Palm Royale: Jeff Toyne's Vivacious Score
CineConcerts met with composer Jeff Toyne to discuss his score to the new series Palm Royale!
Composer Jeff Toyne
CineConcerts (CC): Can you briefly describe where you came from? How did you get into this business?
Jeff Toyne (JT): I got into film music because the music that I was writing as a music student, as a composition student, sounded like film music. It had a dramatic quality to it and I had the blessing and the curse of eclecticism, going way back. For me film music, when I was looking outwards at what kind of a career I would have, as a music student in college, film was a place where you could get budgets to record with an orchestra. I think that’s the heroin that we're all really addicted to, is spending time with live musicians and particularly the big bad orchestra. So, film music for me was a place where I could record with orchestra and a show like this brings the eclecticism to bear as well.
CC: When you say eclecticism, what does that mean musically in your mind? And how does that compare to how other film composers speak?
JT: I don't have a particular niche that I've drilled down on narrowly, stylistically, or musically, in my career. I have a classical education; I have a bit of a jazz education. I played in blues bands in high school, but I also went to school and learned music the nerdy way with books.
The composers that interest me are a wide range of styles of music. I don't have a really specific focus. Sometimes Hollywood really likes, “Give me the guy that does the thing I want.” Right? A very specific thing. Hollywood also likes to take the guy that does the really specific thing and get him to do something else, push him out of his comfort zone, so to speak. It can be difficult to work without a wheelhouse. I don't necessarily have a one and that can be a blessing and a curse.
CC: What's your approach to this? Do you experiment a lot naturally on your own or does it come together when you start thinking about the story and the characters? Where do you begin when you start thinking about musical ideas?
JT: These shows don't come to you in a vacuum. They have fantastic showrunners, creators, writers and directors. They come to you with tons of ideas already and, by the time they start thinking about music, they've already tried a couple of things.
When the show comes to you, the only time that you probably don't get too much to work with is when you're given the idea of a show to pitch for. Sometimes, you get the title of the show and a sentence or two and they really don't want you to have too much information about what the direction of the show is. That can be frustrating to shoot in the dark when you're trying to pitch for a show. Actually, even this show, when the showrunner Abe [Sylvia] was first crewing up and wanted me to pitch, he told me that it was set in the 60’s, that it was Palm Beach. He actually referenced the photography of Slim Aarons and said we want it to sound like these photos look. That was a tough one to get my head around. Fast forward to when you finally see the footage, they nailed it.
CC: So as a musician and composer who's classically trained but also has jazz background, if somebody comes to you and says, “Take this picture and make music,” how do you process that? And what's your approach to beginning?
JT: I like to do some very serious listening. I don't know what the opposite of “garbage in garbage out” is, but I try to be really careful to put good stuff in so that I know the good stuff is hopefully going to come out. I really dive deep into source material and other music that already exists.
For a show like this, there was the Slim Aarons photography so I had a couple places to start. I can start with the time period; I can start with the epoch. I can start with the place. I can start with the setting.
For example, I can start with the setting and I can say, well here's the music that was on the radio, here's the music that these characters were listening to. Sometimes you start with the music that I know the filmmakers are really into.
It can also be what their pitch and whatever kind of clues I can get to out of source material and occasionally I'll come up with tangential things or oblique ideas but I like to do some serious listening and then go from there.
CC: Does that make it easier or harder as a composer, to compose outside of those structures that you have reference material?
JT: Each show is so different in terms of the parameters that you set for yourself as an artist. On some kinds of shows it's very apropos to be creating sounds in music that no one's ever heard before. I kind of think that that might be a little easier to get notes on music that no one's ever heard before, because it’s hard to tell when you're doing it wrong. This show, it's very easy to tell when you're doing it wrong because everybody's heard this music. Everybody knows what it's supposed to sound like. When doing this show, it's very seamless between the licensed needle drops and the score and I think things flow very coherently.
CC: Do you always tend to experiment a little, even though you're really in this specific creative lane of the 60’s style?
