Imaginary Worlds - Songs in the Key of SF

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Jeff Russo has composed music for sci-fi fantasy shows like Star Trek Discovery and Picard, The Umbrella Academy, Altered Carbon, For All Mankind, and Lucifer. But he didn’t set out to be known as a composer of SF projects, or even a composer at all. He began as a rock musician, and found he had a knack for writing music for the screen because he understood that music plays a crucial role in grounding unreal stories in the emotions of the characters. We talk about his approaching to scoring and why it’s so challenging to write a theme song. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. A TV theme song can be iconic, and a sci-fi or fantasy theme song can really set the mood. Like the original Star Trek theme, or the X-Files. Or Twin Peaks. In the last 20 years, a lot of network TV shows and cable shows have done away with theme songs. It's become trendy to have a cold open and then cut to the name of the show and have a quick musical sting. But that's not the case with sci-fi fantasy shows. So many of them, especially the ones on streaming services, have full theme songs with high-concept title sequences, like Stranger Things, or The Orville. And the theme song for Game of Thrones was so popular,

they reused it for House of the Dragon. And I recently learned that some of my favorite theme songs from recent sci-fi and fantasy shows were all written by the same person, Jeff Russo. Jeff has written music for Star Trek Discovery and Picard, The Umbrella Academy, Altered Carbon, Lucifer, Legion, Utopia, For All Mankind, The Santa Clarita Diet, and the reboot of The Man Who Fell to Earth. He's also written scores for films and video games. Jeff started out as a rock musician. He still plays with his band, which is called Tonic. He kind of fell into composing. He was hanging out with some friends, the rock duo Wendy and Lisa. They're best known for having been part of Prince's band, The Revolution, but now they mostly compose music for Wendy and Lisa. They're best known for having been part of Prince's band,

The Revolution, but now they mostly compose music for film and TV. They asked Jeff if he wanted to help them out with a project, and he discovered he really enjoyed the process. Eventually, his career as a composer took off after he was hired to write music for the TV show Fargo. I was excited to talk with Jeff because the process of composing music has always felt mysterious to me. And I asked him, did he have any kind of background in musical composition before he got into this? No, as a matter of fact, I'd never written a piece of orchestral music in my life before I did Fargo. So it was like me sort of just trying to figure it out, you know, like, I understand harmony and I understand how to write a melody and I understand counterpoint. So, you know, why not apply the, the way I write

now to this, these other instruments and see what happens. You know, I think I wrote the original melody for, for the Fargo theme on my guitar. I just sort of was messing around with the guitar. And then, you know, I said, why can't this, what happens if this is on violin? You know, what happens if violin plays it? And then I just sort of went there. Wow, that's amazing. Like, I love your theme songs.

And I was wondering, what is the process of composing a theme song and how is that different from scoring an episode? Cause you almost have to make like a thesis statement with a theme song. Well, that's exactly right. And I actually have had this conversation with filmmakers about this and with, um, you know, studios and networks and, you know, where, where people are like, well, isn't it just as easy as writing a score piece? And I was like, well, no, that's not how you go about writing a theme. You know, when you're writing a theme, you're trying to encapsulate the idea of the

story and make a statement while you're standing out there like you're on your own. Whereas with score, there's dialogue and there's all these other things that are happening that you are in concert with and that's that is a much different way of thinking in terms of how you go about composing something like that you know you're not thinking about the other things that are going to be playing in concert with it you're thinking about how will the music tell this whole story in a minute or a minute, 30 seconds or two minutes or or 10 seconds. Sometimes it's like, how do you do that in 10 seconds? I spent an entire summer working on the main title theme for for Star Trek Picard season one. Star Trek Picard season one.

