Dragon Age II Soundtrack Released, Inon Zur Q&A
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Tell me about Florence + the Machine's contribution to Dragon Age II. How did that collaboration come about, what was it like working with them, and why did you choose (I'm Not Calling You A Liar) for Varric's theme?
We really loved Florence's voice, and we though that it really empowered the whole Dragon Age world. Mike Laidlaw, the executive producer on Dragon Age II, felt (I'm Not Calling You A Liar) conveyed more than her other songs. Have you already played the demo of the game?
I have, yes.
So you know in the beginning, Varric is basically just telling Cassandra bullsh*t, you know? And Cassandra says something like, (Stop lying to me, why don't you just tell me exactly what happened.) And the whole thing is between truth and falsehood throughout the whole game; what really happened versus what people are saying happened. So Mike thought [(I'm Not Calling You A Liar)] was a good text for that.
Now, regarding Florence, that is a great story. Steven Schnur, president of music at EA worldwide, heard about her about her and said, (Let's use Florence.) And I said, (Suuure? What do you want to do?) He replied, (Oh, she's just going to send us a track, and we're going to send it to BioWare to make sure it's ok.) So she sent over the track, (I'm Not Calling You A Liar,) and we loved the song but we really didn't think that the whole arrangement around the songs fit. So since they sent it over with everything broken down, I started to eliminate more and more and more components out of the arrangement. Eventually, I decided to go with just the vocals and dropped everything else.
