(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.)
For Weird Al, the polkas had to be just right.
“We forgot to include some B section to one of the polkas,” recounts Leo Birenberg, one-half of the compositional team behind Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
“Like, a famous B section,” specifies Zach Robinson, the team’s other half. “Al wrote [us] an email like, ‘Guys, you’ve got to include that. People are going to be like, “What the fuck?”’” The two share a hearty laugh looking back. “We were thinking of it from a film score perspective,” continues Robinson, “but he was thinking of [them like] songs, so we learned about the Minnesota sound. We learned about the A-B-A-C form.”
It was just another day in the life of two musical savants. Well, not just another day – the frequent collaborators had been longtime fans of Yankovic’s music and were now getting the chance to work alongside him on his farcical biopic – but mastering the art of the polka was yet another chance for Robinson and Birenberg to show people their wide-ranging musical capabilities. The duo spent years working under legendary composer Christophe Beck (Frozen, WandaVision), whose eclectic resume of projects across the early 2010’s primed them for just about any genre of film scoring.
“When we were working for him, it was, like, the heyday of his career,” explains Birenberg. “We were doing eight movies a year, sometimes more. There would be an indie movie, a couple of giant studio films, some bread-and-butter rhythm section comedies. It was an unbelievable training ground to see not just how, creatively, you switch between those things and make them all unique but also, logistically, how you get it all done and make them all sound at the highest quality possible.”
With score coordinator and additional music credits ranging from The Edge of Tomorrow to Muppets Most Wanted, Birenberg and Robinson were able to exercise a number of different skillsets based on their self-described “broad musical backgrounds.” Just look at them now: the duo is most well-known for their hard rock hair metal for Netflix’s Cobra Kai, yet you would never know it listening to their genre-defying, eclectic score for Weird. In one scene, you’ll be charmed by classic orchestral Americana; in the next, you’ll suddenly hear a John Wick-inspired piece of pulsating electronic rock.
“A sound supervisor [recently] told me, ‘Hey, I watched Weird with my whole family and it was really cool to hear you and Leo make that type of music,’” says Robinson. “‘That’s just so not the music that I’m used to hearing from you.’ It’s such a big compliment when people say, ‘I didn’t even know you could do that.’ I think that’s really the best part about our job, that we can show all of our different skills and interests. In a way, it’s a flex for us.”
“Oh, a huge flex,” Birenberg confirms. From Silvestri to Rachmaninoff to Steely Dan, the film’s sonic palette was inspired by several different styles of music, each one recreated to perfection. The composers worked closely with director Eric Appel and Weird Al himself to make sure each song played into the sincerity of the spoof, something that has always been a staple of Yankovic’s own music.
“The comedy came from the music being the straight man,” explains Robinson. “We play it very sincere.” Birenberg concurred. “We’re always playing it straight on everything,” he adds. “If you don’t commit to that fully, you end up with a significantly worse product. You’ve got to just commit.”
In this in-depth discussion with Geek Vibes Nation, Birenberg and Robinson break down the inspiration behind several memorable musical moments, what it was like working with Weird Al, and how Forrest Gump helped inspire the film’s signature melodic motif. Here is that discussion, edited for length and clarity.
You were both Weird Al fans before signing onto the project. Was he formative in developing your senses of humor?
Zach Robinson: It’s an interesting question. I think we approach scoring comedy in a unique way. Our music comes from a self-awareness of the thing we are scoring. The music is not just supplementing a joke; the jokes are enhanced by the kind of music that we have to write. In Weird, the comedy came from the music being the straight man, essentially. We play it very sincere and I think that’s the kind of comedy that Leo and I enjoy. To say Al is a master of parody is like, okay, yeah, definitely. But he’s so fluent in so many genres and so many styles and, in film scoring, you’ve got to do that, too. So, I think that’s a connection.
Leo Birenberg: That was very beautifully put. I often feel that Zach and I are contributing the least funny thing to a project. We’re always playing it straight on everything and that’s just one of the ingredients that makes it work. If you don’t commit to that fully and you try to enhance the jokes too much, you end up with a significantly worse product. You’ve got to just commit.
During your time working with Christophe Beck, you both were working on a lot of different projects spanning genres and tones. That must have set you guys up to become musical chameleons as your careers progressed.
Birenberg: I think that’s definitely a huge part of it. Chris is a guy who’s pretty lucky in that while he’s done a lot of broad studio comedies, he’s not totally pigeonholed in that. The guy is outrageously prolific. When we were working for him, it was, like, the heyday of his career. We were doing eight movies a year, sometimes more.
Wild.
