Welcome Back: Ginny & Georgia's Season 2
CineConcerts was very fortunate to speak with Lili Haydn and Ben Bromfield, the composers behind seasons 1 and 2 of Ginny & Georgia!
Composer Lili Haydn
Composer Ben Bromfield
CineConcerts (CC): How did your paths converge and start together specifically with Ginny & Georgia?
Ben Bromfield (BB): We have a mutual friend who was my mentor for many years. This guy, Tree Adams, is a fantastic television and film composer and Tree scores stuff, but he also plays gigs with his band. I went to one of the gigs and I was sitting in and Lili is also a friend of his because she comes from the recording industry originally, which is also Tree does.
Lili Haydn (LH): I was basically playing violin and singing for a lot of different composers, including Tree and Hans Zimmer. And Tree invited me to his gig and Ben and I just got to jam.
BB: When I was still a composer's assistant, and years later I was scoring shows separate from Tree and my friend Sarah Lampert created this show. Now, Sarah and I actually went to high school together. And we moved out here at the same time, and we've just been checking in with each other for years. When she showed me the script for this, I was blown away by it. I got to see it right after it got sold. But also needed a female composer as well.
LH: Tree was kind enough to recommend me. And the funny thing is actually that the only reason he even knew I was a composer is that I was trying to pitch on another television show and I knew I wouldn't get it without a more established television composer. So, I asked Tree if he would partner with me on it and he said yes. He was so kind. We didn't get that gig, but it planted the seed for my being a composer. And then he told Ben that I might be worthy.
CC: Is the only project that you've done together, these two seasons?
LH: It is, but I've collaborated a lot, and I don't know if Ben knows how special this is. I think that Ben's and my chemistry is uncannily good. It's like we have complementary skillsets. He's amazing. He's a badass, he's a fluid improviser and I'm a fluid improviser. And not everybody is. And we just get in a room and shit happens. It's just really a great thing. I am eternally grateful for this, even if this show was not this wild success, which of course we're thrilled that it is. Just having chemistry like this with another musician and composer, it's really rare and it's very special.
CC: Do you watch the show together and then go into a room and jam or do you go to your separate spaces and then come together later with ideas? Talk about your creative process together?
BB: I would say that generally it's the latter, but there is one cue in particular that comes to mind on the soundtrack where we made a special effort to do it in a room together. It's I think it's called “Georgia and Paul's First Dance” or something. It's sort of like a spacey piano violin thing. And we improvised that together. I mean, we refined it with the showrunners, but that was one based on what we could tell they wanted for that scene, it was actually Lili's idea. She was like, “Let's get in a room for this and let's just do it.” And I was like, okay.
Even when she was over here, I was like, okay, why don't I do a little piano? And then, you know, you can add to it. And she was like, “No, let's improvise it together and play off of each other.” It’s the only time we've ever written a cue like that, I think, and it was it was really cool. I mean, we both did a bunch of takes. I think we did like maybe 15 takes or something because we're both improvisers. I think that was an opportunity for us to really flex that muscle together.
CC: And Lili, you're a violin player, right? Did you bring your violin to this studio and jam on it?
LH: Yes.
CC: Is it something that you add after?
LH: Well, first of all, the violin is practically surgically implanted. But, yeah, no, I brought it over. In general, I'd say the pace and the workload of a television show needs to kind of—It's good to kind of divide and conquer a little bit. But then once we kind of put our stamp on stuff, we each have our different styles and they just happen to blend really well and then we complement each other so that we'll add stuff to each other's cues.
Or once we have to get revisions, it can be very helpful to have the other person's take on your work. So, it's a lot but I mean, in general, what I love about this is that we really do have a sound that is unique. It does not sound like other shows to me, which is really exciting because obviously when you do this for a while, when you listen to stuff or watch stuff, you can hear, okay, I bet they temped with that. It's so clear to me now, especially the more television and film I score.
So, I can tell that they must have temped with a specific show and I don't hear that in our show for some reason. The more I watch and consume, the more I realize that this is really special.
Forgive the eschewing of humility there.
CC: Without giving too much away to the people reading this, you have two very strong women who are very much alike in this show and there are tender moments but also some high school pop stuff. How do you mitigate that as composers?
LH: We just start with what's called the spotting session, which you probably know about. And that basically means you're going through with the show creators, with everybody who's involved. You're going through and you're marking the moments where this beat, that beat and a lot of it is marked by what they've temped in, where they put the temporary music in.
So, then we know, okay, this is the vibe, this is the pacing, this is what they have in mind. But then there's other moments where we say, “I think this doesn't need anything” or this is a moment where, could we sweeten this to just underscore the emotion a little bit more? Could we could we help the audience understand this transition here? It's a conversation. And then we each just say, “I'm feeling this. I have an idea for this,” and it's just kind of a natural.
