When directors Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar tasked longtime collaborator Bryce Dessner with writing the score for Train Dreams , the story of an early 20th century logger watching the world change around him, it was only natural that Dessner go to the woods, too.

“I wanted to get away from my computer,” Dessner says. “A lot of film scoring is done in front of a picture. Often with scores you see for big movies like a Marvel film or something, there’s a lot of advanced technology. This was the opposite.”

For about a week, Dessner, a fan of the Denis Johnson novel on which the film is based, holed up at Flora Recording & Playback in Portland, Oregon, the same studio his band, The National, has worked out of. There, he recorded with no shortage of vintage gear, from upright pianos and

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