You know, that's because I was going back and forth on a lot of different ideas and a lot of different melodies and a lot of different, a lot of different types of structure and a lot of different feels. And, you know, finally you find something that works and then you have to write it. Once you find the thing that works,

then the work begins, you know? Yeah. Well, I'd love to go over some theme songs you've written for, all for sci-fi fantasy shows that I really enjoy. Let's start with Picard. There seems to be kind of like, like a childlike sense of wonder at the beginning of this theme. And, and that like also a lot of the story elements for the show had been like Picard wrestling with his past, especially like

in season two, there were all these flashbacks to his childhood. Is that the kind of thing you already knew ahead of time? Like, did they discuss that with you? Did they say, you know, this is where we're taking the character? Well, we didn't discuss that particular thing that happened in season two, which they didn't even know when I was writing the theme for season one. But what we did talk about is the idea of personal growth, right? And the idea of personal realization and struggling with self, struggling with past and trying to move into the future. And a lot of that is all related to looking to your own past and sort of breaking from it and reconciling it and then moving forward into the future, a lot of that is all sort of part and parcel to how I wanted to tell the story, because that was what we were talking about in terms of the storyline for season one.

You know, we made a change to the title theme in season two. I made a change to the title theme in season two. It was because the way the story was being told was changing. I did my best to continue the connection to the main title melody, which I thought was very important. There were like three pieces to that melody that I think keep us really grounded

and connected to Picard as a character. You know, I struggled with that in the beginning and then I think finally found the way through in order to keep everything connected. So I'm curious though, in that process, did you have other versions of the Picard theme that you like had even come close to doing

a sort of a sketch of and then you know that had a very different feel to it but you just you set it aside eventually well yes um yes so as a matter of fact the first one of the first versions I did was way more similar to our second uh season's theme than our first. When I first presented my idea to Alex Kurtzman, you know, Alex was like, well, this is really great, but I'm wondering if there's a way to make this a little more contemplative. Is there a way to be a little more sort of looking inside rather than feeling like we are swashbuckling at this moment?

And then I understood what he was saying. And as I sort of dug deeper into that idea, it shifted into the more, I mean, certainly the more contemplative thing that you hear now. Well, I want to ask you about Star Trek Discovery, because that was like the first Star Trek show you worked on. And I was talking this over with my assistant producer. We're saying how like Burnham's growth as a character seems to be in that theme. Like when the show begins, she's somebody who's on the road to being a captain.

She screws up big time, falls to the bottom of the Federation. And the rest of the series has been her working her way back up to the top again. You know, I feel like it's, that's kind of there in the theme, but then the theme hasn't changed much since the first season. So I was curious, was that something you talked about with the showrunners in terms of what her trajectory was going to be? Yeah. I mean, you know, the first thing I discussed when, when thinking about the theme for, for Discovery was, well, how do we continue this idea, the idea of Star Trek and its music? How do I connect it to something new?

And then how does that connect to what my original idea for the way to go about music for this iteration of Star Trek was, which for me was a way more emotional connection to, you know, music's emotional connection to the character. That was my sort of idea when I talked to the producers about doing the show to begin with, was I felt that it was really way more important to talk musically about how a character feels

and not what a character is doing. I think that connecting it to Burnham and that character changes drastically in the first four episodes of that show of Discovery. And most of that growth, most of the like really the 180 degree turn that she made happened in those first few episodes. And then the growth becomes now much more long-term and you see a slow growth over the next four seasons. But in that first season, there was a big turn from that first episode and then, you know, how she became a leader, a true leader. And, you know, the idea of that theme was, to me, trying to talk about the struggle of someone who's born to be a leader and struggles with accepting that. And that that to me tells the story over a much longer period of time.

How do you do that musically, like in terms of instruments to tell that story? How do you do that musically, like in terms of instruments to tell that story? Well, you know, it's interesting. Like I say it because that's what I was feeling. That's what I wanted to feel when I was writing. There is no one way to musically tell a story. I mean, other people might argue with me. Other people might say, no, there are very specific musical ways of doing X, Y,

and Z. And I don't really write in that way. Like I write from a much more cerebral approach, a much more hands-on sort of turn the lights off and see how I get there if I'm just feeling my way around in the dark. So I wouldn't say that there's a specific way I went about doing that other than as I was sitting there at my piano playing these melodies, wondering how it was I was feeling about that character. And when I stumbled across that melody, which coalesces with this sort of ostinato. By the way, an ostinato is a musical phrase that gets repeated throughout a piece.

