Playing Tunes: Interview with Carl Johnson & Joshua Moshier

CineConcerts was very fortunate to speak with both Carl Johnson and Joshua Moshier about their scores to Looney Tunes Cartoons on HBO Max. We discussed how each of them got started scoring for cartoons, how they approach each short, and just how long it takes to score 1,000 minutes of footage!

Composers Carl Johnson & Joshua Moshier

CineConcerts (CC): I want to ask each of you, but we can start with Carl. How did you get involved with this show? It seems like you have a more traditional experience with animation but what drew you to this project?

Carl Johnson (CJ): Well, it would be interesting to compare, I think Joshua and I both came to this project from very different routes, but for me, I've been working in animation since the early 90’s. My first project was the last couple of episodes of Tiny Toons, Spring Break Special, and then I started working on some of the early Disney Afternoon stuff. Goof Troop, Bonkers, that kind of thing, and then became a part of a group of people that were doing animation. Rich Stone, Mark Watters, Steve and Julie Bernstein, all of us were kind of working on the same projects.

So, that's how I eventually got onto Animaniacs, working for Rich Stone. And this was very early in my career, kind of one of the first jobs I had had was working on that stuff and also with Shirley Walker on Batman the Animated Series. So, I had this background of animation from the 90’s and I’d kind of gone off and started doing other projects, more animated features for Disney, theme park projects, couple of albums that I worked on.

But then when this project came around a couple years ago and they were starting to look for composers on it, my agent sort of turned me onto it and said, “First thing we have to do is submit a list of things that you've done that might qualify you to work on this project.” And I had a list, “Okay, how about everything I've ever done in my life?” So, it was really exciting to come back to something where I had started.

Working with Rich on Animaniacs, his whole goal was to make it sound as Carl Stalling as possible and so the whole creative brief was trying to channel Carl Stalling. I’d had experience doing that and when it was time to turn that back on again it was a really gratifying feeling, because it was very much returning to my roots.

In fact, I put a post on my Facebook page of one of my early meetings, standing under the water tower and saying, “Feels like coming home.” It was really a neat feeling, whatever it says about the trajectory of one’s career, it’s nice to come back to where you started.

CC: And Josh, it seems that you have a vastly different background with sketch comedy. I can see the visual similarities because there's a lot of musical moments that match slapstick comedy with animation. So, what's your story and how did you get involved?

Joshua Moshier (JM): My story starts with Looney Tunes and also Animaniacs because you know, I just I gobbled all that stuff up as a kid. I videotaped every Animaniacs I could and I'm still upset that I missed the—we had a set timer on the VHS and I missed the last Animaniacs ‘cause we were away from home. I have the DVD, but I just like, I can't bring myself to even watch it ‘cause I just like…

But I adored Looney Tunes, I drew them all the time and that school of comedy and that sensibility and I really think the way that music is married to it, is the inciting interest in music for me and the inciting interest in comedy. So, for me that led me to be interested in things like SNL and early Steve Martin movies. I’m a pianist and I was very focused on being an improvising musician and went to college to do that. The DVDs started coming out when I was in college, so, I would watch those and I would show them to friends and be like, “Look, isn't this great?” I think I was still the most interested, everyone was very polite. I did some sketch, I did a little bit of like playing in an ensemble for a sketch group in college, but really was very focused on performing.

When I got out of college I was playing as a pianist in a number of groups, I had my own group and we had this great trumpet player named Marquis Hill and he was just a fantastic soloist. His partner saxophonist, Christopher McBride, amazing players and they could take an 18-minute solo and my job was just like create this arc behind them and tell a story, each solo would be a story. When it was my turn, you’d have to change the vibe a little bit and it really got me addicted to being in a supporting role of a performance. That's what Bugs Bunny is when I'm working to picture, it's just these virtuoso drawings.

I’m sure, Carl, you feel the same, the expressions, they surprise you every time and the artists are really digging deep for these performances and so I really see my role in a similar way where I'm backing these performances and I'm really trying to tell the story and shape it and use harmony to do that and rhythm and all these things.

So, for me, I got my first composing job in Chicago doing interactive music. And I would stay after work, if I didn't have a gig, I had an office with the door and I would shut it and I would just practice scoring. I would try to recreate Looney Tunes and would try to recreate, like, how can I do this on a computer? ‘Cause I didn't have an orchestra at my disposal and it ended up being this great training for this opportunity that I had no idea would come up.

