I must say your new band Baby is a very good looking group of people. Did you use the NSYNC method of putting the group together?

Hardly. I just happen to have hot friends who rock.

Please give us blurb (that might appear on a CD sticker) to describe your sound.

BABY is Future Roller Metal. It is my dream of hit radio.

Will you be touring?

Yes, but I don’t know when yet. Probably beginning this fall.

Journey replaced Steve Perry, Judas Priest replaced Rob Halford. If the members of Baby revolted and kicked you out of the band, who would you like your replacement to be?

Freddy Mercury’s bones

You decide to arrange a festival tour. What musical acts would you like to see on the bill with you? What would you call the tour?

That’s a toughie. If I were to do it right this very second, and it was comprised of people and groups that are a.) still living and b.) still together, it would include Glass Candy, Revl9n, Fennesz, Dizzee Rascal, maybe 2manyDJ’s, and then round it off with a more composerly songwriter type, I’m not sure who. I guess I’d have to call it Heavy Rotation 2003.

Let’s talk about your career composing music for movies. How did you get started? Was it something you always wanted to do or just a cool side gig to pay the bills?

Movies have always been a close second to music in terms of sheer passion bordering on occasional mania; so, as with music, when it occurred to me that making music for movies was something that a person could actually DO, there was no question that I wanted to be one of those people. Having said that, it happened quite organically. I always made more experimental sort of proto-ambient type music late at night, in my spare time, separate from whatever band I happened to be in, from the time I got my first four-track when I was about 15 or 16.

People said it sounded like “movie music.” Then, when I was in college (NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing — essentially a performance-art program) I began doing sound design and music for theater and performance pieces, as well as my own sound installations and music-based theater. A lot of my friends were in film school at NYU, and as they started making movies, they naturally needed music, which I happily provided. One of these people was David Wain (who would later direct Wet Hot American Summer, which I co-scored with Teddy Shapiro), my childhood friend and college roommate, who was also a member of the comedy group The State. Shudder To Think was happening at the same time, and we were beginning to chafe at the constraints of having to write traditional (such as they were) rock songs. We needed an outlet for other kinds of music we wanted to try, and we were all big movie fans. My roommate after college, Jessie Peretz (who directed the first Shudder To Think video, as well as all of the hilarious Foo Fighters classics and other notables) was about to make his first movie, First Love, Last Rites, which needed a lot of songs in a lot of different styles, as well as traditional score. He asked us to do it, and that’s how it all began. Basically through friends.

At what stage of the movie do you, the composer, come in? Meaning, do you start composing music at the beginning script level or do you wait to see actual filmed scenes?

It depends on the film, but usually I don’t come in until the movie is shot and in the editing phase. If a movie has an on-screen performance of an original song then, of course, it needs to be written and recorded beforehand. I just did one like that for a new Richard Linklater movie called The School Of Rock, which I then scored much later, once they had the whole thing nearly edited. Sometimes a director likes to get, or at least develop music early, so he or she can play it while shooting, live with it and play it for the actors. There are positives and negatives to both approaches.

School of Rock stars Jack Black. Sounds like a lot of fun. What kind of music did you create for the film?

I did one song for the climactic battle of the bands scene that sounds like Creed (only better, one hopes) and the score is rock, kind of a garagier Queens of the Stone Age.

What is more challenging, doing original music for comedies or dramas?

• I think they’re all equally challenging, although the nature of the challenges is different with each film. Some variables are:
• The chemistry between me and the director
• The level of involvement of the director in the music-making process
• The size/budget of the film
• The motivation of the people with decision-making power (i.e. the art to $$$ ratio)
• And the musical taste of a director, and how able they are to articulate themselves musically what the drama calls for and can support, musically. Wet Hot American Summer, for instance, called for a fairly traditional score. With Roger Dodger, Dylan Kidd (the director) wanted something entirely different, and so encouraged me to experiment and to take different kinds of chances. Both are equally difficult. In fact, in some ways it’s harder to make an exceptional traditional score, because the rules are strict and the bar is high, as so many good ones have already been made and I want all of my music to be special. It’s the same way with making records. If something is utterly unique, then there is nothing to compare it to. To make a great pop, or country, or polka album, you’ve got to transcend everything that’s come before.

Please give me four movie makers with whom you’d like to work.

David Lynch, David O. Russell, the guy who made Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly) and Steven Soderbergh.

Allow me to reminisce. Musically and vocally Shudder To Think really stood apart from the norm in the D.C. punk scene. Describe how your band did and did not fit in.

