You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Everything everywhere all at once is a sci-fi comedy independent film that came out in the spring of 2022.

It's a huge hit that made over a hundred million dollars at the box office, and it's already been named the best movie of the year by a bunch of publications and awards organizations.

The movie stars the legendary actress Michelle Yeau, and it was directed by the Daniels, the directing duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Shinerd.

The score for the film is by the band Sunlux, and in addition to the score, Sunlux also made an original song for the film's end credits.

It's called This Is a Life, and it features two prestigious guest vocalists, David Bern of the Talking Heads and Mitsky.

For this episode, I spoke to Ryan Lot from Sunlux and the Daniels.

Ryan tells the story of how the song was created, with his bandmates and Mitsky and David Bern and Daniels all adding to it and shaping it.

I don't know what we should.

This is Ryan Lot from Sunlux.

Sunlux is Rafik Batia, Ian Chang, and Ni. We were in New York doing a bunch of recording for what was going to be our next record, and our manager reached out and was like, hey, these guys are Daniels, they're interested in you guys scoring their next project.

Hello, this is the voice of Daniel Kwan.

And this is Dan Scheiner. I don't sound that different.

We had an initial call with Daniels, and they pitched the idea to us. It didn't really make a lot of sense, but it sounded super fascinating.

It's a sci-fi action adventure where a middle-aged woman gets taken on a journey across the multiverse, but she mostly gets freaked out about the lives she could have led, and about the overwhelming number of options out there.

The whole movie is an adventure trying to engage with what it feels like to be alive today and to be overwhelmed, and how do you figure out how to love in the noise.

So then after the call, they sent us the script, and there was no way to anticipate what was on those pages. I thought my PDF was broken. This page can't come after that page.

You know what I mean? So I really thought it was broken, or something was weird, and I checked in with the guys, I was like, yeah, have you guys started to read this yet?

Refee laughed his ass off, like he couldn't put it down, but I didn't really get it at first. I couldn't keep up with it.

By the time I made it through, I said to myself, what have been cool to make a movie with the Daniels? Too bad this movie is never going to get made.

You know, that was definitely my position. Nobody is going to make this movie.

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