Meg Remy has covered a remarkable amount of ground with her U.S. Girls project over the past 20 years, from droning lo-fi to high-concept disco and smooth soul—yet it wasn’t until last year’s festival debut of Grace Glowicki’s sci-fi sex comedy Dead Lover that she’d dipped her toes into the realm of film scores. Rather than approaching the gig conventionally, Remy explained that the score came together from various “scraps” of sound pulled from the public domain and even U.S. Girls’ scrappy early discography, which she then “collaged” with the assistance of Glowicki and Remy’s recent songwriting partner Jack Lawrence (of The Raconteurs fame).
Among these scraps, though, the soundtrack centerpiece “You’ve Got Everything – But a Smile” is a fully intact original U.S. Girls single gliding on warm synths and Remy’s soothing vocals. As Remy shares with us, the backbone of the track came from one of Lawrence’s recordings that she happened to be tinkering with when she was brought onboard to soundtrack Dead Lovers. “One day, I was listening to the lyrics for the song and realized that they fit well with the subject matter of Dead Lover,” she says. “My instinct told me to send it to Grace. So I did, and she loved it. The song and its heartbreaking synth melody ended up becoming the glue of the score. This outcome never could have been engineered or achieved by other means; it was pure synergy.”
Out today, the single’s music video embraces the surrealist stage-play aesthetic of the film it appears in. Check it out below, and take a look at your local listings to see if Dead Lover is playing this weekend near you.