Well, I came to D.C. from Cleveland, OH, where I cut my teeth playing in pop, punk, new wave, and metal bands that didn’t really discriminate about what was cool and had “integrity” or “cred” or whatever. So to me, it was all one thing, and that thing was my savior. I knew about Minor Threat and Bad Brains (still two of the all-time great American bands) and maybe a few other D.C. bands, but my influences, vocally, were not of the screaming variety.

Also, I preferred the West Coast punk scene (X, Germs, etc.) to the less romantically poetic, less melodic and in my opinion (at the time) less stylish East Coast harDCore thing. I grew up on Wings and Sex Pistols, so I wanted melody and glamour. Therefore, when I auditioned for the D.C. band “Stüge”, it was kind of a strange collision between 1980’s Shaker Heights, OH and Dischord Records’ ubiquitous influence on Washington white kids. Neither side liked it, but after a few rehearsals we all had that tingle like, “Wow… this could really be something…”

For a long time (about two or three years), everybody hated us, nobody would come to our shows, I would just get drunk and run around keening like a banshee. In short, we fucking rocked. Amanda McKaye (Ian’s sister, with whom I attended high school) was starting a label and agreed to put out our first single (one of my very favorite Shudder To Think recordings, the “‘It Was Arson’ 7″) and subsequent first LP. I think the money was probably coming from Ian, but he and Jeff (Nelson) were maybe not so sure about us still, so it was almost like a farm-club for Dischord, or so it felt. But things were changing in DC, and the stars aligned, and gradually we became an integral part of what was happening musically at the time, even though we never really sounded like anybody else.

Are you still tight with people from the old days?

We don’t keep in constant touch, but there is a lot of love, and when we see each other, its family, both with everybody at Dischord, and members of Shudder To Think.

What were the positives and negatives about signing with a major label (Epic)? Would you ever go back to a major label with Baby?

Major labels are everything everybody says they are, both good and bad, and so are indies.

When and why did you make the move to New York City?

I moved to New York for college in 1987, about a year into Shudder To Think’s 12-year stint. I was born in New York, and like a salmon, spent my life fighting my way back. When I would come to New York, I always felt OK, like I could just get lost, no looks, pure possibility. Then, when I was a senior in high school and deciding on college, David Wain called me from Cleveland, where we had grown up together, and said “I’m going to NYU — you should go, too, and we’ll be roommates.” That was far more compelling than the Dramatic Arts curriculum at Vassar, or Northwestern or wherever.

So it’s you and David Wain at NYU. Give us the genesis of the comedy group The State.

David was my roommate at Britteny Dorm, and we met Ken Marino our first day of orientation, because a friend of his was David and my third in room 603. We (Ken, David and I) became best friends. The two of them joined a comedy group called ‘The New Group which went through various mutations and became The State. Most of us lived in the same dorm, and many of us were roommates at one time or another.

There seems to be a tight-knit group of indie comedy, film and music people in NYC. Would you ever leave for Hollywood if the film thing really took off?

I’d like to work and live and make records in both places. My girlfriend, Meggan, is a screenwriter among other things, and her brother (Tom Lennon) lives in LA, plus most of our friends do a lot of back-and-forthing, so anything’s possible…

Would you ever go the route of The Who and The Ramones and license some old Shudder To Think songs to be used in TV commercials?

The product and the money would have to be right. I don’t have a categorical beef with commercials as such (there are always a few great ones out there and it can be a fun format to work with), but the exponential growth and unbalanced/unchecked dominance of commercial culture is horrifying. While I believe in living by example, and while I don’t want to feed The Beast as it were, licensing music for commercials, as well as doing new music for commercials can, under the right circumstances, be a great way to both get one’s music out there and to get paid simultaneously, particularly right now, when it’s next to impossible to cobble together a career making records.

I read on your website that you just fronted a Bad Brains cover band for a show at Arlen Grocery. I take it you still enjoy belting out some good, old-fashioned punk? Did you wear some natty dreds?

Just the sheer dread in my heart.

Weirdly, I don’t consider Bad Brains to be old-fashioned anything that music is as other as ever, and miles ahead of almost everything being made today, musically.

What’s the best love song ever?

“A Song For You,” written by Leon Russell as performed by Donnie Hathaway. There are others.

Who is the coolest person you have worked with in music or movies? Why?

Music: John Doe, because X is my favorite band and John Doe is a beautiful, graceful songwriter and individual who has come to me, with Exene Cervenka, in dreams, and offered support and advice.

Movies: David Wain, because he is my best friend.

What do you consider a “good day” for Craig Wedren?

Tomorrow.

More Craig: www.myspace.com/craigwedren