This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on The Last Duel, Encanto, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=122325
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.
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Cry Macho (2021) - **½
Mark Mancina; add’l music by Clint Eastwood &
Marlon E. Espino; orchestrated by Larry Rench
TBTF discovery #88. If it wasn’t for Vikram’s marvelous interview featured in FSM, this would’ve been a much shorter write-up.
The first film score Mark Mancina had written since Moana was also the first time in decades director Clint Eastwood had worked with a Hollywood composer. The collaboration resulted in easygoing and likable music that was also sparse enough to make Hillbilly Elegy sound lush by comparison. “It’s a very organic, dusty score - nylon string guitar, pedal steel, electric stuff, a cellist, some woodwinds.” COVID meant most instrumentalists were recorded remotely, but at least Mark got to collaborate closely with Clint since the two lived near each other. “Clint’s not a cell phone guy. I’ll be sitting here working, and all of a sudden he’s standing behind me. Clint loves to write music, and there were a couple of themes he wrote that I arranged, and one piece that he played himself.” And the film also allowed the composer to flex his songwriting muscles with a tune done in the style of a Merle Haggard ballad, one that they plucked a New Mexico country singer out of near-obscurity to sing on.
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“COVID brought a thirst for content. So much stuff is getting made!”
Lorne had seven scores come out in 2021, including a reunion with Lego Batman director Chris McKay on The Tomorrow War, episodic scoring for one of the year’s most streamed shows, and music for the second season of the Batman butler prequel series Pennyworth which came about after that show’s post-production moved to London and a U.K. composer had to be hired for tax reasons. Lockdowns did have the benefit of allowing him to work closer to his family though, and the composer would joke that they now knew who he was.
Black Widow (2021) - ****½
Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Max Aruj, Steffen Thum, Steven Davis, Sven Faulconer & Dieter Hartmann;
orchestrated by Shane Rutherford-Jones & Mike Ladouceur; arranged by Luigi Janssen; conducted by
Gavin Greenaway; cello Peter Gregson; beatboxing Kimmy Lawrence; vocal Diana Artashesyan;
technical and scoring assistants including Peter G. Adams, Michael Bitton & Joe Cho
This long-awaited use of Avenger Natasha Romanoff as a main character in an MCU movie would see its release delayed over a year until it was offered as a premium offering on Disney+ in July 2021. Alexandre Desplat was revealed as a surprise choice for composer in January 2020, but a few months later it was confirmed he’d been swapped out for Lorne. Speculation at the time was that Lorne was hired to rescore the film during the pandemic; it turned out that he had been hired months earlier as his week-plus of recordings were “the last session at Abbey Road” before lockdowns started. Lorne’s relationships with music supervisor Dave Jordan (6 Underground) and editor Leigh Boyd (Fast & Furious 6) helped secure the gig. Desplat said very little about leaving Disney’s Rogue One a few years earlier and would have even less to say about this - “I was attached, and then detached.”
Many score fans thought this would be another unremarkable modern-sounding rush job like Geostorm or Pacific Rim: Uprising - and could not have been more wrong. Black Widow was a colossal orchestral effort that broke the record for the largest group recorded at Abbey Road, and one that Lorne said pushed him to a new level of writing at times. Additionally, it was steeped in Russian elements. Lorne wrote his main theme like it was a folk song Natasha heard when she was a child, and even had choirs sing lyrics derived from works by Russian authors. “The Red Army was also a massive influence.” Lorne would’ve taken this a step further and recorded singers in Russia, but the abbreviated timeline left no room for that.
He still managed to do creative things with the singers recorded in London, including having half of the female choir be a gospel group to add a contemporary edge and layering some of his percussion with a beatboxer, though both of these effects are subtle enough that most listeners won’t notice them. The score also had a bunch of ass-kicking action music and a deep roster of strong character themes, plus one of the best tracks of 2021, Natasha Soars, which kicks off the end credits with a rousing performance of Natasha’s theme before returning to a melody that briefly appeared as a lament when the sisters were separated early in the film but now triumphantly returns in full choral glory to signal their victory. Added fun would come when composer Christophe Beck revisited Lorne’s themes in the Disney+ Hawkeye series later that year.