I also got really interested, because I was interested in comedy, Chicago is such a great place to see that. I would go see Second City shows, iO shows, much as I could and I got to know a bunch of those comedians and then we all ended up kind of migrating to LA at the same time.

And so, a lot of the First shows that I worked on were collaborations with other comedic improvisers from Chicago and so I didn't have the list of Animation credits that Carl had, but I was able to have some comedy credits to put forward that came from that work.

Still from Looney Tunes Cartoons “Curse of the Monkeybird”

CC: There's a foundation, musically, that works between you both and so let's talk a little bit about that. Do you guys split the work or do you sit in a room together and hammer out ideas? I mean, obviously you can't do that easily now with Covid. How did you guys meet and where did that collaboration start or how did that work?

CJ: It’s kind of an interesting set up. Joshua and I work completely independently of each other. And, in fact, we didn't meet until—was it at the first scoring session?

JM: Yeah, the first scoring session.

CJ: And the way Warner Bros. set this up was, they were looking at this workload of 1,000 minutes that they wanted to create, knowing that it's more than any one person can do, so they basically just hired two composers and said, “Okay you get this half and you get that half.” And they had us both do our own versions of the main titles and end credits.

Other than that, we've been completely separate on how we write things, how we orchestrate, our production process and it's kind of cool in the sense that every time I hear something that Joshua's done I'm like, “Whoa, I got to up my game. He’s got some great ideas.” In that sense it has not been a collaboration but it has been sort of a good partnership in a way.

JM: That’s so kind of you to say and I feel the same way. There’s a warmth and a bigness from Carl's music and a heart and all these things that are so inspiring when I hear it. I also think we get inspiration from the artist themselves, like everybody's personality comes out in their contributions and that goes back to Looney Tunes originally. You can put on a cartoon to be like, “Oh, this is Robert McKimson. This is a Chuck Jones. This is Friz Freleng.” You can see it.

Sometimes you can even be like, “Oh, this is a Rob Scribner animation,” you can tell the artist’s hand in the frame and I think it's the same on these shorts. You can be like, “Oh, this is totally a David Gemmill.” He's one of our directors, only he would do a joke where Tweedy pulls out a rib from inside of Sylvester. The other directors wouldn't make that joke or certain board artists have their sensibilities and I think that Pete Browngardt, wants those fingerprints to be on the show. It's not a show where it's very uniform, where you never know who wrote joke or ordered the joke or who scored it. Looney Tunes, it's always been very transparent to the artist's hand in it and it's cool that that still exists.

CJ: I was just going to agree with that, that Pete and the Alex and the creative team have really given us a lot of leash in terms of how we're going to approach something and it's been really nice to have that sort of creative freedom. I mean, within the structures of, “This is Looney Tunes and this is kind of the world that it lives in,” but they've been very, very generous with the amount of space that we can work within.

CC: You mentioned one thousand minutes, for people that are reading this, I don't think people understand what that realistically looks like as a composer. So, can you just talk about how much music that really is and sort of how much time that takes?

JM: I wonder if it's similar or different for us. But for me, it's generally about one short a week that I'm sketching from beginning to finish and then maybe when I'm starting the next short the next week, I'll be helping to shepherd the orchestration and the mix and all of those things. So, there's like an overlap that happens. Sometimes it piles up a little bit more than that, but to me, I just, my brain, it's a very intense kind of music to write and I like to write other kinds of music too so the pace of one a week allows me to have a brain for other things too. And also, just like really focus on making the music as strong as it can be. Carl, I'd love to hear about what it's like for you.

CJ: It is kind of hard to wrap your head around what that amount of program is. For me, I can get a little bit over a minute of music written in a day, maybe 1:15 on a good day of this kind of stuff. And my process, I write everything down so I’ve got scores that I work with and a minute for me is a whole stack of papers and a whole bunch of notes and it's tremendously detailed work and that's before going to the computer to sequence it and record it all.

So, it's 500 hours of work between Joshua and I over the course of this project and it’s the kind of thing where it's so detail-oriented and so all-consuming that you can't just sit down and work for 500 hours. You’ve got to find ways of having a life around it, Joshua's got a new baby, I have my family and plus it'll drive you crazy if you don't look up every now and then and write some minor chords.

