As the first soundtrack of my collection, the journey of scoring Poncho was one that taught me lessons I still employ years later. The project began in an informal setting with a close friend, where he told me about this project he started working on. He described the film to me, how it followed the journey of a lost cowboy through a lost town, where he tried to find himself somewhere within the cracks. After the film was made, I was consulted again as the composer, I wrote a variety of tracks that all maintained a key theme, but were different, ranging from sporadic to desolate, and sent them to the director to see their thoughts. They called me a week later and asked me to come into the edit suite to potentially write alongside the edit process. I went into the studio, and after some small discussions, we ended up recording straight onto the editing software, plugging the mic directly into the computer, no effects or mastering, not even EQ, and wrote and improvised to the film as we watched it come together.
A year after the film was finished and screened, I was informed that the music we had recorded had since been corrupted on a hard drive, and so I took this opportunity to re-record all the tracks from the original sessions, doing so with better equipment, as well as mastering them.
The final piece portrays an emotionally connected array of melodies that fit every beat of the film. Though some chords objectively linger too long, or notes rush before their cue, these imperfections cleanly match with the story they help to tell.