Interview: The Rescues Expand Their Musical Catalog With The Lost Boys

This Los Angeles-based indie pop band The Rescues, made up of singer-songwriters Kyler England, Adrianne Gonzalez (AG), and Gabriel Mann, have had a lot of success, with their songs heard on TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy, The Umbrella Academy, and Pretty Little Liars. But they didn’t know from Broadway when they were approached to write the score for the new musical The Lost Boys. In fact, they weren’t even sure if the offer was legit (they’re from LA, after all).

But England knew the movie, Gonzalez loved vampires, and Mann, well, he could be persuaded. So they dove into an experience that has quickly become one of the most meaningful of their respective careers. What began as a leap into the unknown has not only reshaped how they think about musical storytelling, but expanded their views of collaboration from top to bottom.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What is your association with The Lost Boys?
Kyler England: I definitely saw it in the ’80s with a friend who lived down the street who had cable. I thought it was scary and fun, and it felt really cool. When the producers talked to us about it, I knew what they were talking about, but I had to go and re-watch it, because I kind of have movie amnesia. It just felt like there was so much room for us. It felt like it sang. And Adrianne, you’re excited about anything vampire.

Adrianne Gonzalez (AG): I’ve always been a huge vampire fan. I read all the Twilight books in my 30s, which is really embarrassing, but I love it. I’m super into all that stuff, always have been, so I was like, “Oh, finally.”

Gabriel Mann: We have three totally opposite answers. My wife was a fan of it, but I had never seen it, so it was all new to me. There’s a lot of variety in this movie. There’s full comedy, there’s serious darkness, there’s a major story with the family and their relationship to each other. When you strip away the artifice, there’s real stuff going on. There’s plenty to mine in there. That was something that we were attracted to.

So the producers just came to you after a show and asked you to do it?
AG: Yes. We had no idea if they were legit, because in LA, it ain’t always legit. They sent us the pitch deck and we were like, “Oh, wait, this does look real.”

Kyler: Unbeknownst to us, the brilliant director, Michael Arden, had sent the producers to see us because he had been a fan of our music for a decade. He had been waiting for the right project, is what we realized in retrospect. He knew that we could do this before we did, which is the most amazing gift. We’re all in love with the Broadway world and the process and the people now.

AG: Yeah, we are. We really are. It’s been like boot camp for four years straight. I think we can officially say that we are in the theater community now.

Gabriel: It came out of left field for all of us. We had been looking for something interesting to do as a band that was not necessarily making another record. It felt like karma or kismet, where it just kind of appeared at that moment, this thing that is so enriching and creatively satisfying and challenging and different than what we had done before. We may never have thought that our music would translate to this, but in retrospect, it seems obvious.

Kyler: It runs parallel to the story of our band. We were all solo artists, beating our heads against the wall trying to grow fan bases and get record deals. Someone else had the idea for us to form the band. We never would have thought of it on our own. And thank God someone else forced us to form. It’s been the same with The Lost Boys. Thank God it appeared at the right moment and thank God we said yes.

What are the challenges of musical-theater songwriting, compared to your outside work?
AG: We’ve always enjoyed music that could serve picture, and this is just a different kind of picture. We always want to make a song lyrically feel like it’s moving forward and not saying the same thing over and over. We essentially applied that to this, but in a way that is more specific to story and character. It’s like these transferable skills that we didn’t realize we had until we started to use them. You have to thread a really tight needle, and there’s always the line we’re trying to walk, which we each have different relationships to. I tend to lean way more into song, Kyler wants to lean way more into story. Gabe depends on the day. But between the three of us, we don’t give up until we feel it.

Gabriel: A big part of the learning experience has been trying to find that spot. There have been times when we’ve veered too far in one direction and times when we’ve veered too far in another. There’s something that Adrienne reminded us about midway through the process, which had to do with the soul of the song —

Kyler: And not editing the soul of the song into oblivion. To add to what my bandmates are saying, the process of learning how to tell a story on stage continues. We replaced an entire third verse of an important song because the story that we’re telling shifted slightly, and that meant the verse had to shift a lot. We’re still learning. It’s one gigantic trust fall. Not that it’s easy, but it’s easier than it could be because our team is incredible.

Gabriel: Putting things in other people’s voices has been another part that has been challenging for us. We’ve all worked with other people before, but taking songs that we birth and putting them into other people’s mouths is hard, especially since we sang the demos ourselves. It’s a fascinating experience. In our pre-Lost Boys existence, we thought we were involved in creative pursuits that were very collaborative. We didn’t know there was something so much bigger, so much more collaborative, so much more challenging, and creatively interesting. It’s thrilling and very difficult and exciting.