Kodaline have told TEN that recording a song especially for the new nautical rescue movie The Finest Hours has made them even more interested in creating the soundtrack for an entire film - and they're open to offers.
The Irish quartet are the only band to appear on the soundtrack to the Chris Pine and Casey Affleck-starring The Finest Hours, which tells the true story of the U.S. Coastguard's mission to reach the crew of the SS Pendleton, an oil tanker that split in two off the coast of Massachusetts in 1952. Kodaline poignantly cover the much-loved sea shanty Haul Away Joe at the end of the movie.
Read Harry Guerin's review of The Finest Hours here.
Chris Pine in The Finest Hours
The offer to record the song came from studio Disney when Kodaline were taking a month's break from touring but, as fate would have it, bassist Jay Boland was on holidays in Los Angeles when contact was made.
"The email came in and they were like, 'Is there any chance you'd be able to come to a screening tomorrow in LA?'," Boland told TEN. "Myself and my fiancée went down and got on really well with the executives. It was a magical experience - going to the Disney lot and having a private screening of a film that nobody's seen yet."
On the lot, Boland discovered that the offer to record the track was no fluke and that the producers had been listening to Kodaline's album In a Perfect World for "about a year".
"They were honestly fans and knew what they were talking about when they asked us about styles," he recounted. "About a week later we were all back in Ireland, had a go at it and it worked out. By the time we'd sent two things [versions] back to America it was done. We had a lot of fun with it and I think the storyline linked up quite nicely in that a lot of the people in Massachusetts in the 1950s were Irish. I don't think they asked us because we were Irish but it was very serendipitous."
Boland said that it would be a "huge honour" for Kodaline if other filmmakers were to approach them to soundtrack their work.
"I think it's on every band's bucket list, isn't it?" he enthused. "It's up there with getting your Grammy and playing Madison Square Garden. I think we'd love to. Even before I joined Kodaline I was working with an Irish composer, Lance Hogan, doing European films and small Irish things. It is a really exciting area to work in.
"One of our favourite things, even when we're writing music ourselves, is to stick a film on with no sound - it's just much easier than having nothing to play off. Having a visual there, it makes you think of things. Hopefully we can find a group of young people we can work with in the next while. If anyone offered us a movie I'm sure we'd jump at it."
Asked whether Haul Away Joe had given Kodaline any ideas for their next record, Boland replied laughing: "I don't know if we'll have a shanties album, but it's definitely given us s different view on how other people hear us. We always say we really don't know what we sound like; we just do what we do and people seem to keep coming back so far."
And on the subject of people coming back, Boland admitted that Kodaline are counting down the days until they're reunited with Irish fans at their Marlay Park show in July.
"We just can't wait. We're already messing about in soundchecks, thinking about what we can do different and how we can make the show bigger."
The Finest Hours opens in cinemas this Friday, February 19. Kodaline play Marlay Park on Friday July 8.
