Inside Llewyn Davis
It was music that let the live on-set recording carry, just as it was, the narrow gap between the song onstage and the living made offstage.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Who made it ⏳🌊
- ComposerT Bone Burnett
He served as music director, restoring 1960s folk revival songs through live on-set performance.
- DirectorJoel Coen · Ethan Coen
Drawing on the persona they found in Dave Van Ronk's memoir, they wrote and directed the film together.
- LeadOscar Isaac
Playing Llewyn Davis, he sang and played the film's folk songs live himself.
- StarringCarey Mulligan
Playing Jean, she sang live herself in songs such as "Five Hundred Miles."
- ProductionMarcus Mumford
He joined as associate music producer and added his own voice to "Fare Thee Well," the duet he sings with Llewyn.
I. The road to Greenwich Village
(connection) The Coen brothers had already worked once with T Bone Burnett, who restored American Southern music in O Brother, Where Art Thou? While conceiving Inside Llewyn Davis, the two of them brought him back as music director. (joining) Burnett is said to have known the ecology of the early-1960s Greenwich Village folk scene intimately. His task was not to compose new material but to restore it — to choose songs that were actually sung in that era and revive them in the sound of the time. (principle) He set a single principle: rather than having actors lip-sync to tracks pre-recorded in a studio, he recorded the actual sound of them singing and playing live on set. Even the faintest tremor in a guitar or a voice remained in the film exactly as it happened. (song selection) Of the fourteen songs on the soundtrack, the only one credited to Burnett as composer is the near-comic "Please Mr. Kennedy," and even that is a rewrite of a 1962 novelty song. All the rest are either traditional songs or arrangements of pieces by folk singers of the era. (the man) Burnett is a producer who started out as a singer, and for decades since has restored American roots music through film and record. The work that has passed through his hands has always chosen honest texture over flash.
II. A night at the Gaslight
(stage) The film opens at the Gaslight Café, a folk club in Greenwich Village. A narrow stage, a smoke-filled room, a performance built from a single guitar and a single voice. (first song) "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me," sung by Llewyn Davis, opens the night. Despite its grim title about hanging, the melody is plain and slow. The simple tune typical of a traditional folk ballad is the way the film introduces its protagonist. (the man) Llewyn is a talented but luckless folk singer. Since losing the partner he once performed with, he has been standing on stage alone, and his life amounts to drifting from one acquaintance's couch to another. The character is built on the life and memoir of the real singer Dave Van Ronk. (aftertaste) After the song ends, he is beaten by a stranger in a back alley. Why he is beaten is not revealed until much later. The film carries a structure that opens on this scene and returns to it again — what that return means is something to confirm only by reaching the end. (place) The Gaslight was in fact a club at the center of the 1960s folk revival, a stage where singers of the era, Van Ronk among them, really performed.
As the song that opens the film, it introduces the character of Llewyn using nothing but a single guitar and a voice.
- The mismatch between the grim title about hanging and the plain melody is the first thing to convey the character's resignation.
- A simple melody typical of a traditional folk ballad — recorded live by Oscar Isaac, singing and playing on set without dubbing.
- The structure itself is worth listening for: this song returns at the very end of the film, in the same place, in the same form.
- A song actually sung during the 1960s folk revival, not an invented repertoire.
III. The couch and the cat
(drifter) Llewyn has no home of his own. He gets through each day by cycling through the couches of acquaintances. The simple fact that he has no fixed address reflects the very situation his music career is in. (the cat) One day the cat of the house he's staying at follows him out the door, and he ends up, almost by accident, dragging it around the streets of New York. The name later given to the cat points to a long wandering that seems to mirror Llewyn's own condition. (duo) Jim and Jean, the married friends Llewyn relies on, take the stage as a harmonious folk duo. Their shared performance of "Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song)" lets a harmony of two voices stacked together convey tenderness — a togetherness that exists on stage. (tension) But offstage, there is an unspoken tension between Jean and Llewyn. The harmonious sound the song creates and the discord between the real people pull against each other, driving the drama forward. (the commercial) "Five Hundred Miles," sung together by Jim, Jean, and another singer, offers a smoothly polished, commercial folk sound. Set beside Llewyn's raw, jagged solos, the difference between the sound that sells and the sound that doesn't becomes unmistakable.
A tender duet sung on stage by the married friends, set against the tension in their private life.
- The harmony built from two voices stacked together gives the togetherness on stage its sound.
- Rooted in the traditional song "Dink's Song," it sings of parting and loss in a plain voice.
