- Film And TV
- 23 Aug 19
Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea have collaborated on new track 'Daily Battles'.
The slow piano driven ballad will feature in the film Motherless Brooklyn, written and directed by and starring Edward Norton. Based on a 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem, it centres on a private investigator with Tourette syndrome (Norton) working to solve the murder of his mentor (Bruce Willis) in 1950's New York.
The actor recently told Rolling Stone that he emailed Yorke the Motherless Brooklyn script as part of a pitch for the singer to compose an original song for the movie. While he did not expect a reply, the Radiohead frontman answered two weeks later with a track already written.
In the Rolling Stone interview Norton says: “He sent me this track of him on a piano singing it and I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark, crying from listening to this song ... It’s so instantly heartbreaking and evocative of so many of the themes to the movie without being overly specific to them."
Norton loved the track so much in fact, it led him to alter his movie. "I thought the idea of daily battles that everyone is fighting, that you’re trying to rise up and out of, was so evocative that I went back into the script and put the phrase into a scene.”
'Daily Battles' is indeed a beautiful delicate track, featuring the same aching melancholy Yorke brought to the soundtrack of Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria reboot of last year. It's also noteworthy for reteaming the Radiohead man with Flea (who worked on the horns section of the new song). The two last collaborated on Amok, a 2013 record from supergroup Atoms for Peace.
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Motherless Brooklyn is out in Irish cinemas November 29. It also stars Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Willem Dafoe.
Listen to 'Daily Battles' below.
Meanwhile, see the trailer for Motherless Brooklyn here.