire problem. But it’s also a powerful look at the role music plays in our culture across time and space, and how so many modern genres are deeply connected — and also owe so much to the blues.
Göransson (Consequence’s Composer of the Year for his 2023 Oppenheimer score) and Coogler have been working together since the beginning of their respective careers, meeting at USC as students. “I would say blues music is America’s greatest contribution to culture,” Göransson tells Consequence. “What we’re trying to do with the soundtrack, all of these songs and all these varieties of artists, is show that there’s a thread that goes back to the blues — both through Ryan’s storytelling, but also through through the language of all these artists.”
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The soundtrack for Sinners features performances from film stars Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Lola Kirke, and Peter Dreimanis, in addition to collaborations with artists like Cantrell, Rod Wave, Brittany Howard, Buddy Guy, Eric Gales, Don Toliver, and Lars Ulrich. Ulrich was actually the mutual connection who brought Cantrell on board the album, calling the Alice in Chains founder to let him know that his name had come up for a potential collaboration.
Cantrell says that he played a lot of blues in his early days: “I went through my Robert Johnson phase, I went through my Jimi Hendrix phase, all of the great blues players in the Delta Blues origin and all that. There’s definitely a healthy dose of that in me from the start, and I appreciate and relate to that music. All American music pretty much is a mashup: Rock and roll and rap and soul and blues and jazz. It’s a mashup of all of that stuff, but it’s uniquely American. And it started in the delta.”
According to Göransson, the idea of involving Cantrell in the soundtrack began while Coogler was working on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which coincided with the death of rapper Young Dolph, a favorite of Coogler’s. Coogler was feeling depressed by how many rappers rap and sing about a lifestyle they want to escape — a lifestyle that ends up killing them. When he asked a producer on the movie “Is there any other type of music that’s like that?”, the producer pointed out how many grunge artists have fallen into a similar trap.
“Ryan was like, ‘Oh my God, you’re so right about that,’” Göransson says. The director, he adds, “grew up listening to grunge because there was a big grunge wave in Oakland in the early nineties, and one of his all-time favorite grunge bands happened to be Alice in Chains. I think Ryan was especially drawn to Jerry’s music because it has such a close connection to blues — some of the instrumentation with harmonica, and a lot of the melodies and the vocals.”
So, while Coogler was writing Sinners, he kept sending Göransson Alice in Chains tracks, saying “‘I’m listening to this right now. This is so good, and it’s so powerful.’” Then, a year later, as the team was finishing the movie and figuring out their plans for the soundtrack, they reached out to Cantrell about a collaboration.
Cantrell likes the challenge of being brought onto a movie soundtrack, because “it’s interesting as a writer to be brought into something with kind of a directive. Writing a song for a movie is one thing, but taking the movie in and trying to accentuate it and add to telling the story… I’m trying to tell the story of the characters and the themes in the movie. It’s kind of a cool assignment because it takes you out of yourself.”
Soon, Cantrell was in the studio with Göransson, listening to the Oscar-winning composer’s main theme for the film. This led to what Cantrell describes as about a week of “messing around with ideas,” a tighter timeframe than he might have preferred. “[Göransson] was like, ‘I need to deliver this for mastering by the end of the week,’” he says. “And that was in maybe about four or five days. I’m like, ‘That’s normally a little bit too quick for me. I’m going to try it, man — I don’t know if I can deliver for you, but I’m going to give it a shot.’”
While Göransson liked his initial ideas, Cantrell still felt that he was having a hard time with the project — until he got a chance to watch the movie in a private screening with Göransson’s wife and collaborator Serena Göransson. “The most helpful part for me was sitting with Serena and watching the screening, because I was able to absorb the film, take notes on the storytelling phrases and subjects, and craft the tune out of that.”
Continues Cantrell, “The thing that always takes the longest for me is what you’re actually trying to say. And so we just rolled our sleeves up, dug in, and Friday came and went, and [Göransson] was like, ‘You know what? I’ll give you one more week.’ Which was helpful.” He laughs. “So that extra week, I was able to get some lyrics together. I cut the vocals at my house, and then we went over to Ludwig’s studio and put it together. And it turned out really great.”
There’s a lot of family history caught up in the making of this soundtrack: Göransson’s father was a blues musician, while Cantrell says his great-grandmother was “a good deal Choctaw,” the same tribe as a character in the movie. “That’s another interesting way that life works — if you look at it, it throws up little signposts to you that maybe speak to you being on the right path for yourself. It was a cool little thing, when I was watching that,” Cantrell adds.
Cantrell knows he, like every other artist working on the soundtrack, knows that he has “a unique musical fingerprint. That comes with you… I think the thing for me was, it’s a really unusual arrangement. We messed around with it a couple of times. We tried to turn it into more of a rock song — it went through a couple of different amalgamations before we ended up coming back to Ludwig’s original musical idea. Some of the effects on the vocals are a little bit different than I normally would probably present myself in. But I placed myself in Ludwig’s hands and let him craft me, and that was a really cool place to be.”
It meant Cantrell was doing “something a little left of center of where I normally operate. But the lyrics and the way that I work with harmony — that all remains me. It’s just a different stage, a different light, you know? And that was exciting to me.”
Both men say that they’d love to work together again: “If he ever needs my flavor on something, I’m right there for him when he calls,” Cantrell laughs.
“Yeah, it’s just an honor, obviously, to work with one of the all-time greatest artists, and one of my favorite artists,” Göransson says. “To bring it back to the movie — it does feel like magic, what we do.”
Sinners is in theaters now.
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