(Welcome to our Emmys FYC miniseries for “Notes on a Score,” GVN’s interview series highlighting the composers and musicians behind some of the year’s most acclaimed films and television series.)
What does the wilderness sound like? For rockers-turned-composers Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, it sounds like Alaskan bears trying to catch salmon.
“Literally growls,” specifies Wedren. He laughs, but he’s not kidding.
“We watched a lot of nature videos,” explains Waronker. “When we saw how [our music] landed against the nature, the aggression but then also the stillness, we could kind of see, ‘Oh, that actually will work against them in the snow.’”
They are, of course, referring to Season 2 of Showtime’s hit horror drama Yellowjackets, which pits the stranded girls soccer team against the elements, specifically during the dead of winter. As it turns out, the snow would be the least of their problems in a follow-up season that only raised the stakes.
“I wasn’t judging our music at all based on the bears,” Wedren insists, always quick with a dry retort.
“I was.” Waronker responds with a hint of silliness but an even greater hint of sincerity. The duo have a distinct wit and charm to how they interact, an innate chemistry that allows for any bit to effortlessly flourish with one “yes, and.”
It’s the kind of levity you need when working on a score this visceral and provocative. Utilizing electronic distortion, screechy violins, and phlegmy, percussive breaths, amongst a cavalcade of other elements, Wedren and Waronker have crafted a wholly unique soundscape that puts Yellowjackets in a sonic league of its own. It feels like every cue is adding new, unexpected layers, even if those layers are already established elements being reworked in new ways.
One ever-evolving later in Yellowjackets’ haunting score is its use of the human voice. Along with the aforementioned guttural breathing, an angelic choir of female voices will often sing a cue’s main melody. They may also scream it. At times, the voices will deteriorate to the point that they don’t sound like voices at all, but make no mistake. It is a voice, just not a comforting one.
“The idea of having female vocals originated with Karyn Kusama,” recounts Waronker. Kusama, best known as the director of cult hit Jennifer’s Body, is one of the show’s executive producers and directors. “She wanted the presence of a coven to exist in the wilderness. It’s the voice of the wilderness and it’s the voice of what’s going on, what the will and the direction of the scene is.”
Wedren explained that the vocals were first added by the show’s initial composer, Theodore Shapiro, who brought in Shaw for what would only end up being the pilot. “That template was kind of teed up for us, which was great. Then we were able to take everything that they did plus whatever we were feeling in the room at the time.”
“We brought Caroline [back] in and had her basically growl like an animal for four hours,” says Waronker. For the prettier vocals, Wedren, Waronker, and Shaw each recorded passes, which they blended into the score.
“We literally can’t tell half the time if it’s Anna, Caroline, or Craig. It’s just this ‘voice of the wilderness.’”
“It’s kind of like Fleetwood Mac,” Waronker replies. “In the wilderness, of course. I would eat Stevie in a heartbeat.”
“Oh, yeah.” Wedren concurs with beautiful reassurance. “You start with Stevie.”
In this hilarious, in-depth conversation with Geek Vibes Nation, Wedren and Waronker discuss their creative process on Yellowjackets, writing the season’s original song “Sit Right Down,” and their reaction to pop legend Alanis Morissette covering their memorable theme song. Here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
You guys came on to Season 1 of Yellowjackets because you had a collaborator, Theodore Shapiro, who temped the pilot. You both came in and lovingly messed around with it. I assume you guys were pretty confident you’d be returning once the show got a second season order. How did that experience feel, getting to walk into a new season being like, “We now have carte blanche to start exactly where we want to.”?
Craig Wedren: Are you suggesting that coming into Season 2 we felt that way or going now into Season 3 that we feel that way?
Now that you say that, I guess both? You’re free to spill about Season 3 as much as you want.
Wedren: We don’t know anything about Season 3 at this point.
Anna Waronker: I have theories.
Wedren: Anna has a lot of theories.
Your gears are probably turning just as much as the audience’s are.
Wedren: Oh, for sure.
Waronker: So much more because we stare at this stuff.
Wedren: We watch it a hundred times and we’re constantly turning over rocks and speculating about it. But also, Anna is a big reality TV and trash TV connoisseur.
Waronker: Yes!
Wedren: She’s really into the drama.
Waronker: Yeah, the soap opera of it all.
It does feel like, in another world, this show exists as a Love Island-style, “watch 10 dysfunctional people try to get along in the woods” reality show. [all laugh]
Waronker: Oh, man.
To go back to my question though, I was really talking about Season 2.
