With music that’s as haunting and heartbreaking as it is playfully sinister, Chicago-based musician Daniel Knox’s music has a rare but addictive sound. As a misanthropic cinephile, Knox recently took a break from his job as a projectionist at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre to collaborate with photographer and dear friend John Atwood on a piece that premiered last night at 92YTribeca: “Daniel Knox: John Atwood Black & Whites.” After applying at the very last moment, Knox was accepted as an artist in residency at the esteemed Watermill Center where he created a long-form composition based on Atwood’s photographs depicting their mutual hometown of Springfield, Illinois. The result is an evocative and stirring experience that brings together sight and sound and creates an emotional landscape for Atwood’s photographs in a unique way. Last night, the piece was performed live with a full band, elevating their collaboration to a new level. We caught up with John before the show to chat about his inspiration for the exhibit, having dinner with David Lynch, and inheriting a desolate Springfield.

Tell me about how you began playing music. I’ve heard the story before, but to me it sounded like a really sad movie I’d like to watch.
It was kind of a sad movie in its way. I moved to Chicago in 1999 and I went there to study film and did miserably in and didn’t care for it [or] for working with other people. The way I was trying to make films was to shoot them in my neighborhood with my friends on my own time and they said you couldn’t do it. So because I was failing film school I was just wandering around. I started going to different buildings at night and just checking the doors, and sometimes a door would just open -- more places will receive you than you would imagine. A lot of these places were hotels and you go in through the service entrance. There’s just so many people in a hotel so usually they’re just not going to stop you. The Hilton was one I would go to a lot…they all had pianos, and I would go sit in the ballrooms there… You feel like Chopin, just sort of clicking your two fingers down, which was how I started to play.

How long did it take you to learn and make something coherent?
No time at all. It’s funny, it just kind of came about. If you listened to [one of the early pieces of music I wrote] now it would just sound like Christmas carols or something, but at the time I was just fascinated that I could do it at all. I really didn’t consider myself a musician until I met John, who is obviously the basis of this whole thing. We met because he heard me arguing with someone in a restaurant, and based on that introduction he decided I was someone he ought to meet. So he called me and said, “Hey, I’m coming to Chicago, I heard you yelling at so-and-so in a Denny’s and I thought I’d like to stay at your house while I’m in town.” I thought that was someone I wanted to meet. So we developed a pattern where he would come over every Saturday, and we would each drink a bottle of wine and play a record from start to finish and scratch off lottery tickets. On one occasion I didn’t have a record, so I just sat down and started playing and I was drunk enough to have the courage to sing something. I had written two or three songs. I turned around he had a look on his face and he said, “That’s what you should be doing.” And so that’s what I do. Because of that. He’s always sort of had that impact on what I do. I’ve changed lyrics to my songs based on ways he’s misheard them.

Did he encourage you to play shows?
The first shows I did weren’t even shows. I’d go back to Springfield with John and he’d grab people from one bar -- everyone with their drinks -- and march them into the lobby of the hotel that had a piano and then push the piano into the lobby. So those were my first shows. And conversely he’s always been very private about his work and I’ve always tried to get him to show it, but he’s wanted to build a body of work. He has his own way, and this is actually his first show.

And you wrote something for David Lynch, once yes?
I work at a movie theatre in Chicago, I’m a projectionist. They were looking for someone because Lynch had musicians play before he read a poem before Inland Empire in each city. So we submitted my music and said, “Well, I’ll play something on the organ,” and he went for it. So I played my piece and got to go to dinner with him. I asked him how he made Inland Empire and he said, “Well, you know I made it with my friends, I made it in my neighborhood with a video camera,” all the things they told me not to do in film school. And I thought, “Well shit, I ought to go back to it.”

Do you find that film influences your music?
I still feel like I’m a filmmaker. Even with this piece, I feel like I wrote a film. Because when I first came to Watermill Center, all I knew is that I wanted to write about John’s work and I had a piece that was somewhat about his photography and him but it wasn’t finished. It just seemed like such a silly idea to write about these individual works, like a man crossing the street or a girl looking out the window, and to take them literally was foolish. I started writing songs about Springfield but felt guilty about that because it seemed to have nothing to do with John and his work, but then I told him about it and he thought it was great. He said it related to everything because, “How could you be who you are without having come from there? How can I take the shots that I take without having being born there and seeing that?” And the more I thought about it, I realized we inherited this landscape of dumpsters and strip malls and smoke stacks and dead parks and dilapidated houses and the concrete island with the little patch of grass, and I realized that was a huge part of his work and mine.

There’s a Lynchian quality to your music where it’s evil and dark or sinister at times, but there’s a strange humor in it all. Like how David Foster Wallace says that there’s murder and then there’s Lynchian murder, which would be like someone murdering their wife because they didn’t bring home the right kind of Jiffy peanut butter.
Or like the parents yelling at each other just going, “Bah bah bah,” in “The Alphabet.” He’s definitely got a sense of humor. And I think that humor is something that’s not well done if it’s forced -- you just have to actually find something funny. A lot of the stuff I’m talking about in the piece are things that when I tell the stories to people I tell them as jokes, but it’s sort of like you have to laugh not to cry about it.

So how did you compose this? Did you plan on making something that was this long?
No. I was very worried that I was going to have to begin the show with an opener which would be terrible. That’s the great thing about Watermill Center; you can get into these corners and bump up against a wall, and then you realize [that] the walls you bunch up against in your normal life aren’t there. There’s no one saying you’ve got to get out of here; you’ve got 24-hour access to your space. I had a room with a piano and a recording method, and I had freedom to fuck up and throw an idea out completely or to just take everything, cut it apart, rearrange it, and see what that did.

How is the piece presented?
We made a sequence of videos that John has actually edited and filmed mostly himself. When he learned that I was going to write it about Springfield, he went there and shot all this footage and it’s absolutely revolting in the best way. All the visuals -- light and congestion -- he’s just made a portrait of Springfield that is just perfect. And some of them go with music and there are a few with no video. We have all the footage he’s edited and shot projected and the appropriate music will go with it, and some of the songs segue into each other and some of them just stop and begin. I put them into a three-act structure.

Do you like this sort of collaboration process or is this something you just enjoy because you’re working with John?
Just John. I hate collaborating with people. I think it’s a nightmare. I would never want to write a song with anybody, and yet John walked in and said, “You should just try to walk in and yell that part,” and then of course for the next three days I chased him around and asked him what to do. I would love to collaborate with someone who was making a film or doing a play. I would love to write music for something. That’s different.

Some of your songs feel like soundtracks to an Edward Hopper painting.
Oh wow. I see some of John’s work having Edward Hopper’s influence and I don’t think it’s direct, I think it’s more subconscious. But I’m directly influenced by him. God, if my work could live in an Edward Hopper painting... I like the ones that are through windows of people just sort of standing there.

Where do you get the influence for your lyrics? Do you read a lot?
There are some poems I can read again and again and don’t get tired of them. Just the sequence of words and the way they have an impact on you can give you kind of a chill. And I don’t think that lyrics necessarily have to do that, I think that lyrics can serve the music the way a film score serves the images. They don’t have to be poetry necessarily, but I definitely think the words come first.

So you write lyrics first?
I tend to get fixed on little phrases that I hear, or somebody will say something to somebody and I’ll write it down because I’ll think, “God, if somebody said that to me...” Or if I was to say that to somebody I know specifically how would I pull that off?