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AE: As a musician and a filmmaker, can you say something about the process of choosing music to be used in the film Life In A Box?
SC-DM: After we came off the road, I went to New York (actually, Jersey City, right across the river) and spent a year logging all the footage and putting together an outline of the story. I was working with a producing team--John Catania and Charles Ignacio, the guys who made the Charles Busch doc that's playing all the big gay fests this year. (It's really good--you should try to see it!) I had 250 hours of footage from the road, plus about 50 hours of archival Y'all stuff: videotapes of early performances and TV appearances, and press, 10 years worth of photos, lots of live audio recordings, just tons of stuff to try to put in some kind of order. It was pretty overwhelming, trying to think about how to tell the story. The meat of the story took place in a year and a half on the road, but in order for those events to make sense, I had to convey 10 years of the history of Y'all and Jay's and my relationship.

John and Charles suggested taking the catalog of Y'all songs and thinking of the story in terms of which song went with which part of the journey. That piece of advice was key to how the whole thing came together, and I think you can still see it in the finished piece. I used the songs to move the story along, like they do in a traditional musical. For the most part, I made obvious choices, like using "Throw Away the Knives and Forks" when Jay and I are uprooting ourselves and moving into the camper. Or "There's a Dark Place Deep in My Heart" when everything is kind of falling apart. The story is complicated and I didn't have time to, nor did I want to, explain everything literally, but I think if you listen to the lyrics you get a lot of information about what's happening.

I used a lot of songs from our last CD, Between the World and Me, which has a very different tone from our other stuff. It's more melancholy. Y'all was usually all about bright, happy feelings, optimism, and fun, but what was happening in our lives wasn't all fun, so it was good to have those songs to tell the sad parts of the story. Along with what's happening visually, I see the songs as the most important element in the film. I also felt that the most important element of Y'all was the songs. Jay and I disagree about this, but I always thought Y'all was all about the songs.

AE: I cried like a baby watching Life In A Box, especially when it came to the last show--how were you able to make it without becoming hysterical on a regular basis?
SC-DM: Sorry I made you cry! (laughs) Actually, I'm not sorry (laughs). I do want people to be moved. I stayed pretty objective while I was editing, most of the time. The really hard stuff I had gone through several months before we separated. I was in a very peaceful and in a way joyful state about our separation by the time it actually happened. I felt so much love for both Jay and Roger, and excitement about the new phase in all our lives, and gratitude for what I learned from our time together. And I also felt very loved by both of them, through all of it. So I always saw it as a story with a very happy ending.
The emotional footage, the arguments, especially, I found myself looking at almost scientifically, I was learning so much about myself and about how people behave in relationships by watching. So while I was editing, I didn't get too weepy, but often after several days of working on a difficult scene, I would feel sadness like a weight on me, and I would have to take a day or two off.

The last scene did get to me, though. Every time I'd watch that clip where Jay starts crying, I'd cry too, and when you're editing video you have to watch things dozens and dozens of times in succession. I still cry when I watch that clip, even at the screenings of the finished film. I think it's just hard to watch someone you love cry without crying yourself. Our time on the road changed all three of us, but I find Jay's transformation the most heartbreaking.

AE: At one point in the movie, I think it’s Jay who says the he thought Y’all would be famous after five years.
SC-DM: We had so much confidence. We really believed for a long time that fame was inevitable for us. We got such a great response from audiences, even music industry people we approached always had great things to say (though they usually also said that they had no idea what to do with us, we were too unusual). We always got good press. People said just the most amazing things about us, it was very heady. I wonder sometimes why we never got bad press (the only slightly negative review we got was in a folk music magazine--the reviewer didn't appreciate our cover of Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing On My Mind"). There must have been lots of people who didn't like Y'all. Why didn't they speak up?

Most of the early reviews of Life in a Box have been favorable, but there have been a couple negative reviews, which in an odd way have been a huge relief. It feels much more real that some people would like the film and some people wouldn't. But with Y'all, the act was all sort of based on a story of two young, naive country boys taking the big city by storm. But after ten years, we weren't young any more, we certainly weren't naive, and fame was becoming a more and more remote possibility. The story sort of lost its foundation, so it was hard to keep it together. Early on, we decided that we had to keep the act pretty much the same until it caught on, but we thought it would catch on sooner, and artistically we were drying up and going crazy not being able to evolve as artists.

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