Hear Thom Yorke’s Collaboration with Flea, ‘Daily Battles,’ from Edward Norton’s New Movie ‘Motherless Brooklyn’

Acclaimed, Oscar-winning actor Edward Norton will make his debut as a director when his film Motherless Brooklyn premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival next month. For the film’s soundtrack, Norton was able to bring together Thom Yorke and Flea, a merging of the Radiohead front man and the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist, for a track titled “Daily Battles.”

Flea, of course, is also in Yorke’s side project Atoms for Peace, so they have a history together. He contributes bass and trumpet on the track, which can be heard below:

There is also an accompanying jazz version of the song recorded by Wynton Marsalis, Joe Farnsworth, Russell Hall, Isaiah J. Thompson and Jerry Weldon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST5NgujQiMk

As for the film, Motherless Brooklyn is based on a 1999 novel written by Jonathan Lethem, and tells the story of a detective named Lionel Essrog, who battles Tourette’s as he goes about his business solving crimes.

In Norton’s film, he portrays Essrog, while the supporting cast includes big names like Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe and Alec Baldwin, among others.

Apparently, Norton has been working on this film for nearly 20 years, as it went through delays and the typical obstacles that sideline a picture. Via Vanity Fair’s detailed look at the film’s story:

What happened next is a familiar Hollywood story: delays, bad timing, years of puzzling out the script. But this fall, exactly 20 years later, Motherless Brooklyn is at last a reality, with Norton as the book’s unforgettable hero, Lionel Essrog, and Bruce Willis as Frank Minna, the paternal head of the seedy Brooklyn detective agency that’s employed Lionel since he was an orphaned teenager. Those characters will be familiar to readers of the book, but as these first-look images make clear, the rest of Motherless Brooklyn is a new world entirely.

Motherless Brooklyn is scheduled for release in theaters on November 1.