But it's tremendously labor-intensive. So, the amount of just notes—and the other thing is that the because of the style of this music, it's fast and it's notey and it's not like underscore for other shows where there's lots of whole notes. This is all 16th notes at 180. So, there's just no way around it other than to have a lot of notes.

CC: Do musicians generally enjoy playing this music? Josh, you mentioned that the artists have to dig deep for this. It’s a character in the animation no question. What’s it like at the session itself, are they sweating by the time they're done?

JM: It's very intense. I think in the larger ensemble, I think some of the pressure is off because you're in a larger group. There’s kind of a nice blur that happens when everyone's together that is right for the music. There's still like an amazing level of precision but I think for the shorts that we do with smaller ensembles every part is so exposed. And so, there's a lot to get done in a short amount of time. But you know, I think each of us have been working with the same core group of people for this whole run and we have a shorthand. I've economized my process a lot in how I prepare the sessions to give to the players now that we're doing it all remotely. I do a lot of prep ahead of time so it's as efficient for them as possible to record a lot of music in a short amount of time.

CJ: The recording sessions with the live orchestra are a completely different vibe and the musicians love it, because 90% of the stuff they do when they do recording sessions it's all really easy stuff, whole notes. Stuff in the recording industry, their job they say, is 90% boredom and 10% terror. So, we kind of get to be that 10% terror sometimes.

Generally, with animation music it pushes them right to the edge of their technique. The trick is not, ask them to do anything that's impossible, but to put something in front of them that really you can hear the desperation sometimes in the recordings about people scrambling to keep up. That's part of what makes it funny is that it's just not quite perfect.

With the live orchestra sessions, the players are as much laughing at themselves and each other. When you hear the trombone doing his drunk trombone thing and all of the violins are laughing at him, it’s a neat vibe that goes on within the orchestra. When there’s time to actually watch the cartoon they all really get a kick out of seeing how what they just played fits with the film. It's really a nice kind of a community thing, which I miss not having for the last year or so. It's neat when you can all come together and share that.

Still from Looney Tunes Cartoons “Deflating Planet”

CC: It’s 2D animation and it's not perfect or shouldn't be perfect because it's hand-drawn. That the music isn’t exact and you get that musician striving to catch up. I feel like that would somehow create a new emotion from what you originally composed. Right? Because you're composing for these things to be in sync and then it takes on a life of its own.

CJ: When you’re timing these things out, Joshua and I both are very careful to make sure that if there's any event that we want to have musically that mirrors something visually, we hit it exactly, maybe with a frame one way or the other. The first half of the job of writing the music is figuring out the tempo and how it's going to line up and then from there you can play with things a little bit by being a little bit off one way or the other to influence how the audience perceives it. It's very much done with a scalpel. Joshua, would you agree?

JM: Or a sledgehammer, depends on what’s required.  

CC: So, you each get half of the project, how is that structured? First Carl gets a short and then the next one goes to Joshua, then third goes to Carl and so on?

CJ: Yeah, the producers are very careful that it’s equitable, even to the degree that, for example, there were two Tom and Jerry cartoons that they did and they wanted to make sure that both Joshua and I got one of them so that each of us could take a swing at how we would approach Tom and Jerry.

CC: Do you guys receive scripts first, so you can think about what you’d like to do or you see it only when it's animated?

JM: There’s no scripts because they’re doing it the way that they were done at Termite Terrace. So, the artists are just pitching jokes. I wish you could see a pitch meeting there, it's so much fun ‘cause they play the animatic that they've made and people just laugh and you get feedback.

So, I don't even know if there are scripts. The cool thing is that we're just reacting to the comedy. There are other projects where it's so nice to get a script, if there's not footage, to get ideas going, but on this, there’s already a language I think that both of us are trying to tap into and do it in our own voices.

Another thing I’ll mentioned is that, this is rare from my experience in animation, is that we actually get final animation to work with so you're not guessing what the gesture is going to be like, you're really seeing it. Every once in a while, there’ll be a small change for a touch-up but it's a real treat to get to work with the final animation and final color. It really can drive.

So, that's kind of like our version of a script is getting that ‘cause that tells us everything you need.

