Interview: James Levine, Composer of “American Horror Story,” “Royal Pains,” and “Glee”

Posted on May 12, 2014 at 8:00 am

Composer James S. Levine worked on two of my favorite television series, so I was especially delighted to get a chance to speak to him. I love “Glee’s” fabulously curated choral selections. And I love the soundtrack to “Royal Pains,” which so perfectly matches the sun-drenched Hamptons setting and the slight humorous, outsider-y edge of the Lawsons. Levine has also worked on other hit series, including “American Horror Story,” “The Closer,” and “The Blacklist.”

What was the first instrument you ever played?

Piano. I had to ask for piano lessons. I was the youngest of three. I started asking for piano lessons when I was about seven and started when I was about nine. I had this great little local teacher, classical at first. Then I started bringing in pop songs that I wanted to play. My sister was a singer in high school and used to be in musical theater. I wanted to accompany her so I’d learn the song she was singing, show tunes, some pop songs as well.

When I was 13 I switched to a different teacher. I wanted to learn jazz and improvisation and so I switched teachers. He became a mentor to me and I studied with him through college.

What did you study in college?

I decided to get a Bachelors degree in American Studies. I really got into how music functions in society, so I studied music from that perspective. the function of music and culture and then the actual nuts and bolts of musical training I did with this fantastic teacher who I studied with until I was 23.

And when you thinking about music in society, where you very aware of music in movies and television?

Of course, yeah. Totally always very aware of that, sort of loved doing that or thinking about doing that while playing in bands or playing in shows and playing songs, writing songs, that sort of stuff. Sort of anything I could do I would do, that sort of thing.

Why is it that we no longer have the distinctive TV theme songs as we used to in the 60’s and 70’s?

I think that there is this sort of push to get to the show right away so you don’t lose the viewer. And there is a fear of making a definitive statement out of the gate. I think people are afraid that if you establish a tone that’s too specific immediately you might turn off a bunch of people.

One thing I love about Glee is the way it crosses so many categories with the music on the show — pop, rock, hip-hop, show tunes, songbook.

You can’t be afraid of that. I have worked with people, Ryan Murphy being probably one of the most well-known that is not afraid of making a statement and sort of making people uncomfortable and sort of redefining himself with each show. With American Horror Story, each season, we totally reinvent ourselves. So he trusts that you make something that’s compelling.

When you are working on a series like “The Blacklist,” where do you begin?

I think you definitely start with characters and the story and from there I think about themes for characters, I think about the overall tone of the show and sort of what components make up the show. On a lot of these shows like “Major Crimes” or “The Closer,” which I worked on for a long time, there is always the case and then you also have the specific character beats and character pieces and those can help define the character. You sort of ride the line between propelling the case forward in those shows and also getting and giving character information.

Going into a new season of a show, there is always an overall goal of the writers and the creator and producers like this season is going to be about fulfillments and so and so’s drives to find his long lost mother. Okay now within that we are going to have 18 or 22 or 13 episodes of different procedural cases but the overall arc is something that helps you think in a more global sense and sort of maybe grow the music forward a little bit and stretch it.

So just as the writers and the creators might want and usually need to like feel as though they are stretching their muscles and expanding the sort of mythology of the story, that composer can see like we have that opportunity too. You know you have to take chances to do that. So sometimes you might take the chance and be like, “This is not our show! This is unlike anything we do.” And sometimes too like, “Oh, that’s a really cool idea and it totally works!” And it feels like it’s evolving so it’s sort of a case-by-case basis.

One of the things I love about “Royal Pains” is that it has this very specific setting that is not like anything else on television. How do you think about adding the overall distinctive quality to the music?

We keep it breezy and fun and then. The goal at the beginning was to make it light. There’s obviously the medical drama case stuff, which sort of exists in its own way and that’s sort of a procedural element that show so the music sort of functions in that way. But the rest of it is like placing characters. And I always wanted to feel like there is sort of a central core group of four or five characters, a small little breezy sunshiny Jack Johnson, James Taylor, rock band. It’s like sort of an acoustic rock sort of score but it’s evolved and we sort of drift in and out of more serious moments and pull it in either direction. We keep it like a beach party a little bit. To keep the sunshine and all of that. The story gets serious but sometimes you don’t have to play serious on top of serious to get the point across and often times it’s not necessary; because it’s a well-written show and they are good actors.

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Is Television Still a “Vast Wasteland?”

Posted on May 9, 2014 at 8:54 am

53 years ago today my dad, the new 35-year-old Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission appointed by President John F. Kennedy, made a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters that was on every list of the most influential speeches of the 2oth century. We are very proud of him. Last weekend, he was presented with the Lincoln Award by the Governor of Illinois. It is the state’s highest award for public service.

And did you know that television writer/producer Sherwood Schwartz was so angry about the speech he decided to name the sinking ship on his new television show after my dad? Yes, that’s how the S.S. Minnow on “Gilligan’s Island” got its name. Really.

Trailer: The Normal Heart

Posted on April 23, 2014 at 8:00 am

Larry Kramer’s searing, Tony award-winning play “The Normal Heart” is coming to HBO with an all-star cast.

