Jeff Cardoni's 'White House Plumbers'
CineConcerts met with composer Jeff Cardoni to discuss his score to the HBO Max original White House Plumbers!
Composer Jeff Cardoni
CineConcerts (CC): What made you want to become a film composer?
Jeff Cardoni (JC): You know, it was one of those things that was there all along, but I just didn't realize it was a viable path.
I took piano and I played in bands and I toured around in my twenties playing guitar. And I had always enjoyed film music and listened to it and had my favorite people. But I really never knew that there was a path to get into it, you know? And in my band days towards the end, we were in LA a bunch and we had a manager who was a music supervisor on some films, and that exposed me to the outside world that I just didn't know how normal people got involved with.
So, it just opened my eyes to, “Oh, there's something you can do here with music that's not driving around in a band.” And there's actually people that do this for a living. I met some people and I was like, that seems like by the path that I’d like to focus on because I was always the mad scientist in the band. And it just seemed like an easier career. I didn't want to be 50 years old, driving in the van trying to play rock music.
Once I got exposed to that and saw how music supervisors work and the composers and orchestra and all this stuff that I didn't really know how—I’d seen and heard it but never knew, how do you get from that to that? And then I took a bunch of classes at UCLA, like conducting and intro to film and stuff like that.
CC: How did being in a band, playing guitar, inform how you started composing?
JC: Honestly, it was more the work ethic than anything because I never really achieved what I set out to do on the band side. You know, I didn't come from a famous band, so just the scrappiness and the DIY ascetic I think served me well for years. Some people came from a band and they came from a famous band and that made their path, their crossover, easier. It surely did influence my path one bit, but I think just struggling for so long and just having music, being such a driving part of your life.
And honestly, since I never had any financial success, like I never got into it to make money because I didn't think that was possible. You spend so many years driving around and, so much heartbreak and so much rejection and so much…The almost. The things that almost happened. I just got comfortable in that world where I just need to survive. I just need to find a way to survive to make music. And that's enough for me, you know? So, yeah, just having that mentality really helps starting out in this business because, I see some people come in and they think from day one that they should be here.
Still from White House Plumbers
CC: Did you play guitar as a kid and were you thinking musically from the beginning?
JC: It was the classical piano for me, since I was six. And then I made a deal with my parents in high school that I would keep playing if they let me get a drum set. And so, they helped me buy a drum set and a bunch of bands. And then in college I bought a guitar and I became obsessed with guitar. And then from playing guitar, then it was the early 90’s. It was the time of indie rock, a good time to be a guitar player in a band. So that's kind of what I wanted to do and the irony is I've met some people out here who had success at indie rock bands and they're trying to do this.
CC: White House Plumbers is a dark, satirical, and funny take on American history. How did you get involved with the show?
JC: It was honestly kind of indicative of my life, like nothing came easy. I was chasing this thing for like a year because I had some really good friends who worked with David [Mandel] before, but I had never worked with Dave.
So, it came down to basically I had a friend who was an editor on the show, Grady Cooper, and while they were trying to figure out the music, I was making demos for the show, trying to catch someone's ear over there. And what happened is they went through some other composers and I think what happened is towards the end they had a problem. They kind of almost ran out of time and some of my music was in the temp score and that got me a meeting.
CC: And then the rest is history.
How does that scrappiness, constantly trying to throw yourself out there, affect your creative process? I mean, you respond to something creatively and then you feel like you have no choice but to just continue to throw yourself at it again.
JC: Yeah, I just don't know any other way. As much quasi-success that I’ve had It really hasn't changed anything for me mentally. It still seems like every day is the next day and you don't know if the phone is going to ring or if you’ll have another job. It's not like, at least in my experience, not like now that you’ve got to a certain place, you can breathe easy.
I do things exactly the same as I always did, you know? It's like, well, that thing's not going to come to the door and find me so, you just have to go try to stir it up. For me, I knew what I thought the show would be, just from reading about it and the time period. So, I just wrote some music based on what I thought it would sound like. And when I got the job it was cool, what I thought was what it ended up being.
CC: How similar was that thematically from the demo stuff that you sent in? What actually made it on the score?
JC: In fact, one or two that were in the temp, I ended up knocking off because I had done them anyway. I did them for the show so there was no reason not use them. So yeah, and that doesn't always happen.
This is a unique one too, because tonally it's a very specific period of time. Once I got the job, it was that it wasn't a comedy, it wasn't a drama. It was kind of somewhere in between. So tonally it was really hard to figure that out.
CC: What is your creative process like? Do you start at the piano, do you start just thinking abstractly?
JC: Yeah, always the piano. And when I first got the gig, it was me sitting here, coming up with melodic ideas on the piano, recording on my phone, and then Dave and Gregg Fienberg, would come in here and listen to stuff.
