The National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner Open About 'Cyrano' Film Soundtrack

Aaron Dessner has been keeping himself plenty busy the past couple years. After his band The National released their latest album I Am Easy To Find in 2019, he's helped produce two Taylor Swift albums, put out an album with his other band Big Red Machine, and wrote the soundtrack to the new movie Cyrano with his twin brother Bryce. The lyrics to all the songs were written by the twins' National bandmate Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser.

During an interview with NME the Dessner brothers opened up about writing the soundtrack and divulged that there's a new National song at the end of the film.

"We were exchanging music like we always do, but there was something about Cyrano, at least in Matt’s case, that was more direct in the lyrics, and that felt like an evolution," Bryce explained of Berninger's involvement with the project. "It’s really the first time that Matt and Carin have written narrative-led songs that fit inside a story. The most famous scene in the movie is the balcony scene, and that’s a song, so it was a huge shift in our writing. National songs have a little bit of narrative, but they’re largely about [ourselves] and not in service of a bigger story. There’s a new National song at the end of the movie too, called ‘Somebody Desperate.’”

"Somebody Desperate" was written specifically for the movie, and Bryce believes all the music in the movie resemble their work in the band. "They’re National songs in a way, and have an interior, intimate feeling, and weave in and out of the narrative seamlessly,” he explained.

The film, which is an adaptation of the off-Broadway musical that the brothers scored, stars Game of Thrones' Peter Dinklage and hits theaters this December. Watch the first Cyrano trailer above.