The breadth and depth of music on television were on full display on April 15 at IndieWire and Disney’s Pass the Remote panel, where some of the best composers and music supervisors in the business gathered in front of a packed theater at Vidiots Foundation in Los Angeles to discuss their work.
Music supervisors Tiffany Anders (“Good American Family”) and Jen Ross (“English Teacher”) joined composers the Newton Brothers (“Daredevil: Born Again“), Siddhartha Khosla (“Only Murders in the Building,” “Paradise”), Ariel Marx (“Dying for Sex”), and Michael Paraskevas (“Agatha All Along“) for a lively panel on the pleasures and challenges of creating great soundtracks.
One common thread throughout the discussion was the impulse to use music as an expression of character. For Anders, the needle drops on “Good American Family” — which include everything from 1970s ballads like “Sometimes When We Touch” and “Romeo’s Tune” to later radio hits from Jimmy Eats World, Meat Loaf, and Miley Cyrus — were carefully chosen to represent the kind of music the middle American family at the story’s center would consume.
“The parameters were, what did these people from the late ’90s and 2000s grow up listening to?” Anders said. “What kind of stuff do they respond to? We went for that zone of radio music that they connected to and maybe said a little bit about them.” When Michael, the stressed-out father and husband played by Mark Duplass, loses his job and blasts Green Day in his car, Anders felt it was the only choice for his “mad music.” “It’s not gangsta rap, it’s not metal. It’s not Korn. It’s Green Day, which is perfectly Michael. He’s a wounded man-child, and the song has this pop sensibility to it while still having an edge.”
On “Daredevil: Born Again,” composers Andy Grush and Taylor Stewart, collectively known as The Newton Brothers though they are not actually siblings, took their cues from the title character and his relationship to the imposing city in which he lives. “Taylor and I decided that the city was an omniscient presence that is always calling out to its people, whether they’re the vigilantes or just everyday people,” Grush said. “The idea was to create the city’s own theme that calls out and is only answered — or sometimes not answered — by the themes of each character.”
Stewart added that the score also had to build on the theme music established by composer John Paesano on an earlier iteration of “Daredevil” or risk infuriating the franchise’s fans. “On IP that’s not particularly old, as a fan, you’re expecting a certain something from the character,” he said. “We had discussions about how to incorporate that, but then enhance things with organs and choirs, bringing in more religious elements. But there was a lot to work with already.”
While The Newton Brothers had to think about what to carry over from the prior “Daredevil” seasons and where to branch out in new directions on “Daredevil: Born Again,” Khosla had to reinvent his own score for the fourth season of “Only Murders in the Building,” a series he has been on since the beginning.
“[Showrunner and co-creator] John Hoffman wants to reinvent stuff every season, which is exciting,” Khosla said. “We don’t have to use the same score every year. John and I have a conversation a few months before they shoot, and he walks me through the arc of the whole season, and then I just start writing new themes.”
Khosla’s work elsewhere on “Paradise” is as far from the catchy piano hooks of “Only Murders in the Building” as you can get, featuring a sophisticated blend of classical techniques and synth music that evokes mood more than melody. The tense score grew out of conversations between Khosla and showrunner Dan Fogelman, with whom he has been friends for more than half his life.
“Dan and our directors were very specific about what they wanted the audience to feel,” Khosla said. “They wanted us to constantly feel like we were trapped in this world and couldn’t get out. So it’s very tonal, textured, weird-sounding string stuff and a lot of loops.”
“Dying for Sex” presented a different kind of challenge for Marx, who had to create a musical language for the show’s unusual tone — a tone that veers between jaunty comedy, charged eroticism, and devastating tragedy. She credits the unusually long pre-production period, during which she was brought on early, with enabling her to experiment with multiple ideas.
“It was all about just seeing what was working and how to play the comedy,” Marx said. “I tried to stay true to the idea that this is about a woman whose body is betraying her, and she’s using her body and her last days to experience as much life as possible. So there are a lot of humorous sounds that are very organic, but also very fun.”
The Marvel series “Agatha All Along” might not seem very similar, but in its own way, its tonal range is as broad as that of “Dying for Sex,” as the show jumps genres and emotions throughout its first season while reinventing its title character after her introduction on “WandaVision.”
“Agatha was the supervillain, just straight-up evil,” Paraskevas said. “Here, she’s an antihero, and we’re trying to sympathize with her, but you don’t really understand her trauma and motivations until the very end of the show. So there was this balance that we had to find. The first thing we did was get rid of the traditional superhero sound — no French horns, no trumpets. We had this weird ensemble of strings, six trombones, a tuba, and a lot of processed effects and electronics.”
For “English Teacher,” Ross took a big swing by using 1980s pop songs like Scandal’s “The Warrior” and The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame” on what is a contemporary show, but the idea was to give the series a timeless feel and to associate it in viewers’ minds with classic coming-of-age movies that adult viewers grew up watching. (That’s why many of the cues come from movies, like “Flashdance” and “Streets of Fire.”) “We also wanted to find the humor and the heart,” Ross said. “That’s why we use a lot of songs that bring some kind of familiarity, but still work in a very timeless way. We weren’t trying to just play a joke. We were trying to make a greater narrative with it.”
There was added pressure on Ross given that “English Teacher” has no score — the songs have to do the heavy lifting. “We didn’t have a composer for the show, so one of the first conversations I had with the showrunner was about the fact that he thought the dialogue and the songs should set the tone and an emotional narrative. That’s really how we found the 1980s of it all, and then we found other songs that were current to complement them.” One of the challenges? For some of the 1980s songs, original versions were impossible to clear because artists had re-recorded them — just one of the less desirable aspects of a job that Ross and Anders say is as administrative and business-oriented as creative.
Anders added that her background working in record stores, where she had to recommend albums to customers based on their taste, prepared her for the job of music supervising — where she often has to pick music that doesn’t necessarily align with her own taste but is right for the material and the showrunner. “You need to be able to think of something really quick as a backup, and you need to know who owns it,” Anders said. “You need to know who wrote it. You need to know all this information as a researcher and be able to offer suggestions for replacements. I can’t think of a single show that I’ve been on where that hasn’t been needed, no matter what the budget is.”
Finding music that fits the showrunner’s vision was a key concern for everyone on the panel. The composers and music supervisors all noted that filmmakers all communicate differently — some directors and showrunners can speak in very specific musical terms, while others don’t have the language, and part of the job is interpreting what they’re looking for.
“It’s a lot like a relationship,” Grush said. “I haven’t been on a date in a really long time, but it reminds me of what that is like. You meet someone, you sit down, and you’re like, ‘Do they like spaghetti or do they want hot dogs?’ Maybe they want to go to a Dodger game, and you don’t know. That’s what it feels like on every project.”
Watch the full video from the Disney Composing Panel at IndieWire’s Pass the Remote series on April 15 at Vidiots in Los Angeles above. Register here to attend the “Sly Lives” screening and Q&A on May 3.
