“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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

I don’t regret anything. I feel like I’ve made what I would call mistakes.

I’ve never done anything else in my life other than preach and be an activist. Way before I was known.

The thing that interests me far more than anything is creating music, songwriting and arranging, and in that context drumming itself is a means to an end.

I’ve never been part of anything so great as those three kids.

I’m male gigolo. Professionally? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything professionally.

I think it’s really easy to forget that – I’d sooner play something musical than flash, and as I can’t play anything flash.

I try to be musical. Drums can set a mood, create an impression, as much as anything else.

If anything I consider myself an anarchist.