JT: 100%. There's no reason we can't have fun. On this show, the characters are really boozed and pilled up and so, as I was making myself a grasshopper to work on the show, it occurred to me that I could use the crushed ice in the martini shaker and pills in pill bottles as shakers. That's no problem and that's something that you wouldn't know to hear it.
CC: How do you even come up with that idea? Do you have a headache, grab some Advil and say, “Oh, I could use this”? Or does it just come to you in your sleep?
JT: I'm drawing from the story and script. I like to really dive into the show. The characters are making mixed drinks all the time on the show and they're taking pills, so you’re hearing that. It’s nice to be able to draw intellectual connections or emotional connections between them. For me, it begins and ends with the show.
CC: That’s got to be super fun but also difficult to pivot hard and think creatively and differently in a musical way. Or does it just come easy for you?
JT: I don't think anything comes easy. We worked really hard on the music. I was complaining that it was frustrating that the harder I work, the better it sounds. And so, we worked really hard on the show and we got it to sound, if I do say so myself, really good. We're really happy with the how the score turned out. It was for no lack of effort. It was really old-fashioned hard work.
CC: How long does it take to make a score like this?
JT: That is the misery finding the level of the container it's in. We'll take as much time as we have, or do it in as little time as we have. We can ask for as much time as we need, but we don’t usually get it. So, it's always a rush. Often, nothing really gets done unless it's an emergency. I think it's kind of an artificial way of generating excitement. This show was very challenging for schedule.
CC: In terms of time, were they able to use any of your early compositions during editing or did they use other temp music?
JT: The show had a fantastic music supervisor, George Drakoulias. They already had a good palette of pre-existing music that they used in the temp but there wasn't anything of mine in the temp and I hadn't done things ahead of time. Abe and I had talked about the show previously, but they'd gone away and shot and edited, and by the time they came back to me, it was go-time. They had also tried a bunch of things and had done some narrowing down by the time they get to me.
CC: Had you sketched out a bunch of stuff already, or had you not touched it until you saw what they had done with the material?
JT: No. I'd spent time away that I hadn't thought about the project. For me, it was when I started work on the show, it was drop everything, all hands-on deck.
CC: We need this by tomorrow.
JT: Absolutely. You can be free from the tyranny of self-doubt when you have such tight deadlines. So, that could be helpful.
CC: Do you find that as a composer that you work better under pressure? Or do you have to be really zen out and focus?
JT: I got into film music for the deadlines. That sounds crazy. But when I was writing concert music as a student, things didn't get finished. They would kind of languish and the beauty of starting a film project is you're going to be done. You're going to finish something. That's a feature, not a flaw of the situation for me now. But for a show like this, the reason that things are challenging, are really closely related to the ambitiousness that we set for ourselves as composers for the score. So, for this show, we wanted live musicians. We wanted to record with live orchestra, with live big band and that adds a lot of extra steps to the process and puts a ton of pressure on the schedule, because we want it to be that level of production.
CC: I think that's interesting that you make a conscious decision to use live musicians. What made you choose to record that way?
JT: I'm still of the opinion that you can't really sample jazz. I think that style of music is still extremely hard work to mockup. You need live players for jazz and then, for the orchestra, the live musicians bring the highest level of expression to the art. I always joke that if I'm the best musician on the score, then we're in trouble. I don't want the best musician on the score to be me. I mean, I we have access to so many amazing, amazing musicians here that, they’re who should be the best musician on score.
CC: So, if you were to have it be done totally with samples, you're saying that it would be too sterile sounding? It wouldn't have the emotional expression that a live symphony orchestra has?
JT: I mean, the differences have been shrinking, but they haven't gone away. The musicians still bring the highest level and whether you're going from like 80% to 95% or from 85% to 92%, I mean, it's still a better finished product. There's an ease of use as well.
I had to convince a nervous production company to spend the money on live musicians by making a mock up. You have to make a mock up that's convincing, but not too convincing because if the mock up sounds really, really good, then why not just use that? I had to convince the people that sign the checks that we have something worth recording live.
