Jeremiah Fraites, co-founder of The Lumineers, had several connections to Bruce Springsteen before boarding the Scott Cooper-directed biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere starring Jeremy Allen White.
In addition to hailing from New Jersey (living there 24 years) like The Boss himself, Fraites covered several songs including “State Trooper” for the launch of Warren Zanes’ book on which the film is based. This helped him get on both Cooper’s and Zanes’ radar. Fraites spoke about getting the opportunity to score the 20th Century Studios biopic and how he wanted to reflect the music of Springsteen’s record Nebraska in the film’s music at Deadline’s 2025 Sound & Screen Film.
“I had expressed a great deal of interest in scoring this film. I had written some demos, and I thought a lot about how I want to attack the score,” Fraites told the audience at UCLA’s Royce Hall. “I think I thought more about what I wanted not to do versus what I wanted to do, and I wanted to stay away from an overly polished sound.”
To do that, Fraites turned to a “crummy upright piano” nicknamed “Firewood” in his Denver home.
“Long story short, I have a piano tuner in Denver, Colorado. His name is Michael Jackson. True story. He’s about 6’5”. He’s originally from Los Angeles, and many years ago, he was tuning my piano. And I said, ‘Michael, what do you think of this piano?’ It’s my favorite piano,” Fraites recalled. “And he stopped what he was doing and he said, ‘Partner, it’s firewood.’ And I think the myth was sort of born from that. And that was sort of my first [inkling that] this is the instrument for the Bruce Springsteen film.”
(L-R) Deadline’s Peter White and Jeremiah Fraites onstage at Deadline’s Sound & Screen: Film
The film’s score was recorded in the Power Station in New York City, where a lot of Springsteen’s hits were recorded.
“I wanted to make sure that anyone watching the film never confused a piece of an original cue for, like, a B-side or something that could have been off Nebraska. So I stayed heavily away from acoustic guitar,” Fraites said. “I think there’s one acoustic guitar cue in the whole movie, and it’s performed in such a way that would never be mistaken for a Bruce Springsteen song. It’s a very odd way. I performed it.”
Fraites used a lot of electric guitar, the firewood piano and strings. He even put some tracks through a 4-track cassette recorder.
“It was a brilliant idea by my music editor, Jason Ruder. He said, ‘You know, we have a bunch of these TEAC [Series] 144 Portastudios that Bruce recorded Nebraska on. What if we ran through some of the stems?’ ” he said. “I think we ran through some of the pianos and some of the glockenspiels and some of those percussive instruments through the TEAC-144, which kind of gave it this almost distorted, grainy quality. It’s very consumer grade, not professional at all.”
“I thought it was a novel idea that you would go back to that time and use … Brian Eno talks about the things that are inadequate at the time become later sought after decades down the road, like distortion or whatever have you, and that sort of people pay good money for the crappy Portastudio these days,” Fraites continued.
Fraites, who also scored the Francis Lawrence-directed The Long Walk adapted from Stephen King’s novel, called the Springsteen opportunity “a truly humbling moment” following his career writing hit songs like “Ho Hey,” “Ophelia” and more.
Check back Monday for the panel video.
