Oscar Isaac: The Music Man

“I’ve been play­ing gui­tar since I was about 12 years old. I grew up list­ing to a lot of music. My dad’s a musi­cian. He con­stant­ly had Cat Stevens and the Bea­t­les on in the back­ground. So I had music all around, and was in real­ly bad bands of all shapes and sizes and gen­res for long time. They were nev­er folk bands, though. I would always write lit­tle sen­ti­men­tal acoustic picked songs, but they nev­er real­ly made it into rota­tion. It was most­ly hard­core and punk bands. Paper Face was the soft rock band. Pet­ri­fied Frogs. The hard­core band was called Clos­et Het­ro­sex­u­als because we all had long hair and every­one thought we were gay. There was a ska band called The Worms and then there was the Blink­ing Under­dogs which was a punk band. My cur­rent band is called Night Lab. I love to play music, but I think a lot of this was for the girls, if you know what I mean?”

“At 13, you’re too young to decide what you real­ly want to do in life. At that age, I just want­ed to do every­thing. I want­ed to play gui­tar. I want­ed to make lit­tle movies. I want­ed to act in plays. I couldn’t sep­a­rate all that. It was just all fun. It was only when I got to col­lege age and I was accept­ed into Juil­liard that I saw act­ing as a legit­i­mate thing. I couldn’t believe peo­ple would pay you for that. The finan­cial side of things appealed to me at the time, which I guess is what Llewyn Davis is about in some respects. So I thought what the heck, I’ll leave the Blink­ing Under­dogs for a while and go study acting.

“Iron­i­cal­ly, it was at Juil­liard where I real­ly learned to sing. I wasn’t a very good singer before. My dad was always watch­ing my bands and say­ing, ​‘you got­ta get a new singer, kid.’ So they taught me how to use my diaphragm, fill the lungs and do all sorts of weird stuff. And then when I left I found I had to keep play­ing music. It had become a part of me. What’s crazy is that in the last three years, all these things are fus­ing togeth­er again, just like they did when I was 13.”

“Here’s a crazy sto­ry. I was doing this real­ly small movie and there was this guy in the scene, he was an extra, he’s in his six­ties and he’s play­ing a drunk in a bar. There was this gui­tar just sit­ting there on the set and in between takes he picked it up and start­ed play­ing. So I asked him what his sto­ry was, and he said that he was a gui­tar play­er from New York. So I told him that I had this audi­tion com­ing up and that the part was based a lit­tle bit on Dave Van Ronk. So he says that he played with Dave Van Ronk. And then he told me to come by his place, and I asked him where that was and he told me that he lived above the Gaslight on Mac­Dou­gal Street and that he’d lived there since the’70s.

“It was like this time cap­sule. He had these stacks of records and gui­tars all over the place. And he doesn’t start play­ing Dave Van Ronk, he starts play­ing the stuff that Dave Van Ronk was lis­ten­ing to, like the Rev­erend Gary Davis and Light­nin’ Hop­kins. And then he intro­duced me to Dave Van Ronk’s wid­ow. And this was all before the audi­tion. So I felt this has to hap­pen. It was meant to be. So then I start­ed play­ing with him. I’d go along to cof­fee hous­es and open up for him and we would share the bas­ket. And that real­ly immersed me in the whole scene and allowed an organ­ic folk sound to come out.”