Westworld: Ramin Djawadi on Covering Metallica and Billie Eilish For Season 4 Episode 3: Exclusive
The post Westworld: Ramin Djawadi on Covering Metallica and Billie Eilish For Season 4 Episode 3: Exclusive appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Westworld, Season 4 Episode 3, “Années Folles.” To read about the music of Episode 2, click here.]
There’s a lot to discuss with composer Ramin Djawadi when it comes to the latest episode of Westworld, which features Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and Caleb (Aaron Paul) exploring the secrets of the new Delos park upon which they’ve stumbled — and the show adding two notable new cover songs to its catalog, including a full orchestra cover of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”
“Enter Sandman” kicks in midway through “Années Folles,” during an action sequence that feels awfully familiar: In “Temperance,” as the closing credits of the show indicate this particular Delos park is called, a new version of Hector (Nico Galàn) arrives to rob the Butterfly Club (standing in for Sweetwater’s Mariposa Saloon).
It’s clear that the Delos writers are just recycling old material for this park’s storylines, but, Djawadi says, for the sequence he and the team actively chose not to recycle “Paint It, Black” (the Rolling Stones cover previously used for the Mariposa Saloon robbery in Season 1 and a similar robbery in ShogunWorld in Season 2). “Here, we just thought, let’s be Westworld, let’s mix it up. Let’s try another iconic song.”
Turns out Djawadi was a huge Metallica fan as a teenager, so he was super excited to create this particular cover. “There’s a little hint of jazz, but it’s pretty much straight up more rock and roll, rather than trying to swing, because it’s an action scene. There are some sections in there where I still had the little bit of jazz influence, but otherwise it’s very rock and roll.”
Temperance isn’t the only exotic location visited in “Années Folles,” as the episode opens with Bernard inside the Sublime, a.k.a. the Valley Beyond, a.k.a. (as Stubbs puts it) “Robot Heaven,” learning from a consciousness personified by Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) about the chaos to come that only Bernard may be able to stop.
Djawadi says that much of the music featured in the opening sequence directly calls back to the show’s previous excursions to the Sublime, not to mention the themes created for Akecheta himself in the Season 2 episode “Kiksuya,” which heavily featured the character. “It was just nice seeing that character again, and then recalling that music from that time,” he says, noting that unlike other music for the show, Akecheta’s themes are “very organic,” without the use of much synth instrumentation.
As Djawadi adds, Akecheta had music directly connected to his character because of his Season 2 spotlight, but it’s not always a given that a character will have a pre-established theme (as seen last week, with the introduction of a musical motif for Clementine). “It’s interesting how sometimes characters get themes and sometimes they don’t — sometimes we add them later. It’s always something that’s nice with a show that runs for several seasons, because you can kind of take your time — you don’t need to establish all the themes right away.”
Westworld (HBO)
Meanwhile, in Temperance, Westworld makes good on the promise of last week’s episode, infusing the 1920s Chicago bootlegger scene into classic Delos narratives, with a new cast and (more importantly for our purposes here) a new spin on the original soundtrack.
One might think that the version of the “Sweetwater” theme we hear as Caleb and Maeve walk down Main Street is just “the jazz version” of the track, but Djawadi says that it’s a little more complex than that. “It definitely has the jazz elements, but then we wanted to make sure that it has the Westworld spin in it,” he says. “So it’s definitely a little bit more… I don’t know if ‘messed up’ is the right word, but it’s not as clean of a pure jazz arrangement as we could have done. We mixed it up a little bit — there’s some synth elements, there’s some effects happening there. Some things are a little bit more filtered.”
This was deliberate, he says, because he aimed to capture the surreality of the experience for Caleb as he experiences a Delos park for the first time. Unlike the first time we heard the “Sweetwater” theme back in the pilot episode, after all, “it’s clear that obviously that this is fake. And we wanted it to have a bit more of an ominous feel, rather than straight-up fun 1920s jazz. There had to be a little bit more of a subtone to it.”
While we get to hear a number of instruments we don’t normally get to hear in typical Westworld scenes, as played by an ensemble of approximately 20 musicians, Djawadi says that he was navigating towards the trumpet as the lead for this new take on the “Sweetwater” theme. And the musicians were encouraged to do as the jazz greats do and riff on the notes. “It had to have a little bit of the freedom of jazz, where you are allowed to improvise a little bit,” he says. “That’s part of the style. It’s nice when the musicians can interpret a melody and embellish. That’s what I love about jazz, the spontaneity.”
Djawadi doesn’t remember who specifically thought Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” would be the right choice for the player piano of the Butterfly Club. “Many times it’s [co-creators Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy], sometimes a music supervisor gives ideas. So I’m not exactly sure who I should credit for this one, but I got super excited about it because I love the song and my kids love the song. So I thought, I’m gonna be cool because I’m doing the song. My kids will love it. Not that they watch the show, but when they hear the version, they’ll recognize it.”
As with the season premiere’s cover of “Video Games,” Djawadi’s goal was to initially keep the audience a little bit in the dark as to what song was being covered, choosing to start the cover with a section that has “this chordal jam, more than this jazz style. Some people might immediately recognize it, but some people might not, and that’s on purpose.”
It’s of course a pure piano cover — as you can hear below — but Djawadi does think a full jazz orchestration of the song would be “super fun to do.”
Later in the episode, it’s revealed that there’s a secret narrative in this Delos park that uses “real life” as the inspiration, allowing the guests visiting Temperance to experience a host rebellion identical to the events of Seasons 1 and 2, as Dolores/Wyatt led her fellow kind into the bowels of Delos to fight back against their creators/captors. Djawadi confirms that the music of these scenes also include callbacks to the themes played during the original Season 2 attacks.
When it comes to the final terrifying moments of the episode, as Caleb discovers the numerous drones locked away underground (including one who resembles his own daughter Frankie), Djawadi reveals that he and the sound design team collaborated a great deal on the sequence. “The sound effects are very closely related to the score because the sound effect motif, as you can call it, actually happens with the score as well, so that they actually connect.”
Continues Djawadi, “So we work very closely together to make sure that melodically and rhythmically it’s the same, and also making sure that one doesn’t step on the other. So I would write a piece and then we would send it in, and then they would build a sound effect around it and then they would send it back to me. And then I would carve out those moments because it’s so sound-effect heavy, and it was obviously very important to make sure that there’s room for that.”
Key to this was having the low droning sound, created by the sound team, match with some “very high string harmonics” in the music, to create a three-note motif that is hard to describe in print, but is unforgettable when you hear it. And that same motif continues for the end credits music, what Djawadi calls the “Control” theme.
It’s a musically packed episode, not just because of the trips to Robot Heaven and Temperance — there’s also one needle drop that Djawadi had nothing to do with, but loved a lot: The use of “Call Me” by Blondie, which plays on a diner jukebox while Bernard kicks some ass in the parking lot. “We thought, you know, that’s something that a song can do,” he says. “Score wouldn’t have had the same impact on that scene. So it was always supposed to be a song. I remember we were laughing when we put the song in there. We were like, ‘Wow, this is great.'”
What’s coming next on Westworld? No spoilers, except to say that Consequence will be back next week to ask Djawadi all about it. For more, read what the cast has to say about the show’s exploration of issues like data privacy. New episodes of Westworld air Sundays on HBO.
Westworld: Ramin Djawadi on Covering Metallica and Billie Eilish For Season 4 Episode 3: Exclusive
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