The Wheel of Time Season 1 (2021) - ****
Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Alfie Godfrey & Rufio Sandilands; add’l arrangements by Jon Ong & Filip Olejka;
score technical assistants Kiley Norton & Taran Mitchel; Ashleigh Kelly & Ruth Titmarsh as Balfe’s assistants
An adaptation of Robert Jordan’s gargantuan fantasy book series took over 15 years to get right. NBC contemplated a miniseries in the early aughts, and in 2015 another company dumped a low-budget episode starring Billy Zane on FXX in a brazen attempt to hold on to the rights, though the hullabaloo over the latter catalyzed a more sincere effort which Amazon would sign up to help produce and distribute in 2018. David Buckley, a former assistant of Harry Gregson-Williams whose most notable work in the 2010s was doing most of the music for The Good Wife and its spin-off The Good Fight, was attached in late 2019 and writing themes in summer 2020, but by January 2021 news emerged that he was off the project. Lorne probably came on board in late 2020, though his assignment wasn’t announced until fall 2021.
As with His Dark Materials, Lorne would release an album of concept ideas shortly before the show debuted. Three more albums would follow with episodic music, with the composer joking “we’re trying to create as many volumes as there were books.” The initial reaction among many score fans to what he’d written was shock. This didn’t sound like typical fantasy fare, or even the semi-contemporary music Harry Gregson-Williams wrote for the Narnia films. Rather, that concept album played like an hour of folk rock. You’d think this was a choice forced by the pandemic, or even by the show’s budget - which we would learn a year later was nowhere near as vast as the budget for Amazon’s Rings of Power series. But Lorne suggested they would have eschewed the expected anyway. “The showrunner Rafe Judkins, not wanting to be conventional, started sending me a hot pot of styles: Southern, Cajun, Balinese, Celtic, world music. There are no rules with it. You can have an Irish pipe, but why not also a sitar and gamelans?”
It was the halfway point between the eclectic ensemble Bear McCreary assembled for the aughts reboot of Battlestar Galactica and Trevor Jones’ vocal writing, all filtered through Lorne’s contemporary aesthetic. It was a very left field choice, and it wasn’t for everyone, but it made for a striking, sometimes gorgeous addition to the show and was a huge asset in most episodes. Adding to its complexity was how reliant the composer was on a made-up language. “It was my idea. I should’ve thought twice about it. It was very intimidating. There was a fantastic dialect coach [who helped]. I want to do the show like an opera. Normally with soundtracks, we get a lot of generic ‘aahs’ and ‘oohs’. The vocals [here] aren’t random. They’re supporting the storyline of the scene.”
Dopesick (2021) - ***
Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Alfie Godfrey & Taran Mitchell; add’l arrangements by Jon Ong & Filip Olejka
TBTF discovery #89.
Lorne also contributed to Barry Levinson’s miniseries about Purdue Pharma’s role in America’s opioid epidemic. One would think the Hans association drove the hire, but Levinson’s enjoyment of Lorne’s work on the British series Marcella actually got him the gig. The assignment would have enormous personal resonance for Lorne as he’d just gone cold turkey off of his opioids. “My back popped out. You name it, I was on it. I was running low on pills and fed up with feeling the way I was. I went straight off it. It was hell. A friend of mine said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this!’ A week later I got approached about this project. It [used] part of my brain I wasn’t using on Wheel of Time. It was minimal and restricted in how emotional it could be.” The score mixed predictably low-key Remote Control drama stylings with unnerving percussion and electronics, along with some occasional solo instruments to hint at the rural setting of part of the series. The album was unobjectionable though unobtrusive, but the series didn’t require anything more than that, and series writer and director Danny Strong loved working with Lorne anyway. “When switching over from the temp, it’s torturous. Lorne hates that too so he avoids it by giving music all through the process. I can’t wait to work with Lorne again.”
