While nearly 18 million viewers were tuned in to the Oscars Sunday night, Island Styles was performing on a stage in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Baltimore-born musician had just finished a set with the rock band Candlebox and was about to play another. Then he opened his phone to over 75 text messages, emails and calls.
That’s when he knew: He had won. “You know, 75 people aren’t texting you because you lost,” Styles says. The Singers, directed by Sam Davis, won Best Live Action Short Film at the Academy Awards. The documentary-musical centers a small group of talented buskers, street artists and viral personalities that connect over music in a seedy bar. Styles worked as the film’s composer, sound designer, and on-set music consultant, and he also made recordings of the singers featured in the film.
The picture also tied for first place with “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” marking only the seventh tie in Oscar history. “Ironic that the Short Film Oscars is going to take twice as long,” Kumail Nanjiani quipped while presenting the awards.
The reality of last weekend’s Academy Award win is still sinking in, Styles says. The 38-year-old got his start in the DC area singing in a church choir as a kid. He began playing at dive bars around the DC region with his father when he was 16, in venues not unlike those portrayed in The Singers. A few years later, while working at a Guitar Center, he met his schoolmate, the Maryland singer Niki Barr, and began touring internationally in Barr’s eponymous band. Back home, he grew his network, connecting with musicians in basements and bars around DC, including the Velvet Lounge, the Black Cat, and Fletcher’s in Baltimore.
He eventually became the guitarist for Jimmie’s Chicken Shack, playing area venues like the 9:30 Club, Nevermore Hall (formerly Rams Head Live!), and the Fillmore Silver Spring. In 2013, he began work as a guitar tech for Candlebox before becoming the band’s guitarist three years later. While touring, he became interested in sound production and scoring for projects and in 2023 moved from the DC area to Los Angeles to pursue more opportunities.
Styles connected with a producer for The Singers during the filming of a documentary about Candlebox, a ’90s band that had success with singles like “Far Behind.”
“I’ve always been fascinated with how music can affect pictures. I think there’s just so much power in music, and I’ve always been fascinated about how to apply music to different things. I just fell in love with the art form of it,” Styles says. “It also just gave me a little bit more security in the long run. I thought, how old’s John Williams? Ninety-something, right? Still scoring for Indiana Jones.”
From sampling all 88 notes of a piano to fashion a digital instrument to recording a song from “Big Mouth Billy Bass”—a famous gag gift that features an animatronic singing fish mounted on a plaque—Styles had a lot of favorite moments from the film’s production. But those were surpassed, he says, when he brought the singers into the bar to record the songs.
“Everything about this film from the ground up was to be as natural, warm, and genuine as possible,” he says, adding that there were no actors in the film, just real buskers from the streets and subways of New York, New Orleans, and elsewhere. “We decided that the audio needed to be done in the same way. So I set up a microphone right in the center of that bar, and we recorded these people.”
One take of singer Mike Young crooning “Unchained Melody” left him and director Sam Davis with “goosebumps,” he says. “I think that helps to tell the story that The Singers is trying to teach, which is the power of music and how that can affect people. It was unbelievable.”
These days, you can find Styles still on tour with Candlebox, looking forward to creating more music and perhaps even spending some time at home. “We’ve been on the road for about a month. I’m excited about sleeping in my bed, being able to cook a meal, drive a car, that kind of thing,” he says.
Years down the line, he says the opportunity to work on “The Singers” will stay with him for a lifetime.
“Music has the power to bring people together, despite where they come from, what they look like, how old they are, what their gender is, it doesn’t matter,” he says. “I saw that in the live world, and to be able to work on a project like The Singers, where that’s one of the strong messages that comes across—it was really special to me.”
Jenae Barnes previously reported and fact-checked for Capital B Gary in Indiana, 5280 Magazine in Denver, Forbes in New York and ABC News in Washington, D.C. She is a 2024 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow. As a DC-area native, she received her Bachelor’s from George Mason University and Master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School.
