Westworld Composer on Slipping Some Nine Inch Nails Into Season 4, Episode 5: Exclusive
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The post Westworld Composer on Slipping Some Nine Inch Nails Into Season 4, Episode 5: Exclusive appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Westworld, Season 4 Episode 5, “Zhuangzi.” To read about the music of Episode 4, click here.]
Did you catch the Nine Inch Nails cover in the newest episode of Westworld? Don’t feel bad if you missed it — so did Consequence, upon initial viewing. But composer Ramin Djawadi, as part of our weekly series of conversations about the music of Season 4, was kind enough to point out that yes, when Christina (Evan Rachel Wood) and Hale (Tessa Thompson) are having an awkward lunch together, there’s a subtle solo piano inclusion of “The Day the World Went Away” from The Fragile in the background.
“If I didn’t know, I probably would’ve missed it too,” Djawadi says, once again reinforcing that when it comes to the HBO sci-fi drama, there’s always a lot brewing under the surface. Though in the case of this week’s music, the seeds were actually first planted by the trailers for Season 4.
“Zhuangzi,” the fifth episode of the season, includes some big reveals, mostly for Christina, as she comes to realize that she has more control than she ever realized over the future world in which she lives. Of course, she’s not the only one able to bend reality for others, as we see when Hale decides to entertain herself by playing with her human toys, making them dance while a keyboard player with bleeding fingers first plays Handel’s “Sarabande,” followed by Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”
“Perfect Day” is different from other covers included in Westworld because Djawadi had to create the arrangement for it prior to production. This allowed the keyboard player to learn the piece in advance and, as Djawadi says, “when we look at his hands you could see he was actually playing… I’m sure he actually had to play a lot more than you end up seeing.” (Hopefully not to the extent that his bleeding fingers were no longer created by makeup.)
The plan had been to just feature “Perfect Day” as a keyboard piece, much like the characters themselves are hearing it in the scene, but the nature of reality got shaken up a bit in post-production. “We decided, you know, ‘Let’s make this a bit grander.’ It started as just solo piano because that’s how it was in the script,” Djawadi says. “But then when we saw the footage and how great that street looked, with the camera paning up, we said, ‘There’s a little bit more of a God feel to it.’ And so we thought, let’s make that a bit more epic, and that’s when we decided to add the strings, to get a bit more scope to the whole thing.”
Because Lou Reed’s original version of “Perfect Day” was used in the teaser trailer for Season 4, Djawadi didn’t have cause to create a cover of it until its inclusion in Episode 5. But adding “The Day the World Went Away” for the lunch wasn’t too tricky a task, because he had already created his own arrangement for the full season trailer, and as a result it was relatively simple to adapt it as background music for the Christina/Hale scene.
“Trailers are fun, but what’s tough is sometimes they’re happening simultaneously as I write the episodes,” Djawadi says. “So then having to deal with the trailer, it’s even more work, but I enjoy doing it.”
One question that had been on Consequence’s mind for a few weeks now had been the way that sometimes, an episode of Westworld will begin with a opening scene (known as a cold open) prior to the title sequence — and sometimes it won’t. Does Djawadi approach the music for a cold open differently, knowing it’ll be the first thing the audience hears after the distinctive static thrum of the HBO logo?
Sometimes, is his answer. As we had discussed after the season premiere, he deliberately avoided using any pre-existing themes for the first episode’s cold open, “because that one, it was quite a long stretch and it really kind of sets you into the whole season with, ‘Okay, where are we, what’s going on?'”
So in general, he says, “it’s fun to approach it that way, where you’re thematically a little bit more open, to just plant a lot more questions for the viewer about what’s going on.”
“Zhuangzi” concludes with a new theme that gets the big orchestral treatment for the closing credits — what Djawadi calls the Writer’s Theme, which plays in connection to Christina’s newfound discovery that she’s been creating the narratives for the world around her.
Westworld (HBO)
You might not be paying much attention to the music of the end credits when you watch Westworld, but Djawadi is fond of them, because “they’re always a nice little spot where obviously there’s no dialogue, no context, and I can have a nice little afterthought for what we just saw,” he says.
What this means for the rest of the season is a story that, for the audience, is still being written. But here’s one thing we know for sure: After Frank Ocean in Episode 4 and Nine Inch Nails in Episode 5, we’re going to be paying a lot more attention to the music playing during any restaurant scene going forward.
Though Djawadi was upfront about the fact that doing so might still keep us guessing. “There are definitely moments when there is background music I don’t have anything to do with, and it’s not an actual song. You really have to pay attention if you want to catch all the songs.”
Westworld Season 4 airs Sundays at 9:00 P.M. on HBO. For more, read what the cast has to say about the show’s exploration of issues like data privacy.
Westworld Composer on Slipping Some Nine Inch Nails Into Season 4, Episode 5: Exclusive
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