Category: The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead Score Album

Tonight, the Season Eight premiere of The Walking Dead airs on AMC, marking my 100th score for the series’ 100th episode. This season promises “all out war,” as Rick and his armies battle to free themselves from the iron-fisted rule of Negan and his Saviors. These upcoming episodes will live up to this promise, and more, as they deliver all the intense action, drama and revelations that fans have come to expect from this juggernaut worldwide hit series.

This weekend also marks an important personal milestone: the long-awaited release of my original score soundtrack album, thanks to a joint partnership from Lakeshore Records and Sparks & Shadows. The album is available digitally, on CD, and also on vinyl, with a limited run of signed CDs available from La-La Land Records (UPDATE: by the time I finished this blog entry, the signed copies sold out!). And for those of you in Los Angeles, I will be appearing at a signing at Dark Delicacies in Burbank on Saturday, October 28th. If you’ve been waiting for this album to come out for a while, there are, at last, plenty of ways to get your hands on it! (more…)

The Walking Dead Season 6

The Walking Dead returns to AMC tonight, for the premiere of its sixth season! I am incredibly excited for fans to see and hear what’s coming, because I think this is probably our strongest season yet. 

The creative model for this series has been to reinvent itself every eight episodes, with each run taking on a unique tone, and following our characters on a specific arc. Of course there are larger macro narrative arcs that span the entire series as well. This richly layered drama creates a unique challenge for me as a composer. With each season I strive to integrate elements from my previous seasons’ work into new themes, sounds and styles. My task is always to tell the immediate story at hand, but to also help thread the entire series together, to remind viewers they are taking part in a story that goes all the way back to the first episode.

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The Walking Dead: Season 4 Begins

After a thrilling third season, “The Walking Dead” returns for a fourth season! The third season finale built to a climactic confrontation between Rick and The Governor, each the leader of their own ragtag armies. For that episode, I pulled back on some of the horrific and dissonant elements in my score and pushed for a more thematic approach, composing an elegant new theme for piano and strings. If you missed my video blog from last spring, you can check it out here:

By the fourth season of any series, the instrumental palette and body of themes has been firmly established. I tend to look for opportunities to shake things up. For “The Walking Dead,” this shift in the music evolved naturally because the series itself introduces new characters, story arcs and a fresh perspective on the source material. (more…)

The Walking Dead: Welcome to the Tombs

The third season of “The Walking Dead” followed sweeping new story arcs, brought our heroes to the brink of desperation and introduced new players on both sides of a classic showdown between good and evil. To keep pace, I expanded the sound of the score from the earthy, intimate timbres of the first two seasons.  Tonight brings us “Welcome to the Tombs,” the final episode in the season and one that presented me with a number of challenges.  As you ‘ll see in my video blog, in addition to writing the score, I also made myself responsible for playing one of the featured instruments!

WELCOME TO THE SPOILERS: Be warned, do not read beyond this point until you’ve watched the episode!  Major spoilers lie ahead…

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The Walking Dead: Made To Suffer

The first half of “The Walking Dead” Season 3 draws to a close with tonight’s epic Made to Suffer. In addition to writing score to bombastic battle cues and gut-wrenching emotional moments, I contributed a piece of source music for the first time in this series. The cue, my arrangement of a two-hundred year old English lullaby called “Bye Bye Baby Bunting,” was featured during the scene between the Governor and his daughter.  The vocals are performed by Raya Yarbrough, whose voice was frequently heard in “Battlestar Galactica” and can currently be heard in my score to “Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome.”

I detail the process of producing this track in this week’s video blog:

The score to Made To Suffer features an all-out war between various musical themes.  The synth pulse Governor Theme that was introduced last week charges through the instrumentation, undulating beneath the strings, banjos, dulcimers, autoharps and other instrumentation that we’ve grown accustomed to.  This new, foreign musical element helps us feel what Rick feels — trapped in an alien environment. (more…)