Composer Daniel Hart brings an elegance and romanticism to Interview with the Vampire. The achingly beautiful series, based on the Anne Rice novels, is high art of the highest order. Hart’s score is one of the reasons why. For season two of the series, the music got to travel along with the characters through Europe.
The composer spent plenty of his days touring in his career, but it was his college years he thought of during Interview with the Vampire season two. He studied theater. As Claudia first experienced her theater life, Hart returned to his own.
Recently, the Interview with the Vampire composer spoke with Immersive about his score for the second season.
How did you want to convey the blossoming romance in season two?
I got to write a new theme for them because in season one, Armand isn’t revealed to be Armand. He’s in the whole show, but he hasn’t revealed to be who he actually is until just the final moments of the final episode. So, there was no real theme for Armand in season one, and there was nothing in season one that would indicate that their relationship was anything more than servant or assistant. I got to write a new love theme for them.
It shows up so many times throughout the season in all different sorts of situations. There’s a version of it during their meet cute in the park. There’s a version of it when they’re first flirting at what we call “murder mansion,” where the whole vampire gang goes to a fancy dinner party and kills everyone. Everyone’s being gruesomely murdered in the background, and these two vampires are flirting with each other in the foreground. It’s romantic, dark, and absurd. There are some plucky strings in the background for that version.
There’s a version when they’re walking through a museum together after hours in Paris. Yeah, I got to use it a bunch, and I really enjoyed that particular theme. It’s evolution. There’s a version when they’re meeting for the first time in the park that feels very earnest and sweet. It’s like a solo piano, solo viola, and solo violin, all talking to each other sincerely with budding romance in their hearts.
But then later on, as things in the relationship started to go worse, I put enough complicated harmonies underneath the main version of the theme that it could feel tormented. It’s for the times that they both torment each other.
There’s a lot of beautiful dialogue on the show. Do you see the score as a bit of a dance or reaction to the lines?
Can be. It depends on who it is. There was definitely some intermingling of themes throughout, especially with Louis and Santiago. They don’t have a theme together, so each of their themes gets woven in the scenes where they are interacting the most. But then for Louis and Armand, anytime they’re in a scene together, it’s almost always some version of their theme, which was separate. It was separate from other Louis themes, and then Armand barely has his own thing until episode five.
As someone who’s worked as a touring musician, did you think back on those days while scoring for the theater troupe?
Even before that part of my adult life, I studied theater in school. My degree is in playwriting. I spent a lot of time at a theater in my late teens and early twenties. That’s probably more what I was thinking about when I was working on this stuff for the Théâtre des Vampires. I did a play at university called Red Noses, which is about a clown troupe during the plague, if I remember correctly. The director, who is also a professor, wanted a live band.
It was essentially my first time doing what I spend almost all my time doing now, writing music for film and television. This was the first iteration of that. We had a live band on stage with the rest of the actors, but everybody in the band, if I remember right, were also theater students. I think we had euphonium and accordion. I played a couple of things, but I was writing for euphonium for the first time and doing this kind of job for the first time. So, that’s what I was thinking about, especially because this theater also had a live band on stage.
How to get the recording right with the sound team, just talking about the acoustics of this theater?
We had a few chats about that as we were preparing to mix each episode. Well, the first couple episodes anyway, where the theater band is introduced. My friend Danny, who I work with on most things, mixes most of my music, so for soundtracks, that’s what you hear is Danny’s mixes. Then there’s also the post-production stage sound mixer who is usually responsible for all the on-camera music.
Because this music existed in between those two worlds, we had both of those folks involved in those conversations about who should do what to make sure that everything sounded right. Mostly it was left up to the re-record on the stage to get it right for the sound of the room. I just tried to record all of those instruments that the trio on stage was playing as dryly as possible so that it could be affected with whatever room treatments were added later on.
What about the song that Claudia has to sing over and over again for the play? What were your influences there?
The play is “My baby loves windows.” It was a song that I wrote for the episode called, “I Don’t Like Windows When They’re Closed,” and it’s supposed to be a sort of Broadway show tune, but also it had to be super duper saccharine and really cheesy.
