Nick Cave & Bryce Dessner have shared a new song, “Train Dreams”, for the new film of the same name directed by Clint Bentley.

“Train Dreams” features Joel Edgerton as a railroad labourer, alongside Felicity Jones and William H. Macy, and it adapts Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella.

Director Clint Bentley shared this about the song: “When we started thinking about making a song for the film, Nick felt like the perfect artist to do it. It turns out that Train Dreams is one of his all-time favorite books, but he initially feared there wouldn’t be time to do something because he was getting ready to go on tour. Then he watched the film and was inspired to write something and the whole thing came together really quickly. I knew he would craft something beautiful and resonant, but the film has such a delicate tone at the end, one that was really hard to get right, and I didn’t want a song that would push the audience in another direction emotionally. But Nick and I were very much on the same page from the outset. He read some early lyrics to me that he was working on and I was just really a bit overwhelmed with the whole situation, I’ve been a fan of his for such a long time and there I was, not only having a really lovely conversation with him about life and art, but he was also reading lyrics to me that he was writing for a film I made. It was a really special moment. He’s a very rare artist and one I admire immensely. There’s no one thing that defines a Nick Cave song sonically, lyrically, or otherwise. He’s got songs about everything, all the varieties of our experience here. There’s a deep poeticism alongside rock and roll. And that just felt like the perfect fit for a film like this that’s telling the story of this person who lived a beautiful resonant life, even if it did include heartache and pain.”

Bryce Dessner composed the score for the film. This is the second collaboration with Clint Bentley.