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'Big Love' finds harmony with rock-star composer David Byrne |
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Talking Heads front man and new 'Big Love' composer David Byrne
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Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer
When 'Big Love' creators Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer decided to play 'Blue Hawaii' as the out song on their season-two premiere, Olsen saw the perfect opportunity to spotlight the show's new composer, Talking Heads front man David Byrne. Predictably, the test drive blew their hair back. Byrne's stripped-down cover of the song, intended as a placeholder until he could refine it in the studio, struck every chord they could think of. "It had irony, it had heart, it had nostalgia," Olsen says. "It had everything we wanted baked into that moment."
After Byrne worked up a more complex iteration of the piece, Olsen and Scheffer fell into the unenviable position of telling a pop-culture luminary that they preferred his earlier work. Luckily, Scheffer says, Byrne's ear saved them the discomfort. "It was kind of funny because we didn't really know what to say. Then David wrote us back and said, 'You know, I like the first version the best.'"
From the starting line, Byrne threw himself into the project, stockpiling hymnals and research on the Mormon faith to create a master catalog of themes that the 'Big Love' team could tap at will. Some of the half-dozen or so compositions he arranged at the outset made their way into the show: The opening shot of the season, where the camera pans from the mountains down onto the Henrickson homestead, features a brassy piece, and in the sixth episode, Bill and Anna's ice cream date unwinds to the tune of a waltz Byrne wrote. But, when it came to developing characters onscreen, the bolder music couldn't slip into the crannies of smaller scenes. "They're just gorgeous compositions," Olsen says. "But, after two or three episodes, we found it was very hard to use them. They had a limited utility in scoring the emotional lives of the characters - they were outside the moment and bigger than the moment."
Olsen and Scheffer, two fans who "never in a million, billion, gazillion years" expected the composer to join 'Big Love' in the first place, had fought jangled nerves during their first phone conversation with Byrne. Now, with no choice but to take that first giant leap toward solidarity, they had to give him feedback. "We were very nervous about how he was going to respond to that," Olsen says. "And, I think the thing that made us truly fall in love with him - beyond love at first sight - is the way he was such a class act as a collaborator and was willing to roll up his sleeves and join us in this mutual discovery of what would work."
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Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, creators and writers of 'Big Love'
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After the first handful of episodes, with Byrne creating less intricate and melodic pieces, Olsen and Scheffer found themselves in a mind-meld with the composer. Olsen's instinct for ferreting out the right tone flowed through Scheffer's knack for articulating music. "I tend to be able to talk about orchestration and musical instruments," Scheffer says. "Mark has a keen sense of music and choosing our out-songs, but it kind of falls to me to translate the kind of musical terminology that helps to talk to a composer."
That ease of collaboration bought 'Big Love' a level of attention that few projects receive from star composers. The tone of the show was just so complicated, veering between family gaffes and polygamist gangsters, that composing tightly to each scene was the only way to nail it. "David started paying much more attention to time codes himself," Scheffer says. "So he started to compose and stretch the music itself so it would fit in under the dialogue and crescendo when the dialogue stopped, then go back under. I think he became a film composer on our show."
Byrne must have found the collaboration rewarding as well, because he's planning to release a collection of his scores on CD within the next year. "It won't be a pop record by any stretch," he wrote on the journal section of his web site, "so its audience might be limited - but I'm proud of some of it, so we'll see."
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Video
Watch the promos and interviews for the show.
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