BB: I think that's a good way to put it. It's sort of in the first pass of who has a stronger idea or a stronger impetus to write each individual cue will start with it. And what they do might end up being the first attempt. Or it might be. “Hey, Lili, I wrote this thing. It's almost there. What do you think?” And I'll just send it to her. “Hey, Lili, it's almost there. I wrote this thing, but it could have vocals on it. What do you think?”
And then also, I would say on future passes, sometimes the other person might either do a rewrite of the cue. So, we're sending Pro-Tools sessions back and forth to each other a lot of the time.
LH: Yeah, I think that was also one of the factors, besides the fact that I'm a woman composer and that was, you know, the female perspective was an important thing. The fact that I work with Pro-Tools, we work on the same DAW, the same platform, was also a big selling point.
CC: It makes the communication and collaboration that much easier, right, because you're working on the same canvas basically.
LH: I don't see how we could have done this much without being on the same platform, to be honest.
BB: It certainly wouldn't have worked like this. We wouldn't have been able to go back and forth so much. And that's just an essential part of it. So that tech thing I don't even think about anymore really was a game changer from the beginning.
CC: Can you talk about a little bit about integrating the musical components? Because it's not just your traditional score, right? You're not just doing orchestral music, it sounds like you have like a band playing stuff and then you go to musical moments that are original songs.
BB: Sure. Yeah. So, they wanted to do this high school musical. So, there was also something, a smaller version of this they did in season one, but this time it was much more integrated with the plot and it was kind of played as a subtext for the subplot with the characters involved in it. It sort of mirrored their main plot, which is cool.
LH: And character evolution.
BB: Yeah, and character evolution. So, they came to us with that and we both attacked from different directions that were really valuable. Lili has a ton of experience songwriting, producing and releasing songs. I have a musical theater background because I am originally a jazz pianist and there's a lot of crossover with musical theatre accompaniment.
Basically my whole career before I moved to Los Angeles revolved around musical theater—accompanying or music directing, other than playing jazz gigs and studying in school. But in high school, I music directed Into the Woods, which is sort of a loose inspiration for what we did with this musical. So, we were both kind of drawing from those elements, from those different backgrounds.
And so, with he musical stuff, that was the two of us in the room type of process. Also, Lili is a vocalist and sings the songs that she writes typically. As she is a great lyricist, she kind of had some starting points for a lot of that, and we'd get together and refine them. And again, a lot of improv, a lot of me at the piano and her at the violin or me at the piano and her singing, and we're formulating these songs in real time together. “Oh, I like that. Let's put that in. What about we changed this lyric.” It was a very fluid process, and I believe we pretty much wrote all three songs in the span of like a day or half a day maybe.
LH: Yeah, but also, I mean, some initial ideas came up, but once we got in the room, it was like the two main songs that we've been focusing on, literally were born like in the same session.
CC: What is your process? Do you get into a certain kind of mindset, thinking about the characters and the lyric? How do you approach that?
LH: Yeah, to me, it's the same way I think about—it’s not exactly the same, but it's a very similar process to when I'm trying to come up with a theme for a character or a cue for a character. You know, I internalize what it is that they're going through. What is the sound? And I really, honestly rely heavily on magical thinking. And I'm just like, okay, angels. Tell me what it wants to be.
But like, I'll watch something. I'll listen to it. I'll imagine that I'm that person. And then it's like, what is this person feeling? What does this person want? What is this person like? What are they crying about inside? And what does that sound like? And so, Ben puts it in a musical theater context. What does this person want? What is their agenda?
So as a songwriter, I wait for a phrase to catch me, a lyrical phrase to catch me, that speaks to some inside emotion. And something that has a little bit of lyricism in it in the way it comes out.
So, for the duet, we were told it has to be the evil old witch and the aunjanue. And they didn't come to us really with an exact plot. They had some guideposts. They knew that they wanted it to be this Victorian England kind of Jane Austen type thing. But they also wanted it to have female empowerment themes.
So, I didn't really know what the duet wanted to be. And then I remembered what my grandmother's evil older sister’s last words to me were. And I remember she leaned in to me and she shook her finger and she said, “Marriage is a dungeon.” And those were her last words to me. And when I remember that, I was like, That's it. Because it sings so well. And literally, like most of those lyrics and that whole theme came to me in one fell swoop.
And I called Ben. I said, I think I've got the duet. And we got together and it came together and we wrote the song together. It was like, once you have a hook, you can kind of run with it. And then it's a matter of skill and persistence and discipline.
