Hitmaker of the Month: Heavy Duty Projects Goes From No. 1 Kids Album with ‘Muppets Mayhem’ to Music for ‘Spider-Verse,’ ‘Beef’ and Beyond
When Dr. Teeth & The Electric Mayhem hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Kid Albums chart in May with “The Muppets Mayhem: Music from the Disney+ Original Series,” Heavy Duty Projects’ producers, songwriters and supervisors were in on its success with songs in the series, as well as its soundtrack album. It’s a historic first for the “artist” in question; Dr. Teeth made its first televised appearance on the 1975 pilot of “The Muppet Show,” with 2023’s “Muppet Mayhem” being the only time they topped a Billboard charts. However, it’s not the only recent feather in the cap of Grammy-winning producer Ariel Rechtshaid’s Heavy Duty Projects.
Heavy Duty’s fingerprints are all-over 2023’s animated blockbuster “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” working with Sony for multilingual covers of Post Malone and Swae Lee’s “Sunflower” for the recent film (including Heavy Duty signee Isabella Lovestory) and for its “The Sunflower Covers EP.” Heavy Duty’s team has been part of the music for Netflix’s “Beef” action-dramedy, including actor Steven Yeun’s in-character, fan-fave cover of Incubus’ “Drive,” now included on “Beef: The Bonus Tracks EP.” Heavy Duty composer Amanda Yamate was not only behind the score of “Every. Body” which premiered at June’s Tribeca Film Festival, but also co-scored Netflix’s upcoming Adam Sandler feature “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!” with Haim’s Este Haim.
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That’s just a brief accounting of Heavy Duty’s spring and summer (so far) when it comes to “bespoke” original composition, production, mixing, sound design and music supervision. “Even though we have been around for about nine years, it is as if we are just getting started,” said Ariel Rechtshaid, Heavy Duty’s co-founder and a Grammy-winning producer behind Vampire Weekend albums “Modern Vampires of the City” and “Father of the Bride,” and for Adele’s “25,” 2015’s Album of the Year.
Heavy Duty staff producer Dylan Bostick recently worked across both Disney+’s “Muppets Mayhem” soundtrack and Sony’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” songs, managing and overseeing the sonics of Heavy Duty’s contributions to each project. “We’re music creatives who cross boundaries from making the songs in the pop space, along with doing so for film, television and commercials, and producing and managing these projects,” said Bostick of Heavy Duty’s one-stop-shop. “We’re super flexible and play equally well with film directors, creative ad teams and up-and-coming singer songwriters.”
Building a reputation for making “modern, cool music” and “crossing genres” as part of its aesthetic, no matter what the project’s time frame (“even our retro stuff has a contemporary production sound”), Bostick believes that “boundary-pushing pop” was a goal of Heavy Duty on its tracks for “The Muppets Mayhem.”
Additionally crediting Kier Lehman as the music supervisor for “Muppets Mayhem” and “Spider-Verse,” Bostick claimed that the greatest goal of the former was to create music for Dr. Teeth’s wild Muppets Band and their grand finale show at the Hollywood Bowl. “We were asked to provide music based on the ranges of its singers, the constellation of influences given to us by Disney+, and something that would close out the series while addressing friendship and family,” said Bostick. “We went to our songwriters for seven songs touching on the Muppets’ existing sound of rock and Americana. By the next Monday we had all seven, all of which we needed cut and locked for lip-synching.”
Several Heavy Duty tracks wound up in “Muppets Mayhem,” from the series’ closing montage (an up-tempo “On Our Way”) to inclusion on the soundtrack album (a cover of the Muppet Band’s “Can You Picture That”). “The brief for that cover was to still use the Muppet Band’s classic guitar-drum-bass-organ sound, and Joe Cocker-like vocal, but make it sound like 2023.”
Switching to “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” and Heavy Duty’s continued work with Lehman on its music supervision, Bostick claimed that the film’s wealth of Easter eggs and references to other comics gave rise to the idea of covering “Sunflower” from the first film, 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” in order to be part of the new movie’s source music so to create a sonic Spidery continuum. “We did a Latin pop cover, a Cantopop cover that you can hear in the bodega scene all while A&R-ing which producers would fit the film and the covers EP,” said Bostick. “And the work that Heavy Duty signee Isabella Lovestory did for “Spider-Verse” is not too far off from the world that Metro Boomin (“Spider-Verse’s” soundtrack producer) cultivated for the film. With Lovestory, we wanted to create a banger that felt in-line with Metro’s soundtrack and true to Isabella’s sound and our vision.”
