Peter Salett’s ambitious fifth album, In the Ocean of the Stars (released July 22 on his own Dusty Shoes Music), puts the spotlight on a strikingly original artist who has amassed an impressive body of work essentially behind the scenes and below the radar. A sprawling tour de force that moves seamlessly between folk-rooted intimacy and all-out symphonic grandeur, the album takes its place alongside such landmarks of visionary contemporary music as Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, Randy Newman’s Sail Away and Beck’s Sea Change.

The deeply evocative nature of Salett’s music has inspired numerous filmmakers and music supervisors to put his songs to picture (a detailed discography and filmography is attached).

In the Ocean of the Stars arrives on the heels of the release of the Universal Pictures romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, for which Salett wrote, arranged and produced several songs that are integral to the storyline. Working with writer/star Jason Segel, he co-wrote ”We've Got to Do Something” and “Inside of You” for Russell Brand’s Aldous Snow character to sing, and he was the primary composer of the film’s musical finale, “A Taste for Love.” Salett also has a bit part in the movie, which was executive produced by Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin).

While living in New York in the ’90s, the New Jersey-born, Maryland-bred graduate of Brown University regularly packed CBGB’s Gallery, the Cottonwood Café, Tramps and other clubs, building a rabid following in the Lower Manhattan scene with his vibrant performances. “I was playing acoustic guitar with a rhythm section, but it was definitely rock ’n’ roll,” says Salett. “I used to break three or four strings a night.” One of his volunteer string changers was the aspiring actor Edward Norton, and the two formed a relationship that would have a mutually gratifying second act in the following decade.

Ironically, the original material that made Salett a favorite among writers, painters, actors and his fellow left-of-center musicians was so uncategorizable that it scared off major-label talent scouts. At the time, he found his inability to connect with the traditional record business sufficiently frustrating that he left New York, spending the better part of a year traveling around the Far East and the U.S. In retrospect, he has come to realize that not signing a record deal was the best thing that could’ve happened in terms of his artistic evolution. “I’m really happy about how I’ve developed and continue to develop outside the confines of a major label, or any label,” he says. It’s been a really good thing for me that I’ve gone in various directions without anyone ever telling me, ‘You need to write a song like this.’”

What follows is a thematic and anecdotal description of the new album and Salett’s experiences in writing for film, in the words of the artist himself.

ON THE NEW ALBUM

This record has had a long journey. I started recording it in 2005 in New York. We did it on Oliver Strauss’ Neve board at Mission Sound, where I’d recorded a lot of my last album, After Awhile, with Oliver engineering, and we got some great, live-sounding tracks. The players were Bill Dubrow on drums, Don Piper on lap steel and electric guitar and Jeff Hill on bass; all of them are close friends, and it was great to see them play their hearts out for me. We really did it together.

One of the things I really wanted on this record was to find a string arranger who could, in a very natural way, bring various parts of the American songbook together. I wanted it to go from the Randy Newman-esque Tin Pan Alley of “Magic Hour” to the solo fiddle of “Between the Dark and the Light” to the soul strings of “More Than Blue” to the grandness of “In the Ocean of the Stars.” I felt that we were so into separating music in this culture, and I wanted to have this feeling where all these things could live in the same place. And when I heard Chris Carmichael’s strings on my friend Joe Pisapia’s record, I knew that I had found my guy. So I went down to Nashville and met Chris, who made an invaluable contribution to the record with his beautiful string arrangements.

Then I came here to do the music for Ed Norton’s film Down in the Valley, and months were going by. I’d had the record mixed twice in New York and wasn’t happy with either version. I was resigned to it being what it was when I ran into Marvin Etzioni while having lunch with my wife at Café 101 in Hollywood, and the idea struck me that Marvin might be able to help me get the mix where I felt it needed to go. So I called him up, he came right over and after we listened to the record together, I asked him to be the mix producer, for want of a better term. We took it to Todd Burke, who bounced the files to analog tape and stripped away all the compression, and there it was. At that point, we started really getting into it, and Marvin knew how to fuck everything up just enough to make it interesting—opening the album with backwards strings, panning hard left to hard right, putting a part through an echoplex, that sort of thing—and then I would have to reel him in. So between the two of us, I think we really found something, where he uncovered the artistry in the record and made it into a much more listenable album for repeated plays, so that the listener doesn’t discover everything on the first listen. And that was very exciting for me.

I wanted each song to be its own world, but at the same time I wanted them all to be connected, and I think we’ve achieved that. Part of that is the mixing, part is the strings and part is the sequencing. I think “In the Ocean of the Stars” is the linchpin song in terms of its bigness and its indefinable qualities. But I feel that it stands as a collection of songs. It starts with “Magic Hour,” which is intended to suggest the search for connection to nature, and feeling that connection to “the burning star”—the sun—and it ends with “Sunshine.” So I think of the record as a song cycle about trying to connect to yourself and to your loved one in a world where you’re constantly living in a state of memory.

ON HIS FILM WORK

In 2000, Ed Norton was directing a movie called Keeping the Faith, and I’d just finished recording my second album, Heart of Mine, so I sent him an early copy. He ended up making the title song the main theme of his movie. It got a remix from T Bone Burnett, and it was great fun being around him because he’s such a character. That song wasn’t a hit by radio standards, but it was heard by hundreds of thousands of people. To this day, I get emails from people all around the world saying they love the song; some of them even said they’d gotten married to it. So that’s been extremely gratifying

I relocated from New York to Los Angeles two years ago. I’d been coming out to L.A. pretty regularly for the last 10 years to play shows, because I had a little fan base here, and to meet with a small but dedicated crew of supporters in the film industry about scoring projects. During one trip, I played a few shows, and Norton brought David Jacobson to one of them; David was directing a movie that Ed was working on called Down in the Valley. They ended up using my song “Fly Sparrow Fly,” which I had recorded essentially as a demo—just my voice and guitar and an airy lap steel part by Don Piper. It’s the same performance that’s on the record, just with a different mix.

The film was finished for the most part, and they’d hired a composer, but things weren’t working out, and David brought me out to L.A. so that I could see the rough cut. I watched it, and there was a song temped into one particular scene. I said to Ed afterward, “I can write a song that fits that scene better.” He said, “Great—see what you can do.” I was scoring a real indie film at the time, and they didn’t have any money to pay me, so I told them I’d do it if they’d buy me an Mbox. So I got my payment in the form of an Mbox and some mic stands, I borrowed a mic from my friend and I ended up recording some songs at the house where I was crashing, including one called “Sunshine,” which I’ve also put on the record. I played it for them and showed them how I would take the theme that I’d written into the song at the moment when the characters are speaking. I said I thought it would work as the romantic theme, and we’d spin it out in a certain way, and they went for it. So they hired me as the composer on the film.

I was still living in New York, but I ended out moving out here for three or four months, scoring this movie. The movie went through lots of changes but was a great creative working experience for me. I worked with Chris Carmichael, who subsequently did the strings for In the Ocean of the Stars, and Don Piper; the three of us were the musicians for the score. I played electric and acoustic, drums and created sounds—low bass hums, playing piano strings with an e-bow, that sort of thing. The movie went to Cannes, opened the L.A. Film Festival and then came out—and nobody saw it. But it’s been all over cable, and I’m really proud of the work that I put into it. There are five of my songs plus the score, and I was able to integrate the two.