ISSUE 05
A New Kind of Love: How Hrishikesh Hirway Scored Companion
The Song Exploder host turned composer reveals how he scored Drew Hancock’s Companion, and why the sound of love isn’t always human.
Words by Charles Steinberg
I carried more than my normal amount of anticipatory and nervous energy going into my talk with composer and podcast producer/host Hrishikesh Hirway. His Song Exploder podcast, as popular with its many listeners as it is with its featured guests, has been a steady stream of creative revelation since it began in 2014, taking advantage of its format in opening a dynamic channel for songwriters to recount their arrivals at musical eureka in intimate detail.
Knowing Hirway exclusively through this outlet, the stakes, and my admiration, were raised upon discovering he was a composer who had just delivered his first major feature score for Companion. The mischievously entertaining new twist on hybrid horror fraternizes jovially with other genres, guiding Hirway into stylistic spaces beyond the range of his output as a recording artist.
Hirway has long wanted to score feature films, and his biggest break yet has come through a longtime friend who was keenly aware of this ambition. The writer and director of Companion, Drew Hancock, and Hirway have been close friends and neighbors in LA for years, and when Hancock got the chance to direct his own screenplay for Companion, he gave Hirway first right of refusal to score it.
Evinced in his podcast production approach, where he mainly stays out of the way in favor of his guests, Hirway’s instincts to defer to the featured attraction place him ahead of the game a score composer must respect. But his music for Companion isn’t just formulaic window dressing draped in the background. Highlighted by the spookily alluring theme of its protagonist android, Companion’s score surfaces to punctuate the film’s spectrum of themes at all the right moments. It also contains the kinds of referential easter eggs his Song Exploder guests perk up to talk about in their recordings. The multi-talented Hrishikesh Hirway was all too happy to do the same.
Charles Steinberg: I'm glad we get to discuss composing and podcasting. Having just seen Companion, it's fresh in my mind. Jumping into Song Exploder, I want to share how often your productions have moved me to tears. When that happens, I always wonder how it’s done. One moment that hit me hard was Julien Baker on Song Exploder talking about her song “Appointments.” She said, "No matter how small the pinhole of light is, it's entirely possible that within the next day, week, or month, you can feel something closer to joy." That really struck me.
Hrishikesh Hirway: [Head nodding] Yeah. Well, I can't take credit for what she said!
Charles Steinberg: But I feel you can take credit for something I wanted to ask: you get people into a zone where they give careful thought and reflective wisdom to their answers. This was clear in the Trent Reznor episode on Song Exploder (Netflix), where he’s open, closely considering you, the question, the song, everything. I know that’s the forum for it, so there’s a level guests must rise to, but you seem to disarm them. What do you attribute that to?
Hrishikesh Hirway: I think a big part of this is creating the right context. It's not actually something that I'm doing at the moment and more about setting the scene for it. Saying here's this place where I want to talk about everything that you were going through when you created this. What inspired it? What were your obstacles, both technical and mental? What were the things happening in your life where you can hear the DNA of who you were at the time in the creative decisions that you made. That's just sort of the context for what the show is even before starting the conversation, and I think that does so much work because it's not the kind of conversation that a lot of musicians get to have. I don't think there are a lot of outlets for something like that – maybe you get to have those kinds of conversations with some of your closest friends, or the people that you're on tour with.
I know from personal experience just how much work and care can go into a song, and a lot of times that stuff is just kind of left in the room, or left in your own head. So I think just providing a space for people to say some of those things helps a lot because then people are excited to be thoughtful about it, excited to delve into those ideas. After all, it's not something where they’re just talking about the same points they talked about in six other interviews. I am someone who created this show because of wanting it in my own life. I wanted it both as a listener, and an audience member, and I wanted it to exist so that maybe someday I could answer questions like that. I remember I was at South by Southwest a dozen years ago, maybe a year or two before I started Song Exploder and trying to promote an album that I had coming out. This was in the heyday of blogs, and you get these five or ten-minute interviews while you're standing on the sidewalk outside of the venue of the show you’re about to play. And there just isn't a lot of room for depth or reflection on something that you’d spent years making. I think I just had a personal hunger for a situation where you could have the kinds of conversations that I wish I were having – on either side of it, either as the interviewer or the interviewee. So when it comes to having the actual conversations with other artists, I hope that they feel that I'm somebody who's genuinely interested in these things and who can appreciate what they're talking about. At some kind of fundamental level, I'm looking for the connective tissue between who they are and what they make, and how what they make is uniquely related to their experiences and the way they see the world.
CS: It just seems to me that you're able to put your guests at ease and into a place where they feel comfortable sharing. And it's something that I think every person who's ever given an interview would aspire to. But have you ever felt that even though you've established a comfort zone with an artist, you pushed too far? Maybe you probe a little too far into something where you can sense they’re closing up?
HH: I haven't encountered it too many times, but I definitely consider the possibility that might happen, and so a lot of times, I will save my diciest question for the very end, because if they are gonna shut down or close up, I haven't ruined the vibe for all the other things that I need to find out. But hopefully, I think by the end of an hour-and-a-half-long conversation, I've earned some credibility and some rapport with them, so they might be willing to answer a question in whatever way is most comfortable. And I tell them upfront if you feel like you don't want me to include something that you've said after you've said it, just let me know because I'm going to edit this.
CS: It surprises me the recall that artists have, especially when speaking about a song that they made years ago. Does it surprise you that somebody can kind of put themselves back where and when they made the song? How they were feeling on the day, or the day before, or leading up to it on their way to the studio, or whatever it was. And they're able to remember the decisions that were made in terms of what kind of drum or bass line was used? Or is it something where they kind of know that this is coming up, so they give it some thought before jumping on with you?