For one of its most acclaimed 2023 projects, Netflix”s “Beef” and its viral clips of actor-guitarist Steven Yeun performing guitar covers such as Incubus’ “Drive,” Heavy Duty’s boss Ariel Rechtshaid was behind the wheel as its producer.
“I’ve known Bobby Krlic forever [of the Haxan Cloak, the composer and music-maker for ‘Beef’] who introduced me to its showrunner and creator Lee Sung Jin,” says Rechtshaid. “There were scenes that were more pivotal than I knew at the time I first saw them, that were written into the show that were live music-oriented – they had church bands and musical breaks integral to the story. If they did it with me in my studio, with Bobby, it was all going to be… better.” Picking up on the tone of the live music of “Beef” – a church in L.A.’s Koreatown – Rechtshaid’s production had to make the music “raw, but listenable. That’s a boring way of putting it, but it’s true, and of emotional importance in the script.”
One of the rawest, off-the-cuff productions from Rechtshaid was what he called “the aligned taste” of Steven Yeun’s feel for Incubus’ “Drive” track, and its channeling of the actor’s “Beef” character “Danny Cho” and his weirdly-charged energy.
“It’s him, all Stephen, playing it live, and you have to decide whether to go really raw with just a boom mic in the room, or do you want to mix something else in – either way, the goal is you get it right,” says the Heavy Duty producer.
Alongside Rechtshaid, one of Heavy Duty’s newest charges, composer-producer Amanda Yamate, has been behind two of the Project’s most valued efforts, having co-scored Netflix’s 2022 black-comic teen satire “Do Revenge,” and August’s Adam Sandler comic feature “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!,” both with Haim’s Este Haim.
“During the pandemic I was brought onto the Heavy Duty Projects team based on my experience writing for commercials for Facebook, Conair and Applebees as well as my other independent film and television work,” said Yamate. “When Ariel got his first television show to score, Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot, he brought me in to work with him.”
If you blindfolded viewers of “Do Revenge” or the summer’s upcoming “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!,” and asked them to pinpoint Yamate’s sonic signature for Heavy Duty, it is an orchestral one. “When someone on the forward-thinking pop, rock or rap side of the team needs a string or brass score, they usually get me for the big cinematic sound as I come from a background in orchestral composition. I learned how to write and produce music exclusively to picture, rather than working with artists. So, if it’s orchestral at Heavy Duty, it’s me.”
While “Do Revenge” is heavy with discordant strings, the upcoming “Bat Mitzvah” film also benefits from what Yamate calls their “sparkly synth-heavy score” with its deconstructed layers of pop. “Bat Mitzvah” director Sammi Cohen already had a cool idea of what the score might sound like, so the two years spent at Heavy Duty prior to “Bat Mitzvah” working on my pop chops really pushed me to try new sounds, to dive in deep. They make you want to contribute to the entirety of their world-building.”
World-building and creating a sonic universe before and behind a moving image is what Ariel Rechtshaid’s Heavy Duty Projects does best.
“It is an interesting company, to be sure,” says Rechtshaid about Heavy Duty being the common denominator between a kids’ series such as “The Muppets Mayhem,” the bleak comic fare of “Beef” and Projects’ approach to music. “We’re curated as music-makers, not in a highly organized way, but certainly way more organic,” he said.
As the executive creative director and partner of Heavy Duty, Rechtshaid says that he was never looking for a “hole in the market” to fill with his sound, but rather new, risk-taking people making music for even newer film and television makers, and vice versa. (Some of those creative friends include the crew of Vampire Weekend, Haim, Frank Ocean keyboardist Buddy Ross and Bon Iver producer BJ Burton.)
“We’re the people who made music that scored short indie films from someone’s sister’s older brother who graduated film school,” says Rechtshaid. “Or a friend’s younger brother has an idea to pitch a commercial to an ad agency and he wants some music. That same attitude of fun and exploration, to be broad about it, is how Heavy Duty came about. And when the music/film side of the world caught sight of the fact that this collective of people – experienced and fun – were also helping to produce hits for Major Lazer, Frank Ocean, Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend, and were available to lend their perspective to our work… we drew cool clients. We still do, even more so, and this is why I scout, or rather, A&R composers such as Yamate and producers such as Bostick. Look, ‘Beef’ and ‘The Muppets Mayhem’ are both smart, funny, and high concept productions that require smart, fun, outside-of-the-box music. Heavy Duty Projects doesn’t have a sound. We have a perspective.”
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