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

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.

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.

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.

A painter’s got a canvas. The writer’s got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence.

The beatles were always a great band. nothing more nothing less.

Maybe the idea of being a rockstar or being the one who’s recording or playing.

What Muddy Waters did for us is what we should do for others. It’s the old thing, what you want written on your tombstone as a musician: ‘He passed it on.’

When I was thirteen I only wanted to be a drummer.

Sort of doesn’t really matter as much anymore, when you’re surrounded by great musicians who bring their spirit, their own talent.

I’m on my feet and I’m doing what I love to do, and I’m in a profession, as a musician, where we can go on for as long as we can go on.

Fondest memory of being a Beatle: Having three brothers.