Interview: Daniel Licht, Composer of “Dexter”

Posted on April 22, 2014 at 8:00 am

Daniel Licht composed the music for “Dexter” as well as two of the “Silent Hill” video games and films including “Permanent Midnight” and “Stephen King’s Thinner.” He talked to me about the difference between composing for thrillers and comedy and why he hit his guitar with a frying pan.

Tell me a little bit about where you grew up and your training.

I grew up in Detroit and my training has been a bit mixed. I’ve got quite a varied background. I started playing rock ‘n roll when I was 12 in a garage band, because basically I wasn’t good at football and that was the only way to get girls to like you. And then I got interested in classical music and jazz when I was about 14. Detroit was a great city for jazz. I would sneak out to clubs at the age of 14 or 15. I went to late-night jam sessions in Detroit City. And then I went to Hampshire College and I got into world music and started studying world music. Once I graduated I ended up traveling around the world quite a bit studying music. I went to Java and Bali and I spent some time in Europe traveling around and Japan. And I ended up back in New York and getting a job writing music for commercials, just as a way of making a living.

I came out to visit my friend Christopher Young in California and I saw he was having recording sessions and one side of the room was a Japanese percussion section and then there was a small string section and then there was a choir. It all clicked with my varied background. I realized that this was where I could put it all together.

I had been used to musicians in different categories not liking other types of musicians. If you hang out with the jazz musicians, they didn’t want to have anything to do with the classical musicians because they think they can’t swing. If you hang out with the world music people, they are like, “Oh, you have to do just this if you are true and pure.” I love being able to work in all categories and bring it together.

What did you listen to growing up?

I listened to a lot of music and there was a public station in Detroit called WDET with a late-night DJ who played the most interesting music imaginable. He would go between Herbie Hancock to Sleeping Giant to John Cage, to Sly and the Family Stone and I would go to sleep at night listening to this DJ. It really formed my musical interest. I really came to film music from a love of all music . The film music that I loved the most is the film music that was influenced by music other than film music if you know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, I love the classic film music and I love the classic John Williams orchestral scores. But my taste is more towards like Ennio Morricone, Gustavo Santaolalla, or Tommy Newman who bring in the world influences.

It seems to me as I look over your resume that you have really spent much of your time on — I’m going to say this in a nice way — kind of creepy stuff, scary, tense moods; is that fair? Is that something you really specialize in?

I definitely have done a lot of that; there’s no question about it. And part of that, that’s a combination of two things. One is that I’ve always been interested in 20^th century modern music and like when I was playing jazz, it was avant-garde improvisational jazz. So it’s making scary sounds in a sense and kind of out of the box sounds. So I found that working in that form was the most expressive and the least limited of the kind of music that you could do in the film music category; because I’ve always been interested in pushing the envelope in terms of what kinds of sounds and how you can make them. I’ve always been interested in trying to bend the kind of sounds something can make, playing instruments in different, with different kitchen utensils, even. I used to take my guitar and I would put it on my lap and I would bang it with a frying pan.

So that’s part of what drew me into doing the scary stuff. But it was also because a friend, Christopher Young, he had scored the first two “Hellraisers” and he kind of turned me onto my first gig out here. You get typecast very quickly here once you do one thing and people say, “Oh, that’s what he does.” And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; you want to be known for something because then hopefully people will call you for that thing but I made a conscious effort to get out of doing it because I started doing all horror and thrillers.

I moved towards doing dramatic, I started doing some A&E dramatic films. And then I actually did a film for Disney channel, a Disney TV film called “Don’t Look Under the Bed.” That sort of came out of my scary stuff but it was a Disney film.

And the producer that I work for ended up going on to do comedy; In fact he is one of the producers of “Modern Family.” He kind of trained me to do comedy because I didn’t really have a clue about how comedy worked. Comedy is a completely different than dramatic. Working with drama, you really need to have a whole new tool box. I think that’s one of the things that helped me get the job on the Dexter show. I had experience with comedy and you have to learn how to kind of manipulate the audience but don’t take yourself too seriously at the same time if you know what I mean.

When you are working on a series, is it almost like jazz? Is it improvisational because you have the themes that continue from episode to episode but the cues are different, the characters are different?

Yes, it is a bit like improvising and jazz. Working at “Dexter” for eight years, I was definitely rearranging the same themes. So it’s like when you work on a film or video game, you are putting 50 percent of your effort into writing the themes and designing the sound world. Then the other half is executing it.

And then as time goes on, less of your effort is designing the sound and more is kind of filling in the spaces or building the structure from what you’ve already developed. So there’s a little difference in that you are doing a lot more content for television, if that makes any sense.

How do you balance between keeping it familiar and keeping it fresh?

Well, sometimes people want the comfort of a sound, of a particular cue that they have heard before. It is like a touchstone. But like with Dexter, there’s always new characters and new situations that call for new themes. I also always try and rearrange stuff even the same theme. I’ll do a CD every season of Dexter and I’ve always had a different version of the blood theme on that, for instance.

