Just when it looked like they might be out, a number TV program Has drawn the art of opening title themes back.
Some title tracks are customized points created by composers – such as the lovely walk of piano, vocals and paintbucket percussion in Siddhartha Khosla’s theme for “Only murder in the building. “Existing songs can be a fantastic gate to a section, especially when a show collaborates with it forward (or helmet, in the case of the iconic “Peacemaker” opening). Custom themes written especially for a series can also (word games intended) sing a show praise – or six different shows praise, as “Wandavision” The opening theme song adapts to every decade.
“Your friends and neighbors” mix these different approaches in a fun way, with serial composer Dominic Lewis that transforms the main title theme from the show’s points into a single -bar track, for which Apple TV+ series then brought in the main vocalist Hamilton Leithauser from Walkmen to collaborate on the texts and performance. What resulted is “Joneses, ” Which somehow manages to roam the line between an elegant, produced sound that reflects the series’ upper -class environment and the Platonic ideal for a rock song that plays in a dive.
To reflect themes and tone of a TV series back to it through the music is of course the name of the game for all composers, but “your friends and neighbors” was in particular a tricky needle for Lewis to thread. “(The point) is very piano -based and it is difficult in itself because so many things are piano -based. So to make it unique and different around the piano is tough,” Lewis told IndieWire.
But Showrunner Jonathan Trupper felt the piano was right for the world like Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm) inhabit. The brilliance of manners and wealth in Coop’s Country Club World is wound as tight as piano thread, and the show explores what happens at the moment it (and he) is snapped. So Lewis explored that volatility. “The main motif in the choir and throughout the show is a Triton. Without getting too geeky, it’s not a stable interval at all,” Lewis said.
Building a sense of danger and potential explosiveness – something that the visual of “your friends and neighbors” opening theme also benefits from – in the structure of the music, Lewis and his team could have created only an instrumental track. The slowly constructing surrounding dismissal for Theodore Shapiro’s main title for “Severrance” Make Keir’s work to bring us down to the cut floor every section; And perhaps no one in the latest memory has created the musical counterpart to ride out because imagination is fighting in the way Ramin Djawadi’s main theme for “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” do.
But it was important for the world of “your friends and neighbors” to have a human voice also for all the very human greed and pride that inspires Coop to start making some easy crimes. “That (the main theme) must have what the show has. It’s elegant. It’s expensive. But it also has some cheekiness for it. There is some darkness there,” Lewis said. “It lent to this song pretty well.”
Leithauser’s voice was one of the first to come up for Lewis and the music team “Your Friends and Neighbors” as someone who could channel that cheek and dark edge while still playing in the show’s manicured sandbox. Fortunately, the singer for Walkmen was a lot of play to get into a recording studio with the work that Lewis had already done and put his spin on it.
For “The Joneses”, polishing the course actually meant opening up and playing with various iterations and spontaneous additions to the texts. “We kicked around for a while,” Leithauser told IndieWire. “You come to a point where we are all psyched because it works. Everyone is there. The microphone is on. The tone is right. Everyone is ready to go. But you only have one line (missing).”
Reworking a line so that it fits better is really not a new challenge for neither Lewis nor Leithauser. “I’ve been there so many times in my life,” Leithauser said. “Then you start coming up with the stupid shit. But that’s when you brainstorms, and that’s when things happen, and then it’s fantastic.”
A special point of pride for both Lewis and Leithauser was a (very cheeky) reference, “Don’t count the microdes” that eventually fit into the song’s second choir, but for a while was one of a number of loose lyrical ideas that they played with to reflect the high status but emotionally rotten nature in the show.
When it works, you get an audience to get an audience to an audience excited to dive into the section. It can also be a tool for creating a sense of resonance, meaning or completion when it then appears in the section itself. When you looked at “Your friends and neighbors”, Leithauser himself was happy to hear glimpses from “The Joneses” show up in section and emphasize important moments without completely tipping the Apple series hand. “I thought how good it is to get a mileage out of the little one (melody) and then you (the) different keys and stuff,” said Leithauser.
“I remove it to another world halfway through the season,” Lewis said. “I won’t give away anything, but it’s a kind of perfect thing to do for a TV show, to have the theme in the main title but also be a song. It’s related to the audience.”
“Your friends and neighbors” streams on Apple TV+.
