Jim Jarmusch, a friend and great filmmaker, made a movie called Dead Man in 1995 and asked me to do the soundtrack. Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer played the two main characters in this epic film about an Indian named Nobody, who was played by Farmer, and a cosmic-searching character played by Depp. When I saw the film, it only had dialogue, and I told Jim it was a masterpiece. It was. It was a strange classic, in a world alone. It already looked like a silent-movie classic to me, the kind where someone would play live music in a theater on an organ or piano while the movie was projected, although it did have dialogue so it was not precisely a silent movie. Jim really wanted me to do the music and convinced me that it was needed. I drove the Continental to the sessions. For my approach to the Dead Man project, I decided to duplicate the feeling of a musician playing music live to accompany a film in a movie theater. I rented an old stage in San Francisco from Mike Mason, a friend who I had met while filming Human Highway in 1980, and set up with about twenty different TV monitors in a circle around me in the middle of the room. The monitors ranged from seventy inches to seven inches in size. I set up my guitar, Old Black, my amplifier rig, and my old piano dead in the center of the room surrounded by all of the TVs. Everywhere I looked, I saw the movie. It was inescapable. When I felt like playing to it, I picked up an instrument and played live. I played Old Black, my electric guitar, solo for most of the movie, making sound effects and developing a theme called “The Wyoming Burnout” that I had written years before for a cinematic idea of my own. I developed another theme I used for one of the supporting characters. I played it all live. We recorded three passes through the whole movie without stopping. I chose to use the first half of the second pass and the second half of the first one. Neil Young Special Deluxe October 2014