And it's hard for someone to hear a piano demo and be like, oh, that's the show. You’ve got to sell it. I just kept sending him melodic things and then they couldn't figure out what they liked. You know, it's hard not seeing it, but they kept gravitating to a couple of little bits and some of the first demos, and that ended up being the main theme. The main title was just a little two bar section of one of my demos and then I put it up to picture and it stuck from day one.
Still from White House Plumbers
CC: So thematically this show has a lot going on—there’s humor and spy stuff, and also some really serious scenes. How were you able to mash that together musically?
JC: I think the key was just figuring out, once I saw it all because it was all shot, to just approach it like a five-hour movie with a beginning, middle and end. And the middle was episode three, that was the high point.
That was honestly the last funny moment we had. It was all downhill after that. So, the very first scene is kind of a head fake, you know, because it's super serious and heisty and you think they're going to get in and then they don't get in and then we got to pull it back. It's got to go back and it gets a little more groovy.
Yeah, I never wanted to make the music funny. I was thinking of Lalo Schifrin a little bit. I was thinking of David Shire, thinking of just some hip, groovy seventies instruments. But honestly, the thing that tied all together was all the melodies stuck from episode one to episode five. They're a constant throughline though how you hear them is different. And orchestration-wise, I had a smaller ensemble for the first half, we had a 50-piece string section and two horns and a small combo, so it was more like a 70’s ensemble. Whereas from episode four or five, we had a 56-piece orchestra, I believe. I tried to make it bigger as we got further and further along.
CC: Do you do you think visually when you're thinking about creative ideas or is it just something that comes up organically? Do you think of a few notes and then use the piano to try to experiment with it, or do you hum to your phone? Are you always thinking about these things?
JC: Constantly. There’s a kind of flow. It’s stressful in the beginning, but it's always sitting at the piano or humming into the phone. It's always using voice recorder on an iPhone. That's how everything starts, honestly, because I feel like if you go to the computer it's too influenced by the sounds, your tune influenced by having all these core sounding things. I can make something that's pretty good when you don't have your basic raw materials. So, I really tried to make sure that I had all the themes and little fragments set before I wrote anything on it.
CC: How do you deal with an infinite landscape with a lot of possibilities? Like musically, you can start with a very simple theme, right? But how do you decide to pull in a bass guitar or combine that with strings, etc.?
JC: I think you have to limit yourself. You have to have a concept whatever your film is, but you have to have a concept of what it is. I'm not a big believer in, I know guys who do this who have 2000 tracks in their template and they have every library known to man and every sound up at all times. And I do the exact opposite because I think if you have too much, then it just becomes nothing. You’ve got to focus.
So, I knew it was going to be 70’s instruments. It's going to be Wurlitzer Clavinet, you know, Hammond bass drum set. So, I just didn't give myself the options to have a lot of other sounds. I knew it was going to be strings, so I was figuring out what the instruments were. And then from cue number one, I just had a limited palette of sound. There's not that much percussion on the score it’s mostly going to be like bongos and shaker and jazzy drum kit, but that's it. There's a little bit when it got heavier, I had this whole bass drum sitting over there and I put it through the distortion pedal to just give it this weight. But I tried to avoid anything that was modern, like any of the action I tried to avoid the big action percussion.
I don't know, I'm super allergic to anything that says this sounds epic or cinematic, you know what I mean? It just becomes a swash to me. So, I try to keep it small, to keep it focused.
CC: Very focused sounds, very strategic sounds. And that's a discipline, right? Did you have to train yourself to do that? Or is it something that you learned from when you were in your band?
JC: Well, I never worked for Remote Control. I never worked for Hans and in that universe, I was never in that scene so much. I’m drawn to more acoustic sounds, organic sounds, which a lot of times just makes it smaller. I like to hear a squeak on a guitar. I like to hear the drum sounding crappy, you know? I like those little sounds that you hear, and you can't hear that when you have a 100-piece choir. And you know what I mean?
That stuff can be awesome and there's people who do it way better than me, so I just try to do stuff that I feel is me and that I just emotionally like hearing. And sometimes you're lucky enough where you get on a project where that lines up.
CC: What about musical experimentation? Did you try something new on this score?
JC: Yeah, I had some weird ones. I mean, a lot of times it's just grabbing something that's around. I have an autoharp. It has like 50 strings and you can strum it, it has buttons for chords and it's cool, but it's impossible to tune. So, I never used it. But it was sitting back there and I just started plucking it and playing with a penny. And it just gives you this kind of plucky, weird—and since it was out of tune, it sounded disturbing. So, I put a bunch of reverb on that and that became a sound for a lot of the intense stuff. And then I have this boat guitar that it's called a GuitarViol that I've had for a long time. It's a really good tool, especially for a guitar player, because it's tuned like a guitar with just funky sounds. And so, I have an acoustic one and I use that a lot. You just bow and you might get a string sound and then you put it through some reverb or some delay. For me that experimentation comes from bowing something or playing something on guitar or bowing some percussion and then trying to mess about. I like to start with organic sound instead of a modular sound.
CC: Do you find that organic sounds add more of a visceral, emotional element to scenes?