Now, to me, the original plan was to try to speak the idea that all things in the universe are connected. And how do I say that? And the ostinato says that by using something called common tone, where the entire ostinato chord chain shares one note. There's one note in every chord of the ostinato. And that, to me, coupled with this melody that I was feeling for Burnham, those two things together really made me feel like I was telling that story.

Well, I want to ask you about another show that you worked on, The Umbrella Academy, which is a show I really like. It's about a family of dysfunctional, misfit superheroes who fight among themselves a lot, but they still love each other at the end of the day. And there isn't an opening credit credit sequence, but there is like kind of a main theme for the show, which has this interesting contrast between these sort of melodic strings. And then there's this like frenetic rock energy. So like, what was your goal for that theme? You know, to say that there was a specific goal for that particular theme is hard because I never set out to write an Umbrella Academy theme. I did, however, need to write a piece of music

that was for the character formerly known as Vanya because at the time, Vanya, you know, was central to how they were going to end the season based on Vanya's abilities relating to them playing violin. So I had to write a violin piece. I had to write something that was going to be indicative of that character. And in doing that, like writing the melody on the violin, it became very apparent that this was going to be a very orchestral feeling, emotional feeling score. And thus that piece of music became the theme for Umbrella Academy. Although

there was no main title theme, there's no main title sequence, but there is a main theme for them, for the family. So it's interesting because you mentioned that you, Picard season two, you recompose the theme. I think Discovery and Picard and Umbrella Academy too, there's some major tonal shifts and like high concept ideas, major high concept ideas that play out from season to season so that, you know, they sound or they feel almost like slightly different shows. I assume that's something you continue to adjust to as well. Well, yeah, of course. I mean the entirety of those two shows, second season, was a lot different than the first.

So there are things that can connect seasons one and two, and I think it's really important to keep connected in that way. But needing to build on what came before it in order to take us into the future of what that story is going to be is really important. So it's all a work in progress. It's always like looking at a thing and then figuring out how to get to the next step. next step. Another show you worked on that I really like is For All Mankind, which is an alternate history where the Soviets land on the moon first in 1969, and that sparks a whole second space race.

And it's like when I listen to the theme, I feel like the theme is telling the audience that space exploration is wonderful and it's amazing to see humanity like spreading out to the stars. But the story itself is actually kind of terrifying a lot of the time and space is really deadly and so I was wondering um when you went about the composing the music like what were what were the initial conversations you had with the showrunners well you know so I work closely with um with a collaborator on that his name is Paul Paul Doucette. And he and I talked about certainly going into season three when he became, you know,

integral to the making of the music, how closely we are connected emotionally to these characters. You know, I do tend to do a lot of the science fiction-y type of stuff, but I don't treat the I don't treat the material from a, you know, from like a what you would think science fiction sounds like it's, you know, science fiction is basically just emotional, dramatic storytelling with the

background of something being science and or space and or sort of high concept, I should say, or fantasy even. And I think that the way to keep those things grounded is to tell the human story. And the way to do that with music is to play emotional, to play it emotionally and to connect the characters in that way. And I think we do that to play it emotionally and to connect the characters in that way. And I think we do that on For All Mankind. And they agreed. They said, like, let's tell this story from the characters to make it feel as real as possible, because it's obviously it's a you know, it's an alternate it's an alternate timeline story, which is which is really which is really interesting. You want to keep that story as real as possible to make people believe it,

you know, and the way to do that is to connect characters. Characters are the only thing that matter. So I don't really play like is space scary or I'm not even really playing that isn't space wonderful. I'm talking about how the characters feel, like the thrill the characters feel when they're on their way to Mars or the thrill the characters feel when they're, you know, watching their their friends go up into space or how frightening it is when they're dying, you know, or when things go wrong. or when things go wrong. And I think that's one of the more important things with doing and telling any science fiction story is like if you want it to feel real, you have to play emotion and not like action. I mean, action is one thing