And what's really exciting when we put the counterpoint together it’s like, okay, we've got the verse, we've got the bridge, what if we cross-pollinate it? Okay, well, and then you're like, Oh, you've got to change this chord here for this to work. And it's really a puzzle piece. And when you're dealing with somebody as fluid and expert as Ben and when we have this kind of magical chemistry it just comes together really quickly.
CC: Talk a little bit about the instrumentation to this season, it's very eclectic. You've got a lot of stuff going on. Lily, you're a violin player, talk about some crazy stuff that you did to make the sounds. What did you experiment with?
BB: Yeah, well, I would say that an interesting thing about the show is that it's extremely eclectic. I mean, some might say that it's sort of multiple shows combined into one. You know, sometimes we say Dexter meets Gilmore Girls or whatever. There's the high school element and the adults. And there’s a crime element.
I think that's part of the reason that it's so eclectic. For Georgia’s character, she's from the South and so there's a lot of guitars surrounding her, a lot of acoustic guitar. For the high school kids, we basically have to synthesize a sort of pop genre. I've said in the past that what we're doing when we're scoring or creating the sound of a show is like creating a genre. And so, we're trying to synthesize a lot of the pop music that we like and that the creator and showrunner like. We want to make pop music that has the same energy as a lot of the needle drops that are great. The music supervisors are great on this show, Jen Ross and Cody Partridge, and there's all these great needle drops so we have to match the energy of those songs.
There's the crime thing, which we are coming up with a completely different sound for that because the showrunners have no patience for the CSI style. Nothing wrong with that type of music. That stuff is great, but they do not want the show to ever feel like a procedural in terms of score. So, we have to be creative with that. And then we had the musical where we recorded a pit band.
LH: What I thought was also really cool about the way we did the musical is that we drew on Ben's experience as an actual music director of a high school musical.
BB: Because people tend to write what they know, and I went to the high school with the show’s creator, the show's school is inspired by our high school to the point where I know who specific characters are inspired by. The first season one was a wild trip.
And so, when it was time for the musical for the high school—I used the music direct in the high school that inspired the show. What better experience to draw from but that experience of actually music directing in “that” high school! So, we chose instruments that would be realistic for a pit band, specifically the high school pit band that I music directed in 2006. And one thing that's interesting about that environment is you kind of have to be a little crafty with your instrumentation in that situation because you're relying on mostly students to play and not every student is a French horn player or an oboe. When I was music directing—and this was Sondheim—so it's, you know, difficult stuff, you have to figure out how to represent everything in the score with the instruments you’ve got. So as an effect, we ended up with this kind of unique ensemble of instruments for the pit band. Not crazy, but definitely differently balanced than you would normally get if it was a Broadway thing Sometimes it would just be a piano if it was a smaller high school, but this is a fancy high school, so they've got to have a band. And we ended up with a bit of French horn, clarinet, flute, two violins, a cello, piano and auxiliary percussion, which would be played by a second piano player with a keyboard. So, there's a little bit of Celeste in there (which would be played by the 2nd pianist/keyboardist)
CC: The singers are the cast, right? Had they worked in this environment before? Did you have to coach them and direct them on what to do?
LH: I started making records when I was 20. And so, I have a long experience in basically going from “What do I do?” and “I don't know how to sing, but I really want to.” I basically condensed my 20 years of experience into a short month with the cast. I said, let me do this. I know how to do this. And I whipped them into shape essentially. Sara Waisglass more experienced, but the rest of the cast had not really done this. So, I got them with my voice teacher. I was mentoring them. I got in there and we produced sessions remotely and I just used every trick that I have ever benefited from with myself. And it was actually really therapeutic in a way. I swept in and really made it my project to make sure that we got the best performances out of them. And then Ben and I produced the sessions together.
CC: They sound fantastic on the album, you would never know that they were amateur singers.
LH: Thank you so much. To their credit, they worked really, really hard. And it would not have sounded like that if they weren't naturally talented and had a really great attitude and phenomenal work ethic.
CC: What’s on the horizon for you guys? Are you going to release a record just between you two? Any other collaborations? I assume this is going to continue because you mesh so well and the stuff is great that you guys are coming out with.
BB: We’ve been pitching for some other shows together. We have talked a little bit about doing some, as I call it, music for music’s sake together. No specific plans.
LH: Obviously we hope that there's a season three with the success of season one and two, knock on wood. Well, we're hopeful, but you never know. And obviously, we would continue to do that. I would love to continue to work with Ben in this kind of setting. I think it's just so natural. I think, again, we complement each other's skills excellently. I'm sure we'll make some music for music’s sake. But at the moment, we both have very full plates apart as well.