We know it says, in the script, that Claudia gets so tired of it. She’s so bored of it, and the main part of it’s the character having to play a baby infant over and over again and being infantilized, as they talk about in the episode. I needed the song to feel that way too, just like Shirley Temple… Just so that it would be harder for her and that the repetition of it would feel more punishing. To that end, Rolin Jones, the showrunner, also felt punished by that song [Laughs].
I really like it. I wrote it on piano. The first iteration was just going to be piano and vocals, and then Rolin decided, what we should do instead is have it on a record player. The theater spent the extra money, hired an orchestra to play the backing tracks, and then they put on the record player and the backing tracks play, and then Claudia sings it on stage. So, we got to do it with the orchestra, so I was arranging my own solo piano version for orchestra. I feel like it’s some of the best arranging I’ve ever done for orchestra.
I was really so very pleased once the orchestra actually recorded it, because there’s certainly always a difference between sampled orchestral instruments that I use in my demos and the actual players. This was one of the most drastic differences in how much it brought that song to life when the actual players played it. We were recording it with the Synchron Stage Vienna Orchestra in Vienna, and I’m sitting here in my studio at home listening to it remotely.
They were playing, and I was like, “Oh, wow, it feels like a show tune.” All the instruments are so busy and everybody’s talking to each other. The woodwinds are talking to the strings, the brass is up here, and they come down. I am really happy with how it all turned out.
You worked at that Vienna Orchestra remotely. In your studio, do you have go-to headphones or speakers to hear their work?
I’m usually listening through speakers in my studio that would most closely resemble the experience that I would have if I were there. I would be in the control booth listening through speakers to make sure everything’s right. So that’s what I do here. I have some dynaudio speakers. I am very happy with them. They’re great for me. They’re great for this room.
My studio is a former garage in my house that was already converted into a living space before I showed up. It’s not an incredible room. It’s just a room, and I’ve done some things to make it a bit more friendly to recording and pseudo mixing things in here.
Going back to that song for Claudia, like you said, you started off on piano. When you’re composing, do you have an instrument you usually write on first, like the piano, even if the final song is stings?
It was mostly piano for this show. I probably wrote some things on violin. Yeah, there’s a piece of music called “Annika,” and it plays in the theater for the first time that we see Santiago seducing a victim on stage and getting them to be willing to accept the fact they’re about to die. The piece itself starts out with the trio of musicians playing on stage, and then it expands into the orchestra as the scene reaches a bigger and bigger climax. But the beginning of the piece is just solo violin and solo timpani, so I feel it didn’t make any sense to write it on piano. I don’t think there is any piano in that piece of music.
In addition to Santiago being an antagonist, the fact that he’s a performer and always “on,” how did that influence his theme for you?
I can really relate to that. Whatever that is, having wanted at one point in my life to be an actor, it was not hard for me to find that for Santiago, always being on, always wanting to perform. Probably touring, as well, and having my own band for which I was the front person, I felt I needed to perform for people to entertain an audience. I was pulling on that there.
That’s where my touring experience came in for Santiago. Yeah, showmanship. Definitely thought about that for him, but it wasn’t hard. It wasn’t hard to find him for me at all. Ben Daniels as Santiago is just brilliant. The first show that Rolin, the showrunner, and I worked on together was a TV show version of The Exorcist back in 2016. Ben Daniels was one of the main actors in that show, so I’ve gotten to write a lot of music for him already. What a treat.
How do you find some of the performances inspire you while writing? Are there certain qualities in particular that you want to help accentuate or emphasize?
I was just all constantly watching and listening. Trying to make space for those performances is probably the most important thing that I’m listening and watching to get out of their way. This is an old John Williams trick. I mean, I probably got someone at the beginning, but just not having an instrument playing at the same time as the person who’s speaking.
So when Louis is talking, there’s nothing in the baritone mid-range in the forefront. No solo bassoon or something like that, unless it’s playing way up high. I try to keep in mind as well, if possible, avoiding the frequency of their voice in the instruments. Overall, that’s all I do. I just listen to them, watch them, and try to react to them.