and we do action in all these shows, but that sort of has to be secondary to to the storyline yeah that makes sense i mean i've heard so many actors talk about that like if they're in a sci-fi fantasy scene they always say that they had to like play the reality of the scene or the emotion of the scene i remember actually like um i heard an interview with like paul bettany and james spader and they're talking about the scene they had together was like Ultron and Vision. And so there's like two high concept, like Android robot characters. And the way they approached the scene was like to play it as a father and a son. And so it seems like when music is like picking up on those emotions and enhancing them, the music is then also just kind of like

grounding the scene even more in a reality that anyone can relate to, like on a personal level. Yeah, it's true. Music is crucial for that. Music actually can help the actors feel even more real. And also, conversely, it can do the opposite. How so? Well, I mean, when the music becomes disconnected from the emotional content, then it becomes like, you know, elevated reality. Right. And it sometimes people want it to not feel real. Sometimes people want it to feel like heightened reality. And it does the opposite of grounding, you know, and making you feel like drawing you into the scene, but keeping you looking at a 30,000 foot view. You know, I've worked on projects where that's

what they wanted and they didn't want it to necessarily feel like genuinely real. They wanted it to feel more like you were seeing the story that couldn't possibly be real. Like you were seeing the story that couldn't possibly be real. We'll talk more about the role that music can play in fantasy worlds after this. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection.

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I asked him if there was a theme song for a sci-fi or fantasy show that he did not work on, but he thinks that composer did a really good job of conveying to the audience what that show is about. And he said he really liked the score for Severance, which was written by the composer Theodore Shapiro. Severance is a dramatic thriller starring Adam Scott about a group of characters that work at a company which puts chips in their brains. So when they're at work, they don't remember who they are outside the office. And when they leave the office, they have no memory of what happened there. Teddy Shapiro's theme for Severance is amazing to me. It's incredible. And that show's score is also really incredible. And it goes to that theme a lot during the score, which is how I like to write a score.

I like to connect main themes into the score and sort of have it all work together. Could you tell me a bit more about that? What are you feeling emotionally? And that's all focused on Adam Scott's character too, that all the title sequence and everything. What are you feeling about Adam Scott's character when you listen to that theme? Well, I feel like there's, you really do feel, and I'm not sure why, but you really do feel like there's two sides to this character and that character has trouble deciphering the two sides.

And it's possible that I feel that in the music because I feel that in the show. And it's like, you know, you never really know, like, is the show making me feel that? Is the music making me feel that? And when I listen to the music without the show, I still feel that. But is that because I saw the show? You know, I don't know, but I I really do feel like Teddy nailed that sound like it really sounds uneasy. What was a show that maybe you struggled with the most where you definitely had free reign? You know, you didn't feel like you were sort of fighting against notes that you didn't agree with. But you really, it took you so long to finally nail that one. I don't know. Now that I'm thinking about that and it's like they all take time.

They all take, they all feel like I'm never going to get there until I do, you know. And then I get there. There's a struggle with every creative endeavor. You know, I struggle with myself. I struggle with, I'm never going to get there. There's a struggle with every creative endeavor. You know, I struggle with myself. I struggle with I'm never going to get there. And then a lot of other things set in, you know, like, you know, are they sure? Did they hire the right person? And maybe they made a mistake.

Maybe they listened to the wrong reel. Maybe they think I'm somebody else. I don't know. There's a million things. And I think that that happens with every project. Well, you've also composed music for video games. And one of them was like a really highly regarded indie video game called What Remains of Edith Finch, which is about a character who goes back home after their family has died, possibly because of a curse. What was the process like for that? I mean, was it any different from composing a show or a film?

