Best of What's Next: Ola Podrida

Photos by Aubrey Edwards

Despite what you might have heard, the first time composer David Wingo worked with filmmaker David Gordon Green wasn’t scoring the director’s contemplative debut, George Washington (though he did do this). Instead, as youngsters, the two longtime friends actually worked together at a Texas puppet theater called Olla Podrida, where Wingo once dressed up as a furry mouse to promote a children’s book and had a beer chucked at him. Fortunately, both guys have since moved on to more rewarding careers. Green has since brought us Snow Angels and Pineapple Express, and self-taught musician Wingo now juggles film-score gigs and with his blossoming Austin band Ola Podrida, affectionately named for his experience with stage shows and booze.

Wingo recorded and produced Ola Podrida’s second album Belly of the Lion in two months, in between composing the synth-heavy soundtrack to Jordan Hess’ comedy Gentleman Broncos. Its shimmering, glowering bedroom rock, tracked with just one other musician, follows up the gentle acoustics of his 2007 self-titled debut, which he made with a four-piece band. “I had a definite sound in my head of what I wanted it to be, so I went into it pretty focused,” Wingo says. The result is darker, richer, more haunted than his first album, the transition from deep acoustic textures to open electric planes sparked by his film composition work—specifically, by a cover of Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” that Wingo was asked to record for a horror movie called The Signal. “I finger-picked the main progression on acoustic guitar and then for all the backing tracks … did some Jesus and Mary Chain-type guitar stuff.” It was refreshing to plug in his electric guitar and all its effects pedals, to manually play with the sound he wanted rather than recreating it in post-production software, and that freedom encouraged a jangly, guitar-heavy record that swells in an expanse of subtle distortion.

When it comes to juggling his film work and Ola Podrida songwriting, Wingo knows that maintaining their separate-but-equal status is crucial to his creative inspiration. “If I’m spending six to eight hours a day working on a film score, I definitely don’t have it in me to work on my own stuff after,” he says. “… To be working on an album and a film score at the same time is something that I probably will always stay away from.” Still, it’s not always bad news when the two bleed into one another, as making Belly of the Lion shows. “One thing the film scoring has done,” Wingo says, "is that it’s really nurtured that part of me that’s restless and doesn’t want to do the same thing more than once.”