Funny you say John Williams, because his Dracula score is one of his best.
John Williams’ Dracula, I don’t know as well as the Bram Stoker’s Dracula score. I did try to avoid a lot of vampire music for the past couple of years as I’ve been working on the show. I didn’t want too much of the other stuff to seep in, didn’t want to accidentally plagiarize.
Do you usually do that? For The Green Knight, did you avoid listening to fantasy scores?
I didn’t listen to much fantasy music, but I did listen to just a massive amount of medieval music because I was trying to get period stuff correct, and I did more research on The Green Knight than I’ve ever done on any project ever. With historical accuracy, I was trying to be influenced by some things there. I don’t remember trying to avoid anything for Green Knight. I watched a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when I was working on The Green Knight.
That makes sense. It is such a bizarre, sometimes hilarious movie.
Yeah, it was really funny at times. There’s a line in the Green Knight, Barry Keoghan, when they first meet, he’s in a field searching dead bodies for money, valuables, anything. And he looks up, Dave was riding his horse, and he goes, “Who are you?” It was just the way that he delivered it. I was like, gosh, that’s the reason why you’re a successful actor. I would never have been one, because I could never.
For Interview with the Vampire season two finale, how did you want to wrap up some of the themes for season two? Where did you want to conclude and where did you maybe not want to wrap up themes?
There had to be some kind of wrap up for Louis and Armand’s theme for sure. I mean, maybe it’s temporary, but it feels pretty permanent. The final evolution of their theme, it gets very sparse and slow. Yeah, not hard to wrap that up. Wrapping up Santiago was lot of fun. A lot of fun. Guess he get what he deserves, the bastard. Who else did we wrap up? Anyone? I guess I’ll be somewhat reserved in my explanations just in case anybody hasn’t seen the finale yet.
There’s a reestablishment of a theme from season one at the very end of season two. To bring that back after holding off on it for an entire season was very satisfying. I’ve never done that before. I’ve worked on a few shows where we had more than one season, and I’ve never done that before where a prominent theme from the first season gets purposely left out of the second season until the right moment. Very gratifying to bring that back.
I just want to leave you with a quick story. The other night friends and I at a birthday party talked for a good hour about the show. We talked Lestat becoming a rockstar, and the consensus was, if Daniel Hart is doing it, it’ll probably be great.
Jack, thank you.
Do you already have ideas brewing for his rockstar phase?
The answer is yes. I do already have ideas. Yes, I already have to think about it because of the scheduling. Also, when I started working on this show, it definitely felt like a show tailored to me in terms of my strengths and my enjoyment of things I get to work on. AMC was kind enough and Rolin was insistent enough that we should have an orchestra for the show. It’s not as common anymore with television. To have an orchestra, that was huge for communicating what was needed to be communicated musically with this show.
And so, as we continued to work on season two and we got into the theater again, I’m continuing to feel like, wow, this is a show for me. Everything that I have worked on is all my past, is all my experiences coming to bear here. Everything that I have done previously in my life is informing what’s happening here in very helpful ways. But season three is just like somebody was like, “Well, what could we do to make it even more in Daniel Hart’s wheelhouse?”
We will find out.
Well, yeah, this could be my famous last words could turn out to be a total disaster.
[Laughs] Well, you have full confidence from many Interview with the Vampire fans.
Thank you. I’ve been very lucky throughout my time working in film and TV to have people reach out to me about the music that I’ve written for various things. It’s almost always a very meaningful interaction, very meaningful for me. A part of what makes this so gratifying, especially as someone who comes from the world of playing, performing music live for people and touring and being in bands and being on stage, having that audience interaction is the most important part.
It’s something that is often missing from working on music as I do now much of the time. And so, always having that interaction with people who enjoy the stuff that I work on, it is incredibly meaningful. Interview with the Vampire fans, it’s just a whole other level of interaction and adoration for this show. The way that people have received it and loved it, and consequently the music with it, it’s just really special.
They’re thoughtful fans.
I watch people talk about musical themes online, bantering back and forth. I’ve never seen that before. Never for anything I’ve ever done.
Interview with the Vampire season two is available to stream on AMC+.