JC: I do because I feel like it has personality and it has imperfections and it has life. And again, the imperfections, to me, is the biggest thing that makes music come alive, you know? Some of the strings in the first few episodes, there are some squeaky notes. If you're using a sample library, you would not let that fly, you know? But it's just inherent in having less players and it's cool.
Most experimentation probably starts on guitar. I have an upright bass I’ll bow that sometimes or pitch it down and use that. I always try to have one or two live instruments in every piece of music just for me, because that's just what I do. And again, there's people who get amazing stuff going with modular sense.
I think in my early days especially, I tried to do what you think it's supposed to sound like, and it just sounds like a bad knock off. And you can't out John Williams John Williams. He’s too good.
I didn't use a guitar on any of my stuff for years in the beginning because I thought that you had to be a legit “composer”. So, I think eventually everyone gets to a point where they know what they do well or what's unique to them that maybe isn’t unique to someone else. Because otherwise, to me, with all the technology and all the computers and software, if we're all just using the same libraries, it all just sounds the same.
CC: Which is one of the criticisms of film music just generally now, is that a lot of these bigger scores, you put them all together and they sound very similar.
JC: I don’t envy the Marvel guys because that's hard. You get a lot of criticism. There's some incredible music being made but there's so many outside factors and so many cooks in the kitchen. That's what gets through at the end.
Still from White House Plumbers
CC: When exactly was that moment where you stopped trying to make things how you thought they were ‘supposed’ to sound and embraced your own style and sound?
JC: My first real gig I got was this show, CSI Miami that was a long time ago. All the mistakes I made then, it was just ignorance because I didn't know how to do it the way they wanted me to do it, because I just didn't know what I was doing. I was just figuring it out.
I feel like the last five years or something, maybe seven years, maybe when I was doing Silicon Valley, I felt like I was just doing me. When I got the gig on Silicon Valley, they weren't going to have a composer at first, and there were just spots in the show where Mike would be like, “Maybe we should try something there.” And there's no temp music. There was nothing. And I just started writing stuff. And then I was like, “Oh, you can do you and it can work.”
I'm not saying what I did was the most unique thing on earth. But it just came from inside of me, from watching the picture. And that's what I thought this could use and I think if you're doing that on a project, that's all you can ask for, really.
I think there's very few people that get hired to do the same thing on every project. There's very few that get to be very singular in their voice. And that's all they do their whole career, you know? So, for the rest of us, we're changing it up on everything a little bit. But still, you try to filter something of you. You try to bring something of you to the table. And honestly, for me, I think the way to do that is when you get a job on something and the first time you get the picture and you're doing your first pass on it, you have to be bold then. Don't adhere to what they did before. Don't play it safe. Don't try to give them what they already have there. Take a swing at what you think it should be, because that's the only chance you're going to get to really push it somewhere else or to start a conversation.
If it's temped with Thomas Newman and you give your best Thomas Newman impression, they're going to like it and your whole score is going to be an impression of someone else. But if you give them something totally different, even if they don't like it, at least you're being part of the creative process. You're being a partner in this collaboration and it will lead you to where you eventually get. Even if I go way out here on the first version, then they keep pulling you back in. Even where you end up is going to be further away, than if you just played it safe on the first version.
CC: That's really great advice. And it allows you to fight for things that you think are really important. Whereas, the person playing it safe might not fight for something that the project needs.
JC: It’s not even a fight. It's more like a conversation, because you might do this thing and they might say, “Well, I don't feel that there. I wanted to feel hesitant, but that makes me feel this”, you know what I mean? But getting those words is what you can take and then you can, on your next version, try to make them feel hesitant or whatever the word they're looking for is. And then you're solving their problem through your music. And not just because a nice piece of music that they put in there works.
CC: Is there anything in particular you’d like people to listen for in the score? Any specific cues or sounds?
JC: I think probably the track that kind of encapsulates everything is one called “Maintain Radio Silence” because it starts with this political driving thing and then it turns into the groovy insanity of when they were scurrying around trying to run. So, it's kind of got every element that's in the whole thing is in that cue.
A couple of fun facts, I played a lot of keyboards myself, but I also had this guy named Jeff Babko, who plays in Kimball's Band, and he played Wurlitzer Clavinet, and he just came up with some ridiculous sounds that I was not expecting, and I ended up sprinkling some of them throughout the rest of the score. Sometimes I'm too much of a control freak and I'll give them music and say, play this. But then I realized I can play the simple stuff. I already did that, so why have them replace that? So, I would say to Jeff, “Here's this track I already did this, but from 1:00 to 1:45, can you jam here or just give me another layer of something?” And that's I think when it really flourishes and expands, when you let them bring something, that same way we as composers want to bring something creatively. You want musicians to bring something, you don't want to hamper their creativity because you might get surprised. And then I had this guy play flute, Katisse Buckingham, who's played on a bunch of my stuff through the years. But he's famous because he played the flute solo in Anchorman, I know if I was on the table doing that.