Waronker: Well, we thought that we had a leg up because we had gotten through Season 1, during which we felt like we were hanging on to the bumper of it. It’s unusual that one gets to be so creative in a television show because oftentimes we’re trying to appeal to different people’s opinions and tastes. In this situation, the showrunners said, “Keep going. Get weirder,” instead of reining it back, which we’re also used to [being told]. By the time we got to Season 2, we had already done a bunch of pre-production because we anticipated what we would be doing. It was maybe Episode 1 or 2 of the second season where we realized we were right back to water skiing behind everything because the show is a beast.
Wedren: With a typical show, you know what genre it exists within and what the traditions or forms or demands of that genre might be, musically. You can stick with them, you can break them, you can stretch them. With [Yellowjackets], it was really, from the word “go,” all about invention and discovery. We’re super lucky, super fortunate, very, very grateful, and also challenged every single frame. The show keeps doubling down on its vision and its originality and its audacity, so we’re playing this game of chicken where the show pushes the music pushes the show pushes the music. It’s a cool push-pull.
When you guys approach doing a season of Yellowjackets, what is the first thing that you see before you start putting music to picture?
Waronker: Well, they send us scripts, but we make an effort to not read them because the producers like to see our reaction—
Wedren: They like to see Anna’s reaction.
Waronker: Okay, they like to see my reaction to the cuts because I’m such a granny. I have a very honest reaction to all of it. I get scared and freaked out.
Wedren: Unfiltered. Guileless.
You’re one of us.
Waronker: Yes. They really love it and value it because they feel like if we have a strong enough reaction to stuff, they know it’s working. But we also had an idea based on the weather and where we thought the story would inevitably go, at least the surroundings and what the sets would be.
So winter played a role in the score for Season 2?
Waronker: Yes, we watched a lot of nature videos.
Wedren: We were watching live cams of bears in Alaska trying to catch salmon a lot while prepping for Season 2. I think going into Season 3, we’re going to want more information.
Waronker: I have a couple ideas.
Wedren: There’s so much now, exponentially more than at the end of Season 1. It’s not just conjecture about “what happened out there.” We’re starting to see it and feel it. The different directions it might take this next season, I think, are going to inform our sound maybe more than up to this point. [But] we’ve been talking about how much we want to know. It’s sort of like a Dance of the Seven Veils. Just show us a little skin. We don’t want to see the whole body.
So, you’re watching live cams of bears getting salmon. Musically speaking, what does that translate into?
Wedren: Literally growls.
Waronker: We did have a lot of bizarre grunts and growls and groans, but we also took a lot of themes from Season 1 and reinvented them. We would take one little rock moment, let’s say, and then turn it into a whole vocal piece. When we saw how it landed against the nature [videos], the aggression but then also the stillness, we could kind of see, “Oh, that actually will work against them in the snow.”
Wedren: I wasn’t judging our music at all based on the bears.
Waronker: I was.
Wedren: I just thought it was really fun having bears on the screen. [laughs] I was just like “Bears are rad, this music is rad, this is great.”
The female voice is such a prominent element in the score, especially the evocative percussiveness of the breaths and grunts. What does that element of the score represent in terms of aligning the picture with the music?
Waronker: The idea of having female vocals originated with Karyn Kusama, who directed the pilot and this season’s finale and is a producer on the show. She had initially said that she wanted the presence of a coven to exist in the wilderness. It’s the voice of the wilderness and it’s the voice of what’s going on, what the will and the direction of the scene is. The wilderness has chosen.
Wedren: Karyn is friends with Theodore, who brought in Caroline Shaw, who’s this extraordinary vocalist and composer in her own right, for vocals on the pilot. That template was kind of teed up for us, which was great. Then we were able to take everything that they did plus whatever we were feeling in the room at the time. Anna’s a singer, I’m a singer, and I tend to like to use my higher, sort of falsetto register a lot.
Waronker: We blend really well.
Wedren: We literally can’t tell half the time if it’s Anna, Caroline, or Craig. It’s just this “voice of the wilderness.”
Waronker: It’s kind of like Fleetwood Mac.
Wedren: It’s just like Fleetwood Mac.
Waronker: In the wilderness, of course. I would eat Stevie in a heartbeat.
Wedren: Oh, yeah. You start with Stevie.
Waronker: We brought Caroline in and had her basically growl like an animal for four hours. She had the best time because it was like, “Well, we have the soaring vocals that we did, so why don’t you just add whatever you think it needs. Whatever witchiness,” and she was just like “ahhh.” It was great.