Birenberg: There would be an indie movie, a couple of giant studio films, some bread-and-butter rhythm section comedies. It was an unbelievable training ground to see not just how, creatively, you switch between those things and make them all unique but also, logistically, how do you get it all done and make them all sound at the highest quality possible. But I think, also, Zach and I both have pretty broad musical backgrounds. I think [working with Chris] was a great environment to nurture all of these musical influences that Zach and I have and figure out how you execute that on a film score level. Now, we don’t feel pigeonholed at all. Yes, we do a lot of comedies, but that’s really just because almost everything is a comedy now. No one wants a straight drama. Even the stuff that is a drama, like Succession, you’re laughing most of the time.
Robinson: I feel like when you call us “chameleons,” that’s one of the highest forms of praise that we could get.
Birenberg: Oh yeah.
Robinson: I think the big fear is getting pigeonholed. I know horror composers that would kill to do a romantic comedy and would crush it, probably! This morning, a sound supervisor told me, “Hey, I watched Weird with my whole family and it was really cool to hear you and Leo make that type of music. That’s just so not the music that I’m used to hearing from you.” It’s such a big compliment when people say, “I didn’t even know you could do that.” I think that’s really the best part about our job, that we can show all of our different skills and interests.
That’s how I feel listening to this score. You have the more straightforward orchestral sound in the beginning of the film, and then you have these huge, as you’ve described in the past, John Wick cues. Then, you’re going into the jungle with Pablo Escobar and that environment is informing the sound, but it’s all aligned in the same 1-4-3 motif. I know that melody is an innate thing for composers, but can you remember where the inspiration for that progression struck?
Birenberg: We wrote the speech at the end of the movie first and, while brainstorming, came up with that melody. We figured that [this would be] the final victory moment and whatever the theme was going to be that this was going to be the most glorious presentation of it and probably the longest presentation of it. [We said,] “Let’s do that first, play it for the director, Eric Appel, and get him jazzed on it, and then we’ll go back to the start of the movie and work it in and build to that moment.
Robinson: We were really inspired by early ‘90s Alan Silvestri and Thomas Newman scores. Really wholesome Americana.
Birenberg: The great American hero.
Robinson: Yes, that genre of score. It’s very emotional, it’s very hammy, but it’s very sincere, as we always say. Forrest Gump was temped everywhere in the movie and it worked really well. For Eric and Al, this was the tone that it was always going to be, which is really helpful for when composers start. A lot of times, if you can’t figure out the tone, there’s a lot of trouble that comes with that, but everyone was really on the same page with the tone for the score and it just worked out swimmingly.
Take me back to when you signed onto the project. What was the state of the film at that time? Was there a locked cut?
Birenberg: It was pretty far along. It was definitely a little bit longer right when we started and then they trimmed it down. Zach, I feel like we wrote to locked picture almost, right?
Robinson: I feel like we wrote to locked picture, too.
Birenberg: But we had been talking to Eric. We know Eric very well. We’ve done a bunch of projects with him. So, he called us really early on this one. We were talking to him throughout shooting. He was sending us dailies. As soon as he got in the cutting room, he started sharing scenes. I think we felt pretty informed when we sat down to write it.
You said that there was Forrest Gump temped into the score. I always like to talk the temp music monster with composers. Were there any struggles with that on this film or was Eric really interested in replacing it?
Robinson: In this movie in particular, I feel like they just kind of threw in some temp music and if it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t, it didn’t. They knew we were going to replace it. Often, actually, we were trying to stay closer to the temp and then Eric was like, “I actually didn’t imagine the temp doing what you think it’s doing. Do your own thing.” One of the biggest examples of that was when Al and Madonna start making out. They had temped “Like a Virgin.”
Birenberg: I totally forgot about this, actually.
Robinson: We did the theme but a Madonna synth pop version of it. Eric was like, “We didn’t have a piece of music, but I always imagined romantic stuff when she comes through the door, that that plays through and climaxes all the way up into them making out and beyond.” It yielded one of the best pieces of music in the whole [movie].
Birenberg: We upped that one to 200%.
We have to talk more about that Madonna cue because it’s so amazing. I was wondering where the inspiration for that came from.
Birenberg: Eric mentioned something about using piano, which I thought was a good prompt. We have some ‘90s piano elsewhere in the score, but it’s not featured on its own. Anytime you can have a cue and really give it its own identity within the score, it’s special from a compositional point of view. I think the product sounds like an old school Hollywood piano concerto a la Rachmaninoff[‘s No.] 3 or something, and that’s just really fun to do.
“Clair de Lune” came to mind as I heard it.
Birenberg: Yeah, it’s almost like Debussy doing a Rachmaninoff cover.
Robinson: And that goes into the whole chameleon aspect of it. In a way, it’s a flex for us, too.
Birenberg: Oh, a huge flex.
Robinson: You’ve been hearing us do our ‘90s score, but now we’re going to take you back to the 1890s.