CC: I've never heard that before, but that makes total sense actually that you can sketch things out and then the polishing comes with the talent of the players.
JT: Not just the polishing. Those orchestras mix themselves. They balance the levels in the room. There's a lot of stuff that you don't have to do when you have all the people in the room playing it, they can hear each other. They know if the cellos need to come down a little bit. We don't have to move any faders later. They can hear it and can also respond. They play in tune with each other and they react emotionally to the notes that we can give them. We need this section to be tense. We need this section to be hesitant or we need this section to be really florid and really opulent. As opposed to let me pull up my controller and all of the musical elements that would equate to a single note but play it in a more emotive way. The best part of working on a score is working with the musicians because it's a very immediate feedback loop, and they bring so much to the show.
CC: How long of a session was it for this entire score? Was it a couple days or was it a week or more?
JT: Probably, it added up to a week. We recorded a lot on separate days, separated sometimes by a couple of weeks, and in a bunch of different studios with different ensembles. Again, due to the evolving nature of a score and the instrumentation for the score, I ended up sewing together multiple separate sessions that, in retrospect, I could have done in one, rather than recorded the woodwinds on a separate day, and the brass on a separate day, and the strings on a separate day. My mixer wouldn't have had to import three different joint sessions into his mixing template. The main title I think has 8 or 9 different recording sessions. If you've heard the main title, you know, there's a lot going on in that.
CC: So, a lot going on, but it's interesting that you have a hundred layers and you never would know. I mean, some of them are subtle, but it just blends together so well and sounds so great.
JT: As many layers as it is, I could show you the single live piano sketch that generates that piece of music. It's a little bit like, if you are intimidated by the giant mixing console in a big recording studio, once you learn one channel strip of that mixing console, you actually know the whole console because it's just multiplication. It's just the same single channel strip multiplied by however many channels. The orchestra is a little bit like that as well, once you come to know how the individual player parts all work together, even though it is big and complex and has a lot of moving parts, it's not as daunting, to know that you can generate that from a very simple idea.
CC: So out of all of the tracks that you did, I mean, I know it was staggered and you had a lot of stuff going on. Is there one in particular that that was super fun for you?
JT: Aw, you ask me to choose from my children. There’s a lot of special moments on the score.
I got to meet, Josh Lucas, the actor who plays Douglas in the show at the premiere. He's fantastic. Actually, the whole cast is absolutely astounding. You know, Kristen Wiig is amazing and meeting Allison Janney and Laura Dern and, come on, Carol Burnett? It's a really amazing cast and their performances were all very inspiring of themes for their characters.
One example might be for Douglas, he's like the reliable love. He’s married to Kristen’s character, Maxine. For his character, he gets a love theme and the idea was fleshed out here in my studio by the most amazing jazz pianist, Josh Nelson. He would come over and I'd sit down and I can kind of bang out the idea on piano myself. I then handed it to a master like him, and he really let it soak into the idiom and gave me an amazing performance. We then took that idea to Marcus Sjowall who was my amazing arranger and orchestrator on the show, and he arranged it for the orchestra. We recorded with the orchestra and then we overdubbed in. The instrument that we overdubbed for him was the very Mancini inspired chromatic harmonica, you know Moon River kind of sound. We had Ross Garren record the chromatic harmonica and that all came together to be a nice kind of old-fashioned love theme and had a sincerity about it. In a show where lots of people have all sorts of ulterior motives, he's a surprisingly sincere guy. So, that came together really well and the collaboration of the musicians is what really heightens the final result.
CC: It's an amazing score. I really loved it. But it also sounds like an amazing experience just to be around those musicians and see them take an idea and explode into something that you never would have thought of, potentially. That must be so inspiring to experience.
JT: I've been doing it long enough. The reasons that we fight to have the musicians is because I know that they do that. They do that almost every time. It's always brought to life and heightened by them. So that's why we love to work with them.