You really can hear the phlegm splattering onto the mic.
Wedren: More phlegm, more bears.
I’m curious if the edit and the score interact at all. Are you being given the lock of each episode? Is there a little bit of passing back and forth?
Waronker: Usually we come in when the picture is locked. They have a temp score in there and we do a spotting session with the producers and the editors. Then we take it into our own corners and divvy it up.
Wedren: Now that we’ve built up such a good, solid library of Yellowjackets music and sounds, by now they’re entirely using Yellowjackets score whereas in the beginning of Season 1, they’ll be pulling from other scores just to get a tone. You might get something from Yellowstone or – I don’t know, what are other shows that have “yellow” in it.
[laughs] “Temp Yellowjackets But Only With Movies and Shows That Have The Word ‘Yellow’ in it” Challenge.
Waronker: What about the Minions? Do they count?
Wedren: Yeah, Minions count. Even Curious George.
Music supervision isn’t your department, but is there an awareness of what moment will be a needle drop versus what moment may be a score drop?
Waronker: They usually have the needle drops in by the time it comes to us, so we have a good heads up. We’re lucky that way that we get to know ahead of time.
Wedren: It helps us weave things together so that it’s a … unified rock opera, is the way Anna describes it.
Waronker: Yes.
Wedren: But there are times where we’re scoring something and a piece of music will carry over into where we know a song is supposed to be, and we’ll fall in love with it. We’ll be like, “Get [Kate] Bush out of there. It should be our score!” [laughs]
The temp/source music monster is something we’re always talking about on this show, but it sounds like you guys aren’t ever chasing cues.
Wedren: I can’t think of an instance where there’s been temp love. I think in almost every case they’re like, “Go for it. Do your thing.”
One moment in Season 2 that really stuck out to me is Lottie’s mall hallucination in Episode 4. The theme song comes back in a very explicit way. What was the inception for that?
Wedren: Somebody either reached out to Alanis [Morissette] or she mentioned to somebody that she was a fan of the show. We knew going into the season that there were a couple spots around the middle that were going to be potential places for interpretive Yellowjackets music. I don’t know at what point they decided that Alanis was going to do this dreamy, interpretive … I don’t know, I call it a goth power ballad cover.
Waronker: When we first looked at that episode, they had our version warped and slowed down. Then, it turned out the cover she did worked really well over it. Because it was a reinterpretation, it made sense in the weirdest way. I think it’s a really powerful version of the song. I love it.
Wedren: It gave us the giggles in a good way. We didn’t know quite where it was going to land at that point, but when they put it over that mall scene, it was like it had always been there. Coincidentally, and appropriately, Alanis did the cover with her piano player, Mike Farrell, with whom we arranged “Sit Right Down.”
Perfect segue. I remember in an interview for Season 1 you guys put out into the universe, “We want to write songs for the show!” You guys got to do it, although maybe not in the way you originally expected. Has musical theater always been part of your musical identities?
Waronker: I was always a fan of specific musicals, but not a big musical theater fan, if that makes sense. Loved Bye Bye Birdie and Sound of Music, but Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy were really the things that I loved. And then later Hedwig I loved as well. I got involved in writing music for theater 15 years ago and ended up writing a rock opera with my sister-in-law [Charlotte Caffey] called Lovelace: A Rock Musical about Linda Lovelace, and it was intense. I get a similar feeling with Yellowjackets, however with Yellowjackets we’re not butting up against rotten personalities like you can in independent theater. I’m stuck in a little room with Craig, a safe little zone.
Wedren: My taste is very similar, actually. In fact, it’s probably the exact same list of musicals that you just said, with the addition of some Sondheim and Rocky Horror and Bob Fosse.
Waronker: Oh, yeah! I left out Fosse like a fool.
Wedren: We both came up as indie punk snobs and musical theater just wasn’t a part of that. That said, my mom was very into Pippin and I was always doing shows and in musicals because I was a singer, so I had this dual track of theater and band. I never thought of myself as writing for theater until maybe the last 10 years. A couple of jobs came up, a couple of little assignments. When I started writing for that format, I realized how open and free and weird it is structurally. You really can do anything, so long as it’s telling the story.
Waronker: That part’s so fun.
Wedren: It doesn’t have to be verse, chorus, verse, chorus – though “Sit Right Down” is a fairly traditional song structure. We felt it needed to be super catchy.