CJ: They’re super careful with their edits too. They will sometimes put in or take out one frame to make a joke work better and by the time we look at it, they've already fine-tunes the gags as much as they can. It also, at least for me, it gives me an opportunity when I'm watching it cold for the first time to kind of monitor my own reactions to it. If there's a gag that really gets a laugh from me, A, it's a good sign to them it's working, and B, it tells me how I need to either stay out of the way or help something that isn't working as well.

So, it's really tapping into that sort of comedic sense to keep an eye on what's working, what's not, how can I help that?

CC: Are there any cues in particular that you would like people to listen for in the series or any cues that you would like to highlight?

JM: There's an amazing scene, it's called “Erabbitcator” and I think Andrew Dickman boarded it. It’s this amazing scene where Bugs is at his wit's end and he's trying to figure out how to defeat this robot that Elmer Fudd has built and he's just like pacing around and he goes into double time with what he's saying. In the music, I have the theme that I created for him, so the music goes into double time and it follows every expression. I felt, when I was writing it, just like I was like acting it out with the performance.

Still from Looney Tunes Cartoons “Erabbitcator”

I don't know if you ever feel this way, Carl, but just like you feel like physically exhumed yourself when you're writing this stuff. There's just so much meat on the bone in the performances because the animators, the board artists know the character so well. That one with Bugs is one for me that I always feel proud of but also, I hope when the board artist watches it that he feels that it did justice to what he was going for.

CJ: I'd have to say that Tom and Jerry that I did. They’ve changed the title of it, but I think it's now “The House that Cat Built.” I really went back and listened to vintage Tom and Jerry and tried to get into the Scott Bradley brain and I read some of the things that he wrote. I tried to find some scores but apparently, they just don't exist anywhere. But I made a real effort to try to figure out what is his vocabulary and how does it differ from Carl Stalling’s and not only how do I get inside his head, but how do I sort of digest it and do the way I would do it.

It was really fun to function within the same language but use a different vocabulary. I think it was successful in the extent that it sounds believable. It does sound like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. So, I think it's if anyone gets a chance to kind of listen to that versus the other ones, I would be hopeful that it stands up to the comparison.

CC: What's on the horizon for you guys? Other than Looney Tunes, is there anything through that you're doing individually or other projects that you might be able to talk about?

JM: I have a show called Special that's coming back for a second season on Netflix.

I think that'll probably be this year. And there's an amazing comedy that I love working on called Three Busy Debras. It's so brilliant and insane and that just got renewed for a second season. I'm hopeful to get to be reunited on that.

We'll see what else, I mean I'd love to, when we can have concerts again, how cool would it be to have a Looney Tunes concert? Sometimes I will intentionally try to keep the tempo constant so I can write something that would be playable for a live audience. I want to have a couple that we could just do that wouldn't be like a complete nightmare to rehearse.

CJ: It looks like the Looney Tunes Cartoons are going to continue through most of this year. I think we finish up scoring sometime in the fall. I've got a couple of things that I'm chasing for after that but nothing has really landed yet.

I do write musical theater in my off-time so I've got a couple shows that I'm constantly revising and pushing. That’s another segment of the industry that just vanished in the last year. Hopefully that will come back and I can do that again, but it's nice to have other things. This style of animation music is very gratifying but it's also pretty much major and minor in a few dominant seventh chords and it's nice to do something every now and then that's a little outside that vocabulary. But we’ll see what happens next.

We were talking a little bit about how nice it is to work on a 2D animated show and I think both you and I, because of what we do, we have to go through frame by frame on areas and look at exactly how something is constructed. So, we really get a sense of what the animators are doing and I draw real inspiration from that. I can see when there's something that they put extra care into or a new way of having something happen.

I really, even though everybody is kind of working in their own little bubbles, it's still a very collaborative art form because you see what the person before you did and it influences what you do in response.

JM: Yeah, I think on that note, just something that is cool to know for anyone watching the show is that the contributions you see and hear on the screen, whether it's the voice actors, the music, the background designs, the jokes. Those are the choices that the artist working on it want to make. There's no one trying to make it into something that it wouldn't be on its own, that's what's so special about it to me. You have these personalities and they're really uninhibited, the contributions are really uninhibited, and I think it's because Pete Browngardt and Alex Kirwan just incredibly trusting of the people that they bring on to work on the show. I just think that's neat, like when I watch something, I want to know that the director made the movie that the director wanted to make. That's something that is really special about these cartoons.