Rumble (2021) - ****½
Lorne Balfe; add’l by Steven Davis, Stuart Michael Thomas, Sven Faulconer &
Steffen Thum; orchestrated by Adam Price, Gabriel Chernick & Harry Brokensha;
technical assistants Alfie Godfrey & Michael Bitton; Ashleigh Kelly as Balfe’s assistant
Lorne’s best score by far from this year - and my favorite work of his to date - was the one he wrote for this animated monster wrestling movie that after years of release delays was unceremoniously dumped onto Paramount’s streaming platform (much to Lorne’s chagrin). The composer treated the gig as an opportunity for a raucous, rock-adjacent romp, and it’s an open question how much of the dang thing was even recorded with real instruments given the overabundance of sampled sounds and electronics in the sound mix. But rather than trying to make those noises sound like an orchestra, Lorne delivered something in the sonic realm of chintzy material that might’ve been included in an actual sports broadcast while still managing to channel those sounds into outrageously catchy themes and dramatically potent material. The whole package seemed obnoxious in concept, especially when you consider the saxophone solos and la-la pop vocals also in the mix, but it worked like gangbusters in reality. In Gen-Z terms, this score slaps.
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In December 2021, my wife and I caught COVID while on a ski trip in Colorado. Thankfully our cases were relatively mild, with only the first day being rough, but we still couldn’t fly home, and staying in a ski town for a week-plus wasn’t viable either due to the cost and the need to relieve our pet-sitter back in Chicago. So we rented a car the next day and drove across the country over two days to get home. I won’t say I found that stretch of the I-80 highway to be the most scenic or varied, but I came to appreciate it more when a John Madden documentary aired on Christmas Day and a portion of its runtime covered the Greyhound bus that the flight-averse football commentator would take along that same road to get to games, which prompted me to shout, “Hey, we took that route!” Anyway, I couldn’t sleep very well at the place we stayed at that first travel night, so I logged on to Spotify at something like three in the morning to see what new music had come out that I could put on. Given the early hour, there’s a nonzero chance I was one of the first people in America to listen to these albums. One of those was Rumble. Another was something I immediately and hyperbolically characterized on Facebook as “a Medal of Honor score by way of John Powell.”
The King’s Man (2021) - *****
Matthew Margeson & Dominic Lewis; add’l arrangements Daniel Futcher; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman
& Tommy Laurence; add’l orchestrations David Deutsch, Andrew Kinney, Geoff Lawson, Michael Lloyd & Henri
Wilkinson; orchestra conducted by Ben Parry; score technical engineers Amanda Marsh & Liam Rice
The first Kingsman was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117324
The Golden Circle was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119247
Henry Jackman co-wrote the music of the Kingsmen films with his former assistant Matthew Margeson, but Henry had no availability in late 2018 to start work on Matthew Vaughn’s WWI-set prequel, and concurrent demands on Vaughn’s Elton John biopic Rocketman meant Margeson was going to need a co-writer, so along came fellow former Jackman lieutenant Dominic Lewis. Surprisingly for a Vaughn film, the music of the franchise would shift from semi-contemporary sounds to a largely orchestral feel. “We landed on doing this throwback score to give it the grandeur it deserved. [He] mentioned the opening shot of Lawrence of Arabia and the sweeping nature that evoked that timeless vibe. That discipline of being within these modern parameters but still getting across that traditional style, it was really cool.” It was one of the mightiest and most thrilling scores to come out in years, full of rousing brass, bombastic action, and grand themes, plus a bonkers mid-film twist on Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The film flopped, but the score was a gem, though it almost got screwed up by the pandemic as Lewis’ relationship with an Australian orchestra was the only way they were able to finish recording the music in summer 2020.
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Next time: “Can we use a didgeridoo?”
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