Watch: U.S. Girls – ‘You’ve Got Everything – But A Smile (Theme From Dead Lover)’

Meg Remy made her first foray into film last year, collaborating with filmmaker Grace Glowicki to compose the score for her directorial debut, a surreal horror-comedy entitled Dead Lover — which received its world premiere in the Midnight Section at Sundance, and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Gothenburg Film Festival.

With the theatrical release of Dead Lover from today (20 March), U.S. Girls shares the glamorous, romantic, and eerie centrepiece of her original score, ‘You’ve Got Everything – But A Smile (Theme From Dead Lover)’ – a synth-heavy, theremin-inclined waltz, co-written with Jack Lawrence (of The Raconteurs, and also a key member of the new Nashville-based U.S. Girls live band). The track also comes alongside a dedicated video, watch here.

Says Remy of the track and her involvement in the Dead Lover score: “Director Grace Glowicki and I approached the score for Dead Lover by working largely with music that already existed…public domain recordings, fragments from my dusty hard drives, and compositions from my first three deeply lo-fi home-recorded albums. We gathered these sounds into piles we called ‘scraps’ and collaged the score from them, passing the timeline back and forth, adding or subtracting scraps until it felt finished. Even the main theme, ‘You’ve Got Everything – But A Smile’, was a scrap of sorts It was an incomplete song Jack Lawrence had living on his computer that got unearthed, polished up and put to use. With all that in mind, it felt intuitive to take a similar collage approach to this music video. Instead of cutting a traditional trailer from the film, I went through all the footage that was shot and edited together ‘scraps’ that weren’t used in the final cut. To paraphrase Kurt Schwitters, when everything has broken down, new things can be made from the fragments to create connections, ideally between everything in this world. Collaging never fails.”

Dead Lover follows a lonely gravedigger who goes to morbid lengths to reanimate her dead lover through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love. It has received praise thus far from Variety, Dread Central, Esquire, IndieWire, ScreenRant, Bloody Disgusting, and Roger Ebert.

Last year, U.S. Girls shared her ninth studio album, Scratch It – an instinct-driven amalgam of country, gospel, garage rock, and soul, recorded live onto analogue tape over just ten days with a newly formed Nashville-based U.S. Girls band. U.S. Girls also recently shared a brand new two-track project entitled ‘Running Errands (Today)’ / ‘Running Errands (Yesterday)’, celebrating ten years of her 2015 record Half Free and commemorating the evolution she has experienced over ten years with 4AD.

This spring, the full U.S. Girls Nashville-based band will play a series of shows in Nashville (following a screening of Dead Lover), Atlanta, and Pensacola, FL (her first show in Florida, to date). In May, a special U.S. Girls duo featuring Meg Remy and Dorothea Paas will open for Belle & Sebastian in Chicago and Toronto. Last year, U.S. Girls toured heavily throughout the States with her Nashville band (including a date opening for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in New York), in addition to a run of local shows with her Canadian band.

Purchase / stream Scratch It here.
Stream / download ‘You’ve Got Everything – But A Smile (Theme From Dead Lover)’ here.