Jim Jarmusch: Song & Dance Man

Jim Jarmusch’s first feature film, 1980’s Permanent Vacation, begins with what we recognise as sounds from the street: the rhythm of boots on pavement, the drone of vehicles, a saxophone riff being played by a street performer. As the opening shots of Manhattan unfold, we notice that the sounds and images are related but out of sync. The busker is playing a different song; there’s a crowd of people on the sidewalk but we can only hear one set of footsteps. Later in the film, Jarmusch’s own score is dominated by a sinister loop of church bells haunting the protagonist – a childhood memory turned into a nightmare. We’re unsure what is real and what is stylised; the objective is made subjective in the filmmaker’s hands.

Over 45 years later, Jarmusch is still using music and sound to tilt our perspective, showing inner and outer worlds in tandem across his collaborative albums and film scores. As with Permanent Vacation, the score for Jarmusch’s most recent film, Father Mother Sister Brother, is written and performed by the filmmaker himself. As his characters exist as near strangers in familial rooms, swells of guitar and synthesiser suggest unseen private worlds. When his collaborator, the German singer and musician Anika, sings a wonky facsimile of Dusty Springfield’s ​‘Spooky’, it’s as though the original version – the favourite song of characters played by Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat’s mother in the film’s third segment – has been handed down and altered across generations.

While Jarmusch was making Permanent Vacation at New York University in the late 1970s, he was also playing in the no wave band The Del-Byzanteens, the first of many musical collaborations he would go on to establish during his near-five-decade career. No wave had a dangerous kind of stylistic flair, with artists like Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch and James Chance serving up both the pose and the darkness underneath. The Del-Byzanteens’ song ​‘Lies To Live By’, which appears on the soundtrack for Wim Wenders’ 1982 film The State of Things, encompasses this duality. Its guitar lines establish a hook, only to wobble, spike, then fall apart, as Jarmusch proclaims drolly that, ​“I’m a mystery to those who know me.”

This sense of cool uncertainty carried through into the music chosen for Jarmusch’s early films, as did no wave’s tendency to reconfigure the conventions of American culture. Like another filmmaking peer, David Lynch, Jarmusch understands the loaded power of classic American rock’n’roll. When a young Japanese couple roll into Memphis in 1989’s Mystery Train, they’re listening to the idealised version of a musical haven, playing tapes of Elvis, Roy Orbison and Otis Redding. As the pair wander aimlessly through city streets, the rundown reality of the place is echoed in the score by actor-musician John Lurie, who also scored the earlier Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law. Lurie’s dissonant riff on rock’n’roll is a twisted kind of Americana, soundtracking a reality where Elvis is still dead but Screamin’ Jay Hawkins sits at the all-night hotel desk waiting to check you in.

Only Lovers Left Alive, from 2014, is also set in a legendary music haven, this time post-bankruptcy Detroit. Here, vampire musician Adam (Tom Hiddleston) expresses his increasing frustration towards the human world through noise instrumentals. Adam’s music is made by SQÜRL, Jarmusch’s sludge-rock band with Carter Logan and Shane Stoneback – the third musical contribution to one of his own films after his score for Permanent Vacation and his band Bad Rabbit’s drone-rock songs for 2009’s The Limits of Control.

Again, the music in Only Lovers Left Alive shows us the tandem realities of both his characters and 21^st-century America. Adam dances at home with his lover Eve (Tilda Swinton) to Denise LaSalle’s ​’70s classic ​‘Trapped by a Thing Called Love’, an encapsulation of the Southern soul heart of Detroit. But when the couple drive through its present-day ruins – Motown HQ turned into a museum, a crumbling concert hall turned into a car park – Jarmusch’s guitar rattles and grumbles like a waking ghost. As the story moves to Tangier, Dutch lute player Jozef Van Wissem plays baroque melodies in non-Western scales, a suggestion of the sheer amount of years lived and continents traversed by our ancient protagonists.

