Joseph Shabason

Mississippi River Styx, directed by Andy McMillan and Tim Grant and executive produced by Danny McBride and David Gordon Green, follows Kelly Phillips, a terminally ill drifter, as he embarks on a fragile journey down the Mississippi River aboard a ramshackle houseboat with his dog. What begins as a meditative escape through America’s most mythic waterway gradually unravels as questions arise about his story, leaving the viewer suspended between truth, myth, and mortality.
The score, composed by Joseph Shabason and Thom Gill, reflects that same balance of fragility and ambiguity. Sparse instrumentation—guitar, reeds, subtle percussion, and voice—creates music that drifts with the river’s current, shifting between hushed intimacy and uneasy spaciousness. Several songs are carried by the plaintive vocals of Andre Ethier, whose presence grounds the score in raw humanity and brings flashes of playfulness, longing, and resilience. The centerpiece, “The Thing is Sinking,” stretches to eight minutes of immersive, heavy calm, like inevitability set to sound. Taken together, the soundtrack functions not simply as sonic accompaniment but as an emotional guide—leading the listener through the river’s currents of grief, memory, and fleeting grace.