- Heard alongside the reprise Llewyn sings alone later in the film, the same song can be felt to carry an entirely different weight.
- The recording with Marcus Mumford's added voice preserves, unaltered, the breath and guitar resonance particular to a live take.
A smooth folk sound built from three stacked voices — the 'sound that sells,' set against Llewyn's raw solos.
- The way the three voices stack together shows the archetype of commercially polished folk.
- A short, repeating lyric pattern builds up the feeling of longing little by little.
- A song drawn from Hedy West's traditional repertoire, widely sung throughout the 1960s folk revival.
- Set beside Llewyn's jagged solo songs, the gap between authenticity and commercialism becomes clear.
IV. A joke in the studio
(the studio) Llewyn stands in a recording studio as a session player to earn some money to live on. The song he performs there is of a different cloth from the music he usually pursues. (novelty) "Please Mr. Kennedy" is a novelty song (a light song made purely to amuse) in which an exaggerated voice plays a fictional character begging not to be sent into space. It is telling that the only song on the soundtrack credited to Burnett as composer turns out to be the least earnest one of all. (the choice) Needing cash on the spot, Llewyn gives up a royalty cut in favor of a flat session fee. That single choice, made in the studio, follows him for a long time to come. (contrast) A colleague's low, strange ad-libs and a chorus driven along at a bouncy clip create an atmosphere entirely unlike the folk ballads he usually sings alone. It is a scene that works like a breathing hole cut into the surrounding seriousness.
The only track on the soundtrack credited to T Bone Burnett as composer, a bit of comedy that lets the audience catch its breath between the earnest folk songs.
- Built on the frame of an actual 1962 novelty song (a light song made purely to amuse), rewritten to fit a new situation.
- The exaggerated chorus and absurd falsetto create a deliberate sense of friction among the earnest traditional folk songs.
- The irony of the scene, in which he takes only the session fee and gives up the royalty, overlaps with the commercial nature of this song.
- The recording process itself is built as a single scene, so the actors' chorus becomes the plot.
V. The road to Chicago
(the journey) Llewyn sets out for Chicago, hitching a ride in a battered car to audition for a major promoter. His fellow passengers are a cantankerous jazz musician and his silent valet. (the place name) On the drive back from Chicago, the name 'Akron' flashes past on a highway sign. It is briefly hinted, then passed over, that a connection Llewyn knows nothing about lives in that city. (the audition) Standing before the promoter Bud Grossman at the Chicago folk club the Gate of Horn, Llewyn plays guitar and sings "The Death of Queen Jane," closing the final verse with voice alone and no accompaniment. It is a slow, long old ballad marked by short repeated phrases that build tension gradually. (the verdict) The short, cold verdict Grossman delivers after the song ends is one of the most widely quoted moments in the film. In this moment, where the least commercial song stands in the most commercial setting, the distance between music and making a living is laid bare at its closest. (another song) After returning from Chicago, the English folk song "The Shoals of Herring," which Llewyn sings alone before his father in the nursing home, tells of a fisherman's grueling labor; its repeating rhythm itself embodies endless toil. It reads alongside Llewyn's own repeated, profitless journey.
An old ballad sung alone with a single guitar at the audition, where the least commercial choice of song collides with the most commercial judgment.
- It shows the idiom of the old ballad, where a long melodic line and repeating short phrases build tension slowly.
- Singing to the guitar, then letting the guitar drop away in the final verse so only the voice remains — this makes for the most unadorned vocal moment in the film.
- Paired in memory with the cold assessment scene that follows right after the song, this is one of the most frequently quoted passages in the film.
- Being a solo performance without a band sets it clearly apart from the ensemble pieces heard earlier.
An English folk song about the hard labor of fishermen, it reads alongside Llewyn's fruitless, repetitive journey.
- The repeating rhythm embodies the monotony of labor itself.
- In the film he sings it alone with just a guitar before his father at the nursing home, while the soundtrack recording adds accompaniment from Punch Brothers.
- A song that crossed over from the British folk revival, it shows the flow of folk repertoire back and forth across the Atlantic in the 1960s.
- Listen for the point where the themes of labor and wandering come through in rhythm alone, without lyrics.