Continuing onto another flex, we have the pool party cue, which, on the soundtrack album, is really long, but I don’t think in the movie—
Robinson: It’s that long in the movie.
Birenberg: It’s really long.
Was the note literally “steal from Boogie Nights”? [laughs]
Robinson: The note was “Just do Steely Dan.”
That’s so true! I definitely hear “Do It Again.”
Robinson: That was the template.
Such a good cue. I want to shift to working with Al because he was very involved in the music. Was there one specific note or piece of advice he gave that unlocked something for you?
Birenberg: At the end of the movie, there’s this hysterical sequence after Al gets assassinated, may he rest in peace, with these photoshopped pictures of Daniel Radcliffe’s Al in all these historic moments. Some of them are bits from the movie. There were two versions of it, and the second one’s in the movie. Our first version was very much, “Let’s smile because it happened, here’s all the friends we made along the way.” It sounded like a main title from a sitcom. Honestly, it was a rock-solid piece of music.
Robinson: Eric loved it, actually.
Birenberg: But Al was like, “This is hilarious, but I don’t think it’s the right vibe. I think we should lean into the tragedy, play this like it’s a funeral elegy.” We took the theme and we did this piano and cello duet, super stripped down. He was totally right because it’s absolutely hysterical when you’re watching the movie.
Robinson: I was going to say a broader thing, that Al had a lot of thoughts on the polkas––
Birenberg: Oh yeah! [laughs]
Robinson: ––which we were learning about as we went. We had an amazing accordion player, Cory Pesaturo, who played the polkas. He came in and played the polkas and then Al had some thoughts about the authenticity of what the polkas were actually doing. We were thinking of it from a film score perspective, just trying to get it on picture, but he was thinking of [them like] songs, so we learned about the Minnesota sound. We learned about the A-B-A-C form.
Birenberg: We forgot to include some B section to one of the polkas––
Robinson: Like, a famous B section.
Uh oh. [laughs]
Birenberg: The “roll the barrel down” section.
Robinson: Al wrote an email like, “Guys, you’ve got to include that. This is the roll the barrel down section. People are going to be like, ‘What the fuck?’” [laughs]
There would be riots in the streets!
Robinson: Everyone at that polka party would’ve been upset.
Not to spoil the fun, but is there a part of you that wishes the film got theatrical distribution? I know Al had expressed remorse over not even getting a qualifying run for Best Original Song.
Birenberg: I personally wish it had a theatrical window, either exclusive or concurrent with the streaming release. Look, a lot of people watched this movie because it’s really easy to watch on Roku and that’s awesome, but the movie plays so well in a theater, and everyone who’s seen it in a theater just gushes over it. It’s made like a theatrical motion picture. It envelopes you in that way. The sound mix is fucking amazing. It’s just that kind of storytelling where you make that agreement with the screen that you’re going to put your phone away and watch Daniel Radcliffe be Weird Al for less than two hours. So, I am sad that more people didn’t have access to it in a theater because I think it could’ve done pretty huge business. Al’s a huge draw for the same reason he sells out everywhere he [plays]. But, look, I’m grateful that everybody watched it on Roku too. That’s awesome.
Robinson: Yeah, I agree.
I would love to talk about your other projects coming up. Leo, Bottoms is such great work from you and Charli XCX, and it’s coming very soon!
Birenberg: Yeah. It’s a really, really fun movie.
Robinson: I’m excited to see it! I haven’t seen a stitch of it.
Birenberg: Zach’s only heard like a few random pieces of music from it, so I’m excited for him to see it. Leo and I have this other show with Jon [Hurwitz], Josh [Heald] and Hayden [Schlossberg] called Obliterated. It’s been announced, right?
Robinson: Yeah, but we don’t know when it’s coming out.
Birenberg: It’s a big action comedy for Netflix.
Robinson: It’s amazing.
Birenberg: The score is some of the most fun we’ve ever had writing music.
How would you pitch the score to somebody?
Birenberg: Oh, Zach’s got the pitch.
Robinson: The score is if Hans Zimmer in 1995 went on a mega-bender in Las Vegas.
That is fucking sick.
Robinson: I guess it can’t be in 1995 because it’s a very modern, electric, EDM score.
Birenberg: It’s a very contemporary movie. We have a slight influence of Jerry Bruckheimer movies from the 90s in [terms of] thematic construction, but the score itself is very, actually, EDM influenced. We explored a lot of different subgenres of electronic music. Way different from the Weird score, that’s for sure. It’s a different way of working your brain, and we had so much fun with it.
Another chameleon project ready to hit us.
Birenberg: There are going to be some bangers.
Robinson: I know.
Birenberg: Like, actual bangers.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is now available to stream on The Roku Channel. The film’s soundtrack is available to purchase physically or stream wherever you get your music, courtesy of Legacy Recordings.
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.