In the past decade Jarmusch has worked on records with the likes of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, but Van Wissem and SQÜRL remain his primary collaborators. Since 2012, Van Wissem and Jarmusch have released six collaborative records, all characterised by circular phrasing and the perpetual sound of the drone. Listening to their most recent release, 2025’s ​‘The Day the Angels Cried’, is like tuning into an endless duet, as though Jarmusch’s guitar and Van Wissem’s lute have been playing the same cyclical phrases for centuries, wringing out meaning and emotion from repetition. The most common mood is dread. On the title track, Jarmusch sings of angels looking down onto a burning Earth. Van Wissem is a disconcerting counterpoint, playing a sweetly melodic lullaby with queasy dropped notes.

SQÜRL also deal in post-apocalyptic sounds. Now a duo with his film producer and drummer Logan, SQÜRL is Jarmusch in a heavy, nihilistic mode. Their 2023 debut album ​‘Silver Haze’ – released after a string of EPs and soundtracks – is disorientating and slow with exhausted resignation. Here the apocalypse is less celestial, more post-capitalist fantasy: on ​‘The End of the World’, a gang of feral teenagers roam an abandoned mall, “[scouring] the bins and fallen shelves for remaining clothes and sneakers” – a characterful, cynical image of an American near-future. Jarmusch duets with Anika for ​‘She Don’t Wanna Talk About It’, a track that sets its romantic struggles under the shadow of acid-rain clouds.

The sludgy darkness of SQÜRL’s standalone recordings is something of a contrast to their other two Jarmusch soundtracks, for 2016’s Paterson and 2019’s The Dead Don’t Die. Both are primarily electronic, with relentless percussion swapped out for pulsing and blooming synths. The Dead Don’t Die has a light touch that belies the film’s goofy broad strokes, its guitar squawks coupled with suspenseful synth arpeggios, as though for a more ambient horror film. The quiet curiosity of Paterson​’s titular character (Adam Driver), an observational poet-cum-bus driver, is reflected in its score. The gradual swells and developments have the same rhythm as Paterson’s repetitive days.

In both his music and filmmaking, Jarmusch has a fascination with loops. Textures, phrases, conversations and lives build and grow through the establishment of routine. Characters and musical ideas run and run until they take on autonomous life. Although written in a different musical language from SQÜRL’s doom rock, RZA’s soundtrack to 1999’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is equally compelled by loops as a tool of revelation. As Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) gains wisdom through his daily practice of samurai swordsmanship and repeated reading of the ​‘Hagakure’, our understanding of his world is built through RZA’s samples of ritualistic bells, hip-hop beats and both Japanese and Black American music – not just in their juxtaposition, but in their looped arrangement.

Considering his interest in loops, it’s unsurprising that Jarmusch is drawn to improvised music, a practice that involves musicians continuously interrogating a theme. Neil Young’s stark electric guitar score for 1995’s Dead Man was improvised live to a cut of the film, with abstract phrases representing William Blake’s (Johnny Depp) decaying patterns of logic. The soundtrack to 2005’s tragicomic road movie Broken Flowers centres on the music of jazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke, who applies improvisational techniques to traditional Ethiopian music. The propulsive drumming of ​“Yegelle Tezeta” wills the movement of Bill Murray’s ageing lothario, Don Johnston, travelling across the US in search of the mother to his rumoured son. Instrumental parts on organ, saxophone and trumpet meander around an idea, reaching for the surety of a chorus melody like Don reaches for an answer from one of his ex-girlfriends.

Jarmusch’s filmography can be read as a musical self-portrait: a kaleidoscope of ​’50s rock’n’roll, ​’70s no wave, ​’90s hip-hop and ​’00s doom metal – Buddy Holly, Iggy Pop, Public Enemy and Boris. He is as much a fan as a musician and filmmaker, and all three vocations operate in tandem across his work. His taste is on full display, but beneath it is a foundation of complex emotion, skewed expectations and inner lives. Across all his films, albums, soundtracks and musical selections he demonstrates the value of patience and contradiction: interrogating character, setting and context through endless layers and waves of noise.