'Westworld' composer Ramin Djawadi on how he brought the Rolling Stones into the Wild West
When it comes to contemporary TV theme music, it’s hard to top the intros to HBO’s megahits Game of Thrones and Westworld. Both were created by Ramin Djawadi, the 44-year-old German-Iranian musical wunderkind once mentored by composing great Hans Zimmer. Last weekend, Djawadi competed against himself at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards in the category of Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Original Dramatic Score) for his work on those two shows. He wound up winning for Game of Thrones.
Following his success for GoT, HBO challenged Djawadi to craft an elegant title theme that would properly set the mood for Westworld. But there was a catch: While he was able to score GoT to actual visuals, when it came to Westworld, Djawadi had to rely on only a couple still photos and his conversations with series co-creator Jonathan Nolan.
“He just kind of talked me through what he wanted to accomplish with the main title,” Djawadi told Yahoo Entertainment (watch above). “And the big idea for him was that he wanted a sense of something being built. Musically, for me, I took that as, ‘Let’s start very small, [with] small instrumentation, and build it from there and get bigger.'” The music does indeed crescendo, as do the trippy visuals, including a trademark sequence in which robo-skeleton hands play matching piano notes (fun fact: Djawandi revealed that those are actually his hands animated via motion-capture technology).
When it comes to the music of Westworld, however, the show has become just as well-known for its covers of popular contemporary hits, from Radiohead (“Fake Plastic Trees,” “Codex,” et al.), the White Stripes (“Seven Nation Army”), and Kanye West (“Runaway”) to Nirvana (“Heart Shaped Box”), Amy Winehouse (“Back to Black), and Wu-Tang Clan (“C.R.E.A.M.”).
Generally, such songs are rendered in the show’s distinctive player-piano sound. But in one of Season 2’s most memorable sequences, an extended action scene at Shogun World in Episode 5 plays out over the Rolling Stones’ classic “Paint It Black.”
“I thought it could be obvious just to have pieces playing from the time period, but the idea of taking contemporary pieces and arranging them for the piano, or even take it as far as this big orchestral arrangement that we did for ‘Paint It Black’ during that action scene, I think that gives a certain spin to the show, to make it contemporary and say, ‘Even though this all looks so real, it’s still a theme park,'” Djawadi explained.
He also shed some light on his adaptation process: “Once we pick a song, I’ll just listen to the song itself and break down what it is, what’s the melody, what’s the vocals, what’s the accompaniment. And if it’s just a piano arrangement, I’ll just figure out how to put all these pieces in within just a solo piano instrument. The ‘Paint It Black’ version got a little more complex because it’s like a five-and-a-half-minute action scene that I have to really shape to the picture. So there it got a bit complex maintaining the melody and making it recognizable, but there were a lot of other elements, arrangement-wise, that came into play.”
Ramin Djawadi is currently touring North America with the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience. Watch him talk about the music of GoT:
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