“Sometimes I find bringing in my old ideas is just detrimental.”

Tension, especially with regard to horror, is a very difficult thing to sustain in the big sense.

If I switch showrunners and I get to stay on the show, I approach it like it’s their show, and I’m here to write their music for them.

I think the thing that music can do is be unsettling. It is abnormal – music that’s perceived to be different in an unresolved or unusual way.

With television you are producing hours and hours of music and for film it is a shorter experience for both the audience and for you as a composer.

The showrunner relationship in television is what the director relationship in film, there’s really no more important relationship.

I’m not a good enough musician to like completely master something in a couple of days and turn it around.

What I love more than anything is Jerry Goldsmith’s 80’s music and Bernard Herrmann’s genre music from the 50’s and 60’s.

I have been very fortunate in that I’m not doing all network shows or all cable shows, television has really become a year-round process in the way that it’s made.

While the accompanimental [sic] figures come from Prelude, the melody is wholly original to this theme. First stated on a lonely duduk, and then in octaves by the violins and violas, it is a melancholy and contemplative tune.

If I were doing five cop shows, I’d probably start struggling to find an identity for each one and struggling to find inspirations.

When you change showrunners, it’s like getting divorced and getting remarried.

I always like to think I build in historically accurate musical in-jokes that are so precise that like maybe there’s 7 or 8 people in the world watching the show that will sit up and go, “Oh my God the music being played is the right kind of music!”

I’ve always approached television from a little more cinematic perspective, if not a much more cinematic perspective because of the shows I have been fortunate enough to work on.

Sometimes it also helps you to understand the mentality of the people in the team a bit better.

Sometimes the only way you can get an audience is at an audition.

Sometimes I get, “Have you ever thought about doing real music?” I like to think the music I do is real, it just happens to be funny.

I do a lot of different things, sometimes at the same time, and it’s very difficult to figure out where I fit.

Sometimes they are the same exact thing.

Because you’re supposed to lose yourself in the character, but sometimes people look at a character and go “Oh, it’s ‘Weird Al.'”

One of my pet peeves is that sometimes the talents of my band get overlooked because, and it was the same problem that Frank Zappa had, with a lot of groups that use humor, people don’t realize there’s a lot of craft behind the comedy.

I try not to go the obvious route all the time, but sometimes the most obvious is actually the best.