No, that particular process was not. I've worked on video games that were way more like what you do in video games, which is very different in terms of how the narrative connects to music. But that particular project, they let me write that score like I was writing the score to a film. We did it very thematically and set up themes for places and individual characters that we were talking to along the way and set up a theme for Edith

as sort of the overall sort of theme of the whole game. And then I edited between themes as we were, as the player was sort of going from one part of the story to the next. And in that way, it was really fulfilling for me and really great. I really enjoyed doing that because I got to write all this music and then sort of put it to the picture, the gameplay. It was pretty fun. Well, emotionally, what did you want to connect with emotionally with that theme? Life and death. death because the whole the whole game is about this family's life and how this one character

tells the story of her whole family and that was really what i wanted to get at yeah it's really interesting i mean like i don't think until talking to you i realized like in talking about emotions in in the scores that i've really connected with versus the ones that i haven't i mean i think particularly with sci-fi like i feel like a lot of sci-fi scores these days tend to be very textural. Like there's a lot of electronic moods that they're evoking. And I was thinking, well, it must be kind of old-fashioned because I seem to like the more structured scores, but I'm realizing that maybe I prefer scores that are connecting more like emotionally with the characters, you know, than these scores that are more like an electronica texture. Well, you know, than these scores that are more like an electronica

texture. Well, you know, it's two very different ways of doing a score. And they can be both just as effective as the other. I remember watching a movie called Ex Machina. I don't know if you've seen it. Yeah, it's about like androids and AI. That score is very textured and layered, not particularly melodic or particularly emotional, but it is very evocative. It's extremely evocative. And,

you know, that's the perfect example of a score that's incredibly effective and incredibly engaging, but not traditional sounding, not like emotionally connective, you know, orchestral music. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like the one thing I would say is it's not supposed to be noticeable unless it's meant to be noticeable, right? It's supposed to help tell the story without telling the story, unless it's asked to tell the story. And sometimes it is, you know, in Fargo, we do that a lot where there's just no dialogue at all. It's just picture and music. And sometimes that's the best way to

tell the story. And sometimes being very subtle is the way to tell the story. And I think that when people think it's a mystery on how to get it done, it's like, well, I mean, I think that to a certain degree, the entire art of making films and making television is all a mystery. And it's magic and it's Hollywood magic. And that's what makes it so wonderful to watch and listen to. Who are your heroes in terms of composers? It's funny. I didn't start my career thinking about that. So I don't know that I have heroes. I have favorite composers. Heroes for me are like Dave Gilmore. David Gilmore of Pink Floyd is the reason why I make music. He's my hero. But in terms of film scores, you know, I love the greats, Tom Newman, John Williams, you know, Jerry Goldsmith, all of that, Howard Shore. I mean, there are so many great film composers. I don't know that I have one hero. I mean, certainly we all know John

Williams is probably the greatest of all time, like the true greatest of all time. If there is a greatest of all time, he is it. But I don't know that I would consider any one composer in particular my hero because it wasn't something that I sort of aspired to be from a young age. Well, you were – I mean I saw in a video you mentioned that you were like a big Star Trek fan as a kid. Well, you were, I mean, I saw in a video, you mentioned that you were like a, you know, big Star Trek fan as a kid. So, I mean, it seems like you, you must, even though it's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of creative agita, there, there must be some moments where you're like, oh my God, this is, you know, the little kid in me can't believe I'm doing this.

Oh, without a doubt. Every day I pinch myself. I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe that I do this. It's, it's an incredible, it's an incredible feeling. I get to be involved in the magic making, and that makes me one of the luckier people I know. After talking with Jeff, I re-watched some of the scenes that we talked about,

and I noticed how present his music was. In fact, when I was trying to notice the music, I couldn't believe how dominant it was, because I remember when I watched those episodes for the first time, I was so caught up the music, I couldn't believe how dominant it was. Because I remember when I watched those episodes for the first time, I was so caught up in the story and the characters, I didn't notice the music at all. And maybe that's why composing always felt to me like a magic trick. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening, and special thanks to Jeff Russo for taking time out of his very busy schedule to talk with me.

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