Waronker: The producers were really excited about the idea, but then also weren’t sure. They knew our rock backgrounds and they knew our scoring, but they didn’t know if we could do this. When they brought it up to us, we were like, “Yeah! We’d love to!” When we finally sent them back the song, they were like, “Well, we’re never going to ever doubt you [again].”
Wedren: Just throw it our way! That’s why we do this and stopped doing bands, because it became so straightjacketed. With what we do, we literally get to do anything. I think one of the reasons “Sit Right Down” came so easily and was so fun to do is we had been in this very experimental, occasionally extraordinarily noisy sound world with the score of Yellowjackets, and then when they asked us to do this, it was like, “Oh boy. We needed that.” We needed that lunch break. That little cupcake.
This world that you’re describing, musical theater being so free flowing and defiant of genre, sounds exactly like what you’ve been doing with this show.
Wedren: You just wait till Yellowjackets: The Musical.
Waronker: Oh, I can’t wait.
Wedren: [singing] “Eat me! Eat me!”
Waronker: [singing] “Jackie’s a snackie!”
This musical theater sensibility for Misty’s character is something that has grown a lot in Season 2. Does that at all define that character’s musical sensibility?
Wedren: After we wrote “Sit Right Down,” we started weaving elements of it into Misty’s score very subtly. You wouldn’t even necessarily be aware of it.
Her sound world is a bit pluckier, so it felt like there was a little musical theater in there.
Wedren: Misty’s theme in Season 1 … when it came up, I remember grinning and chuckling and being really excited about it. I remember first playing a very raw version of it for Anna and we were sort of like, “Wait, what? This show isn’t a comedy,” but it turns out it is. In the adult world, there’s a lot of room for playing with TV comedy tropes – with the cops, with Walter, with Misty.
I mean, the condom beat with the cops is so funny.
Waronker: Augh!
Wedren: That’s so great. We were like, “Yeah, these guys really know how to fight crime!”
When are you guys going to do a cop show and just ram into those 80s synth organs?
Wedren: Oh, sounds like a dream.
Waronker: That would be so fun.
Wedren: Maybe that’s our next thing. We think about our collaboration like each project we do together is a different record, you know, by Fleetwood Mac. The first show we did together was Shrill and that was like our indie pop record. Then we did The Republic of Sarah …what was that?
Waronker: We were digging into our emo rock side.
Wedren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yellowjackets is our White Album. It’s experimental.
When are we getting Rumours?
Waronker: That’s the cop show!
Wedren: It needs to be only covers of Dreams.
Last question: I would love to know what other scores you’ve heard recently that have really wowed you, that are like, “I need to share my love for this.”
Wedren: Here’s the problem with that question. It’s like going into the record store and you forget all the records you wanted to buy. I have a great answer to that question, and it’s gone from my brain, since we’re on the spot.
Waronker: My problem is that I watch reality TV and there isn’t score. Especially after coming off of this show, I have to deprogram, desensitize. I need to just be in Miami watching whoever.
Anna, would you ever score a reality show?
Waronker: No. I mean, I would do it, but I don’t know if it would be fun. It’s usually house-y music.
Wedren: Here are my two offerings. The score for the movie Minari by Emile Mosseri. Beautiful. Then, I really enjoyed the score for the AMC version of Interview with the Vampire, which was by Daniel Hart. He also did The Green Knight, which was one of my favorite scores of the past few years.
You know, a lot of composers say, “I can’t watch anything because I’m working,” and that usually messes everything up!
Waronker: Not with what I watch! [laughs]
Wedren: I usually have one or two shows running. Right now, obviously, Succession.
Waronker: Oh, yeah, I love Succession. Fine, I’ll say that [as my choice].
Wedren: I’m finishing Better Call Saul, and I’m watching Yellowjackets with our 15-year-old, which is great.
Waronker: That’s got the best score ever!
I wonder who’re the knuckleheads who made that one…
Wedren: Watching it fully mixed – which is rare, we usually see it before it’s been cleaned up – it’s way less raucous than it feels when we’re making it in here. It’s making me realize we can push it even further.
All episodes of Yellowjackets are now available to stream through Showtime. The second season’s soundtrack, Blood Hive 2, is available wherever you stream music, courtesy of Lakeshore Records.
Larry Fried is a filmmaker, writer, and podcaster based in New Jersey. He is the host and creator of the podcast “My Favorite Movie is…,” a podcast dedicated to helping filmmakers make somebody’s next favorite movie. He is also the Visual Content Manager for Special Olympics New Jersey, an organization dedicated to competition and training opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities across the Garden State.