VI. the returning night
(Return) Having failed to get the answer he wanted at the audition, Llewyn returns to New York. Little has changed since he left. (Circularity) The film returns to the stage of the Gaslight, to the same night it opened with. The same space, the same song rings out with a different weight — the sound heard now is not the same note as the one heard at first. (A new voice) Once Llewyn steps down from the stage, an unfamiliar young voice is heard taking his place. The audience senses the turning of an era through sound before anything else. The film never bothers to confirm who that voice belongs to. (The final song) The soundtrack album closes with Bob Dylan's "Farewell" and "Green, Green Rocky Road" sung by Dave Van Ronk himself. The same song that the fictional Llewyn sang within the film is heard again at the album's end, this time in the voice of the singer who was the real-life model for that character. (Afterglow) The film ends without applause or success. What this film's music holds onto to the very end is not splendor but the texture of poverty and repetition that folk singers of that era actually endured.
Placed at the very end of the soundtrack, Dave Van Ronk's original recording closes things out in the voice of the person to whom the entire film pays tribute.
- Heard alongside the song of the same title that Oscar Isaac sings within the film, the point where the fictional character and the real-life inspiration overlap comes into sharp focus.
- A short, repeating guitar riff creates a forward-moving rhythm, like steps being taken one after another.
- Being placed as the final track on the soundtrack album is itself the device that closes out this film's tribute in musical form.
- Van Ronk's characteristically rough, unadorned voice gives the listener something to weigh against the polished re-enactment in the film.
Lesser-known stories
"Please Mr. Kennedy," remembered as a comic number, is not a wholly original composition. It was built on the skeleton of a novelty song of the same name recorded by the Goldcoast Singers in 1962, and even that original was roughly the fourth variation in a lineage of novelty songs descending from "Mr. Custer," sung in 1960. The filmmakers simply reworked this tangled lineage to fit a new scenario — space flight. The title on the film and its poster reproduces almost exactly the cover of Dave Van Ronk's actual 1963 album Inside Dave Van Ronk. The pose leaning against the door, the tweed jacket, even the cigarette in hand all match — but one thing is missing: the cat that sat at Van Ronk's feet in the original is absent from Llewyn's poster. Given that the film unfolds around the commotion caused by a single cat, this missing detail reads almost like a joke that only lands in hindsight. T Bone Burnett's insistence on live, on-set recording stood apart from the usual practice of Hollywood music films at the time. The principle of capturing the actors' actual breath and finger sounds on the day, without dubbing, was a choice that risked polish, and the rough texture left behind as a result gave the film its documentary atmosphere.
Glossary 📚🔎
Traditional song (traditional)
(Etymology) Jeontong (傳統) combines jeon (傳, "to pass down") and tong (統, "a line of succession"), meaning a lineage handed down across generations. This is why a song passed from mouth to mouth with no composer's name attached is called a traditional song. (In film and musical theater) This refers to a song sung across many generations without a specific composer's copyright. The film contains several scenes in which folk singers sing the same traditional song with different lyrics and melodies. Just as a mother who learned a lullaby from her grandmother sings it from memory in turn, what matters with this kind of song is not who made it first, but who you learned it from.
Live recording
(In film and musical theater) Rather than having actors lip-sync to a song pre-recorded in a studio, this method captures the sound of them actually singing and playing on set. This film shot nearly every song this way. It's the difference between mouthing along to music played in advance at a school festival performance and actually using your own voice to sing in the moment.
Harmony
(Etymology) Hwa (和) means "to blend together," and seong (聲) means "sound." The name itself carries the meaning of different pitches blending into a single resonance. (In film and musical theater) This refers to two or more people singing at different pitches at the same time in a way that still sounds unified. It's like singing in two parts for a school choir — each person sings a different note, but together the sound comes out fuller.
Acoustic instrumentation
(In film and musical theater) This refers to an ensemble made up of the raw, unamplified sound of string instruments such as guitar, banjo, and mandolin, with no electrical device used to boost the volume. Nearly every song in this film was played this way. Think of it as close to the sound of playing a recorder or guitar directly in a classroom, with no microphone or speaker involved.
Novelty song
(In film and musical theater) This refers to a light, exaggerated song made to get a laugh rather than deliver a serious message. It's marked by a ridiculous voice or absurd lyrics. It occupies a spot similar to the parody songs students write at school festivals, deliberately rewriting the lyrics of an existing song to make it funny.
Soundtrack (OST)
(Etymology) The word combines "sound" and "track" ("a strip" or "line"), originally referring to the narrow strip running alongside film reels on which sound was etched. (In film and musical theater) This refers to an album collecting the songs and music used in a single film. This film's soundtrack is sequenced in an order different from the actual order the songs are performed in within the story. (Elsewhere) The term is also commonly used apart from film, as in "the soundtrack to my day," to refer to whatever background music accompanies daily life.