Bluey Composer Joff Bush on Writing Music “From the Kids’ Perspective”
The post Bluey Composer Joff Bush on Writing Music “From the Kids’ Perspective” appeared first on Consequence.
Joff Bush is on a quest for clarity.
“A lot of what we do in the music, and how it interacts with the story, is about creating clarity above everything else,” the composer for Bluey tells Consequence. As an example, he cites fellow Australian children’s entertainers The Wiggles, who “have had a really amazing sense of clarity to their writing.”
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Bush plays out a scenario: a song about “going to put different colored blocks together to build a house. And [The Wiggles] would say, Well, are we talking about colors? Are we talking about building blocks? Are we counting blocks?” he asks, ticking off different possible angles for the song. “That was a big mindset that I switched [on] when I started on the show — to go, how do I make this as clear as possible?”
The world is hearing him loud and clear. Bluey is a global sensation thanks in no small part to the music, which Bush has shepherded onto not one, but two solo releases, 2020’s Bluey the Album and now Bluey: Dance Mode!, which arrives in the US alongside the daffodils as if to herald spring.
Bush is aware of the effect Bluey has on kids and parents — perhaps especially parents. I joke that after getting burned out on Cocomelon, we turned on Bluey and held our toddler’s eyes open like that scene from A Clockwork Orange. He chuckles and says, “Make the children enjoy it. I wonder how much that’s part of the successes. [Creator] Joe Brumm was talking about how he didn’t want it to feel loud or obnoxious. And he always wants to make something he would want to watch as well.” Bush smiles. “I wonder. Maybe it’s not popular with kids at all?”
As for those moms and dads, the evidence of their fervor is everywhere. After a recent Consequence article, one person commented, “Bluey made me a better parent.” Bush has even seen fights break out on TikTok over things like the opening theme song, an exuberant piece of music with a few notable pauses to accommodate an on-screen freeze dance — or as the Aussies call it, musical statues.
“In the Bluey theme there’s these rests in between each break. There’s three rests before mum, two rests before dad, and one rest before Bingo. And so you feel this three, two, one, Bluey!”
Those rests have been picked over on social media. “I did see on TikTok there was this whole debate about whether the break was a 5/4 bar or a fermata” — fermata meaning “hold for as long as you like. And yeah, people have been arguing about it.”
Bush sets the record straight: “I think of it as a 5/4 bar, because I like that you feel the rests: three rests, then two rests, then one rest. You get the feeling of three, two, one, Bluey! But it was also a game of musical statues,” he says. “They’re just pausing because they got caught out playing musical statues. But I always think of it as a 5/4 bar. So you can count it, you can count 1234, 1234, 1234, 12345 for each chorus. And you’ll be able to join in at the right time.” He adds slyly, “If that’s something you’re interested in doing.”
Odd time signatures are just one reason the music of Bluey stands out from what Bush calls the “‘blinky’ genre of kids’ preschool music.” Whereas a show like Cocomelon will reuse a few melodies over and over again, the soundtrack to every episode of Bluey is bespoke.
“I think what we do is usually pretty different to a lot of kids’ shows because each episode has its own musical score that’s unique,” he says. “We’re kind of making it like it’s a short film.”
Bush leads a team of fellow composers and musicians through a hectic schedule that often sees him composing late into the night, when there are fewer interruptions. “We have plans every beginning of every season,” he said, “and by the end it’s just chaos. It’s just because we get to these big tentpole episodes and we go way beyond what we’re supposed to [do].” He cites a few examples — “Camping,” “The Creek,” and the remarkable “Sleepytime” — where scoring became a “big combined effort with a number of different composers, myself, and lots of live musician. I keep blowing the budget, it’s terrible.”
With his own compositions he’s drawn to interlocking, self-referential structures. “I hate math,” he says, but “there’s a lot of satisfying maths behind it.” One example is “Bin Night,” with its themes of repetition, change, and the phases of the moon.
“I think I played like 15 different interlocking mandolin parts or something that create a texture,” he recalls. “There’s this one note in my terrible mandolin that twanged out incorrectly. But when they were played 15 times you just get that twang going over and it sounded so beautiful. ” With this happy accident, he then took “that texture to bring in this melody that you don’t really hear right until the end. It’s just sort of hinted at throughout to where where we’re getting to in the story. That one was really satisfying.”
He also writes from a strong sense of perspective. For the title track of Bluey: Dance Mode, the composer was tasked with a song that could be performed by a busker on the street (played by Bush himself) that also paid off the emotional journey of the family of dogs. Youngest pup Bingo kept acquiescing to the demands of her family, and the song, “Dance Mode,” saw Mum and Dad sacrifice their dignity in order to give her back some sense of control.
Bush recalls “trying to make something kind of like drum and bass EDM,” that “was also bright enough to be from the kids’ perspective.” While the world of the story finds a street busker making simple tunes, “the music that we hear as an audience is how Bluey and Bingo perceive the music to be.”
Bush believes that point of view applies to other aspects of the show, including some of the things that have puzzled parents most — like, for example, the Heeler house floor plan. From episode to episode it seems to shrink or expand, and at times whole rooms seem to reorient themselves in service of the plot.
“I like to think that same with the music, some of the house layout follows the kids’ perspective of what they think their house looks like. Not the reality,” Bush says. “I think that’s gonna be the official answer from now on. It’s all about the kids’ perspective. Sometimes the house has billions of rooms, sometimes not.”
Sometimes a street busker sounds like he’s playing dozens of instruments. Sometimes taking out the trash bins can teach us about cycles of change. Sometimes, with a clear enough intention, even the most overwhelming adult emotions can be broken down so that preschool children understand. Bush will keep asking himself, “How do I tweak the music? How does it relate to the story? How to get that sense of clarity?”
Bluey is streaming on Disney Now (with a cable subscription) and Disney+.
Editor’s Note: Grab tickets to Bluey’s Big Play here.
Bluey Composer Joff Bush on Writing Music “From the Kids’ Perspective”
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