‘THIS IS A LIFE’ FROM ‘EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE’
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is a heady multiversal brew that bends alternate realities through martial-arts madness to reinvigorate a family. Which makes the title of its end-credits song by soundtrack composers Son Lux, noted singer-songwriter Mitski and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer David Byrne apropos: “This Is a Life.”
Son Lux guitarist Rafiq Bhatia explains the idea: “With all of the possibilities of life in front of us, we choose to be here, doing what we’re doing in the midst of each other.”
“This is a life,” Mitski sings dreamily in the song, with Byrne’s soothing voice threading in with “every possibility.” It’s a conversation continued from another universe. “Free from destiny,” she continues; “I choose you, and you choose me,” he responds.
After seeing a rough cut of the film, Byrne’s feedback to its directors and Son Lux was “If you could do a song at the end that reminds people how much heart there is in this show — because they’re gonna be thinking, ‘Oh, my God, my mind is blown, all this craziness, what dimension are we in?’ — to bring it back to the emotional center, how actually moving it is and tag that in the song ....
“I think the guys kind of did that,” Byrne continues. “They said, ‘We’re gonna send this to Mitski; she’s gonna record her vocal, and you have to figure out how to work your vocal around hers.’ So I wrote extra words responding to what she was singing, tried to do counter melodies, and then of course added harmonies, so it became like a little dialogue.”
At first, Mitski’s vocals take the lead and Byrne responds; later, he takes the lead and she responds. Around this, they intertwine and harmonize.
Apart from what Son Lux (founder Ryan Lott, Bhatia and percussionist Ian Chang) had in place, Mitski made adjustments such as incorporating a line of dialogue from the film that actress Stephanie Hsu sang instead of speaking: “Sucked ... into ... a ba-aagel.”
Lott says, “I loved that Mitski picked up on that moment and found a way to use that melody and those words as a background vocal in a special moment in the song.”
Lott points out the song doesn’t follow the common verse-chorus structure but feels as if it’s in two distinct parts separated by that “bagel” moment: “It feels noncyclical and nonlinear.”
As to the flights of fancy the multiverse tale enjoys, Byrne considers some of the ideas in quantum physics that bend his mind and says, “It makes you think the universe is more like a web, a network, an entangled thing. It’s an entangled web of relationships between all these particles and therefore bigger things, cosmic bodies and life forms and everything else. And we’re all somehow, in a kind of cosmic way, connected. I use the word ‘entanglement’ in the song; I intentionally use these terms from quantum physics in the sense of a relationship.”
Perhaps the ideas are expressed no more pithily than in the song’s final words: “This is a life / This is our life.”
As Byrne says, “It’s not a song that smacks you over the head, but if you listen to it, it’s quite beautiful.”