Tell me more about what’s different about scoring a comedy.

Well, this is going to sound a little hackneyed but it is true. What’s the secret to comedy? It’s about timing, right?

Music is very precise rhythmically and comedy is also very precise rhythmically . So you have to learn to make your music dance with the comedy.

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Interview: Martha Williamson of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”

Posted on April 17, 2014 at 8:00 am

Talking to Martha Williamson is pure positive energy and a real treat. The creator of “Touched by an Angel” has a new series on the Hallmark channel. It’s called “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” and it is about a USPS dead letter office where a quirky but very dedicated group of people track down the recipients and change lives by delivering letters. I’ve seen the first two episodes, starring Eric Mabius (“Ugly Betty”) and Kristin Booth, with a special appearance by the effervescent Valerie Harper. It premieres on April 20 at 8/7 central. Carol Burnett will guest star on the series finale.

The first two episodes are great!

Thank you, thank you. They’re both different; I want everybody to realize that there’s a broad world out there of storytelling that we can do. We can get you laughing and crying and we can talk about the serious things with a light touch and the sunny things with a deep touch and we’ll be covering a lot of ground.

Why in the world of texting and IMing and instagram create a television program about old fashioned, analog letter writing?

It is a lost art. Letter writing should not take the place of texting and tweeting and emailing but neither should those things take away the power of the written letter and the written word. I can hold a letter in my hand that my father wrote to me forty years ago and I can still feel what it was like to receive it, I can still hear his voice, I can still look at the little tiny holes in the onionskin paper that he always used for stationary. There’s something so real and so tangible about it. As we stop writing things down on paper we are losing a lot of history. I was just watching last night on TV which is I just stopped for one moment to get my head out of this script and I watched the news and they were talking about global warming and the problems of how long we are going to have electricity.

What happen someday when you can’t boot up and download or upload or recall all those emails that somebody zapped off to you in two seconds? But I can always go to that box of letters from my friends and my family and hold them in my hand. I’m certainly not advocating that we cut down more trees. I’m a big believer in recycling but when you stop to think about what you’re saying with a pen in your hand, you chose your words more carefully. You don’t write things and hit send before you think about it and wish you could retrieve it. You can dash off a letter that you could then put into a drawer and think better about it and not accidentally send it off. There is something about our amazing language and how we are losing our ability to use it effectively that makes me very sad.

Tell me a little about this wonderful assortment of characters you’ve brought together.

Oliver, played by Eric Mabius, is a wonderful fellow from the twentieth century and how he manages to be so young and so old at the same time is really an example of the best of both centuries. This is a guy who was probably raised by old fashioned folks like mine. My dad was born in 1901. He’s a gentleman, he believes in old fashioned values but does not make values a dirty word.

He doesn’t combine values with judgment, he goes to church and sings in the choir but tries to live out his faith more than impose it and he truly tries to do the right thing. And I think more than anything he is kind and that is what draws Shane (Kristin Booth) to him.

Shane is very much a creature of the 21st century and of the new technologies and those are easy things to hide behind. And Oliver is so strong in his gentle mentality and Shane doesn’t quite know what to do with that. You imagine Shane being one of those women who would go to a happy hour with the girls after work. But she would never see Oliver there; this is a guy that she’s never run across before. This is a guy who probably values her more than she even values herself sometimes as a friend and as a person and not as an object. He’s married and has had his heart broken and I think that that’s an important message that our faith does not inoculate us from pain but it does help us get through it and I love that. I just made that up!

And then you’ve got a character with a perfect memory?

Oh yes, Rita Haywith, played by Chrystal Lowe. I love her. Every one of these characters is some part of me that you’ll find everywhere. Rita I think is the most childlike part of me, the part that still wants to believe the absolute best in everyone she meets and is excited about every day. There’s a line in the Bible that says “His mercies are new every morning,” and I just imagine that Rita is the living example of that. That she just wakes up every day so excited that she got another one. And that’s very fun and easy for me to write. I don’t really have a photographic memory although I used to have one that was pretty good, until I had children.

You’ll see later on, she makes a choice to not compete in the traditional way. She can only compete against herself; otherwise it doesn’t matter. It just hit me but I think that’s kind of what I’ve always sort of been.

And Norman (Geoff Gustafson) is somebody who has been deeply hurt, I think. I think he’s the part of all of us who is looking for kindness by being kind, who has an amazing ability for survival, not ability but a facility for survival. And he knows so many things. He loves knowing a whole bunch of stuff and doesn’t always put it in the right order, he always has a cousin who’s connected to something or someone, he can always find a solution but it’s not always going to be the one you’ll expect and it’s going to be fun to watch him come out of his shell. One of the great dividends of this show will be to explore the friendship of men and how they have the opportunity to elevate each other rather than to bring each other down.

I was surprised and very tickled to see that there are musical numbers in the show.

Oh, absolutely! I just wrote a musical member from the special delivery. It’s the funniest thing it goes like “You’re the special delivery, yes you’re our post office queen….”

I can’t wait to see it!

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