How the Music of 'American Honey' Came Together

In the opening moments of Andrea Arnold's sprawling, intricate film American Honey, Lee Brice's "I Don't Dance" seeps through cheap speakers as the protagonist, Star, endures another day of violent domesticity in small-town Oklahoma. Her drunk man takes a plate of scavenged food from her hand, grabs her ass, and sways lazily to the song. His arm locks around the back of her neck, and Star begins to sob. From that point, American Honey is about Star's escape—from violence, banality, brutality, and routine—and the grand, sickly machismo of Brice's "I Don't Dance" makes for a sinister soundtrack to the claustrophobic sequence that prefaces the moment when Star's fight-or-flight instincts kick in.

Arnold's always used music in her films with a peculiar precision; a notable element of her 2009 film Fish Tank was its use of old-school hip-hop to animate the setting of an East London council estate, and American Honey—her first movie shot in the US, produced in part by Pulse Films (which VICE has a majority stake in)—employs music with more force than any of her previous films. When Star hits the road with a touring "mag-crew," led by a rat-tailed Shia LaBoeuf, in his most impressive role to date, tracks from Juicy J, E-40, ILoveMakonnen and DJ Carnage, and OG Maco take over the crew's bus as it rolls around the country's basin—an emphatic snapshot of the sounds of last summer, with every member of the crew rapping along.

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But the music of American Honey moves around the map as much as its characters: the movie takes its title from a Lady Antebellum track; in a specific scene, Bruce Springsteen's solemn cover of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" elicits a rare smile from Star; and Rihanna and Calvin Harris' "We Found Love" thumps at the film's romantic core. The film is a wide shot on music in America, free of niches, instead tapping in to brief moments of catharsis and nostalgia.

In advance of the film's release, we spoke to co-producer Julia Oh about how the street-cast actors influenced its soundtrack.

Noisey: Tell me about the decision to feature Lady Antebellum's "American Honey" in the film.
Julia Oh: Andrea did a bunch of road trips prior to us doing this film, and one of the songs that she heard a lot was "American Honey." I think it really spoke to her emotionally at that moment, so that song was always a part of her script. We knew there'd be a scene where they were going to play that song—we just had to figure out where it would be.

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A lot of the kids in the film didn't have prior acting experience.
None of them, actually—except for Shia, of course, and Riley Keough. Arielle Holmes was in one movie [Heaven Knows What], but it was based on her life and she was street-cast for that role. At the start of each scene in every city, we'd cast the locals to act in the film. The oil men are real, and so is the woman with two kids who's line-dancing in the beginning. Star's man at the beginning who does the creepy dance with her—he's just a really nice guy, and he's from Muskogee. Everyone was street-cast.

To what extent did others's taste dictate the music?
The music came from three sources, one of which was Andrea's own musical inspiration. She loves music and had a few songs that were in the story, like "We Found Love." She was listening to Mazzy Star and a lot of the country songs that are featured, like [Steve Earle's] "Copperhead Road" A lot of the trap songs came from what the kids were actually listening to. When we started the road trip, we realized that if we were actually going to be on the road for that long, we'd need a lot of music. While shooting, I'd send Andrea songs to listen to, she'd pick one, and we'd try and clear it with our music supervisors, Earworm Music. We got maybe 60% of them, and then after the shoot was done we asked everybody for more opinions, ideas, and songs. It was very collaborative.

Kevin Gates' "Out The Mud" came directly from the kids, who we cast from all around— Panama City Beach in Florida, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. They were already listening to a lot of trap, but they also really liked country too. For the scene with Lady Antebellum's "American Honey," nobody had to learn the words because they all knew it by heart already.

Why do you think the kids connected to trap so much?
The summer of 2015 just felt like the summer of trap to me. While we were driving around smaller towns like Muskogee, Oklahoma or Grand Island or Rapid City, we'd hear a lot of local radio pop hits—but once in a while Fetty Wap's "Trap Queen" would come on. We wanted to use it in the opening scene but couldn't get it, because by the end of the summer everybody knew that song.

It's a movie of that year and of right now, and so are the kids—everything is a YOLO lifestyle for them, and they gravitated to things that are in existence at the moment. Trap was a trend that they all heard back where they came from—trap just spread that summer in the cities and small rural places.

One of the most surprising musical moments in the film is Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "Careless Love," which plays during one of the film's darkest moments in the film. Why was that song chosen for that moment?
Originally we tried to use Nirvana's "In The Pines," which also really worked. Andrea never tries to manipulate the audience's emotions, but both of those songs had a rawness that worked. She's always been a fan of (Bonnie "Prince" Billy's Will Oldham)—we tried to cast him at one point—so that's why she put that in there.

​​The ​American Honey ​​Soundtrack is out today, September 30, on Universal.

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