BB: Exploring the artist side of things, I will say that if we do get a season three, Lili and I are probably going to start hitting the road pretty quickly, because we found in season two that it was extremely helpful for us to get together and do a bunch of score writing sessions so we can send them a bunch of stuff while they're editing. There's the first cue on the soundtrack, “Welcome Back, Bitches” I think, which came from one of these pre-season-two sessions. The goal in those sessions was to just basically created some tracks or some ideas, throw some things at the wall and then months later get them mixed down and sent to the producers and editors. “Welcome Back, Bitches” was a slam dunk with the creator and showrunner.
So, I think that if we get picked up, we'll probably start getting together even sooner and more frequently and start writing some more tracks like that because and it's super fun. And also, not everything goes with them, so you never know—We might end up with something we really like that never gets used for the show, and that could turn into a whole album of our music.
CC: So, if season three gets ordered and you guys know that you're going to do it, you work on various different themes or ideas that you send to them that they could actually use to cut to. And that’s beneficial, right? Because it avoids them using temp music.
LH: Yeah, it's really great. And actually, they temped a lot with our season one for this season and I think that helped us to really refine the sound of the show and also how original, you know, how unique to the show it would be. It's much better to be inspired by something that doesn't sound like other people.
CC: Are there any tracks where you hit a creative wall or you pushed yourself beyond your comfort zone and it actually turned out? Is there anything that surprised you guys individually or together throughout the album that people should pay particular attention to?
LH: I actually think the ballad, the love song was surprising a little bit.
BB: Yeah. “I'd never love someone.”
LH: Basically, they said they wanted this to be a love song, but they knew that the main character didn't want to feel owned. She wanted to lose herself in love, but she didn't want to get lost. We knew that it couldn't just be a love song. So, actually a mentor of mine said, “Well, why don't you do an anti-love song?” And I thought “I'd never love someone.” And so, we each had a couple of ideas. We got in a room, and what I particularly love about it is how fluid it is. In terms of its harmonic movements and the movements of the melody. It's not like it all works, but it's very serpentine. And that wouldn't have happened without the chemistry of both of our creative juices flowing exactly at the right time.
BB: Yeah, it's a pretty musically complex piece, but it doesn't sound like it. I think that's what's special about that one. And just the fact that it's probably my favorite song, you know, personally of the three Wellington ones, it's a gorgeous song. I'm super proud of us.
I think I was the one who had to make the lead sheet for it or something, so I really had to ruminate on the melody and harmony, and I was like, “this is pretty complicated!” I mean, just within the verse, it starts in one key and ends in the other in a very fluid way that is not really noticeable. One of my favorite things in songwriting is to really reflect what's happening in the lyrics with specifically the chords, the chord progression. I really like the way that that works as well—the melody and the chords and the way that they highlight certain lyrics. That's my favorite thing. And musical theater is a great genre to do this, but I love that particular aspect and how it came together.
LH: I agree. And also, because it's so fluid and kind of complex, it reflects the inner struggle, the cognitive dissonance of this main character, which is that “I'm in love with this person, but I know that I'm not being treated right. And I don't like the social conventions that are forcing me into compliance here. But at the same time, I want to go with it, but I don't want to.” So, it's like the kind of serpentine nature of our thoughts is reflected in the musicality. And that was really fun.
CC: Anything else you want to tell the audience that's reading this to pay attention to or any Easter eggs you think are fun to talk about?
LH: Well, personally, I have a band and we put single today. My band is called Opium Moon and we won a Grammy two years ago and we were nominated a second time last year and we put out a single today called “Woman Life Freedom”, which is in solidarity with the women of Iran and women's rights struggles all over the world. And then I have another movie called Split at the Root.
BB: I'm working on a piano centric project, but I can't quite talk about it yet. So instead, I'm going to give you an Easter egg about the show, about the song that Hunter's band plays, “Child's Play.” That is a song that my high school band used to play, that was written by my best friend growing up, Nick Throop, who has a couple other songs licensed in this show in this season. So, shout out to Nick.
Anyway, he wrote Child's Play in High School. And creator, Sarah Lampert, loved that song at the time. She felt like it had the perfect high school energy to it, and it was a great thing to have the high school band in the show play. So really funny.
LH: He's being modest. He also has two other hit shows, Oddballs and Boss Baby.
BB: Oddballs is an animated show called on Netflix. We've got season two of Oddballs coming out February 24th.The series created by James Rallison, AKA TheOdd1sOut, who has a gigantic YouTube following. There is also another season of the Boss Baby Netflix series that I co-score with Ryan Elder. Not sure when that’s coming out, but it’s coming in 2023 I’m sure, and it’s a great kids show!