HH: Well, I definitely appreciate the times when artists come in and I'll ask them a question, and they'll be like, “You know, I knew this was gonna come up, so here are my notes.” Or they'll talk to somebody else like a producer to refresh their memory. But there was recently a moment when I interviewed Graham Nash from Crosby, Stills and Nash and Young, and I was so shocked by his recall that my reaction is actually in the episode. I'm like, “How are you able to remember this stuff?!” Because his level of detail is just incredible. At that time, he was talking about memories that are over 50 years old. That was one where it just felt so surprising that it had to be included in the episode, because I thought everybody was going to be thinking the same thing, and they needed to hear me say it. They needed me to articulate what everybody was going to be feeling, which is like, how do you remember this stuff?
CS: What this podcast really does is transport you. It feels like you're transported to a day in the life of an artist. And that, to me, is gold.
HH: Yeah. I will also say that I think one of the tricks of getting those specific memories is the format of the show, again, kind of place setting, table setting. Because, you know, our memories are triggered by sensory experiences. Maybe you've heard a song that you've made many, many times in the years since you've made it, but it's a different thing to hear an isolated stem that you might have recorded and maybe never listened to again once you finished recording it that day. Hearing something like that, I think, can have a kind of triggering effect, where it transports you back and suddenly you're in that space, and your memory is sparked in a way that just talking about it conversationally might never bring up.
CS: You once said in an interview that as somebody who's trying to make creative work, you're looking for ways to learn from these artists that you interview and apply lessons to the way that you think about things. You're still pretty new to scoring, right? You’ve had more than ten years between feature film scores?
HH: That's right, the last feature I did was in 2013. I did a TV show that came out in 2018, then a video game in 2020 and now this. So it's been a very slow path.
CS: Well, what an arrival on Companion. Are you ever using tangible things that you remember from speaking to one of these artists about their song deconstruction that you then applied in your own scoring work?
HH: Yeah, I'm constantly inspired by things that people have said in the podcast and there are so many times when I've sort of cribbed a technique or something like that, whether it's in a song of mine or in some other piece of composition or production. And I've interviewed a fair number of composers for the podcast over the years Harry Gregson Williams and Hans Zimmer…
Oh, yeah, I remember the Hans Zimmer one. And then you did one for The Daily podcast theme music.
Hrishikesh Hirway: I did, yeah. Also, Dustin O'Halloran, and Nicholas Britell, who you mentioned, so a lot of my favorite composers have been on the show. And I would say one of the things that I've been most inspired by from those conversations has been when composers have been able to weave parts of the narrative of whatever they're scoring into their music palpably or profoundly. I remember Ramin Djawadi did an episode on the theme to Game of Thrones, and he talked about how it shifts back and forth from a major key to a minor key because people's allegiances within the different houses change and it's very hard to predict which side someone is going to be on at any point. I thought that was such a brilliant reason. The music is already good, but then to have an underpinning that is so derived from the story of the show, I just thought that was such an incredible way of taking inspiration and catalyzing it into something beautiful.
"Part of the reason why I hadn't made music for so long, is because it was impossible for me to listen to my own music in a non-judgmental way."
CS: I know examples of what you're talking about. Something very overt, speaking of Hans Zimmer, is the ticking clock tempo used through Dunkirk to signify what hinges on the passage of time. Is there a similar thing you may have done for Companion?
HH: My favorite things in my interviews with composers are when they are responding to an external script. I tried to do that as much as possible in Companion. One example is that in the score throughout the whole movie, a lot of my vocals have been pitch-shifted as a source. This is mostly textural, but sometimes melodically or rhythmically, because there's this moment in the plot where (protagonist) Iris changes the sound of her voice. I thought, oh, I want that to be something, even if nobody ever notices it. It was a guiding principle for me. I'd be like, what element do I want here? I know, I'll use my voice, and I'm gonna pitch it up a fifth or an octave or something. And so I'd build these little mini choirs of my voices. They don't sound like me, and they don't really even sound totally human, because they have that kind of, like uncanny valley aspect of being crazy pitch-shifted. But that's one example where I was like, I'm doing this because of what the movie is about.
My voice is also in the ‘Iris’s theme’. Sophie Thatcher, who plays Iris, sings the main melody that I wrote, but in addition to her voice, there's a blend of her vocals with mine. It's 90% her voice, but there's 10% of my voice pitch shifted in. And again, you might not know it when you're listening to it, but if you know it and then you listen to it, I think you can hear it. I sort of jammed my voice through a very gnarly pitch shifter to make it sound like a robot. It's literally a setting called robot in this plugin that makes your voice monotone. Then I reintroduced the melodic information by manually pitch-shifting the notes in Pro Tools. So you get this feeling of a woman singing beautifully, but if you're listening closely, there's also this slightly synthetic element happening just below the surface. And feel free to move on to your other question. Otherwise, I can give you more examples of this.
Yeah, please. I'm happy to hear more.
HH: There is a little computer alert sound that happens in the movie whenever you hear one of the characters say “Love link established”. I actually made that sound, it's not a piece of sound design. It's a rolling chord that plays. If you were to break that chord up into an arpeggio, you would get the first four notes of ‘Iris’s theme’. And so in my head, this is the sound of love to Iris, right? She says “Love link has been established”, and so her love theme has been playing in her head. Somewhere in this unconscious Ghost in the Shell, dreaming/waking consciousness that she has, that sound has been converted into this melody that she's humming to herself all the time because those are the notes she first hears.
CS: You could so completely go right past that connection without ever knowing it’s there because that chord sounds like any generic alert sound! Speaking of the Iris theme, when I first heard it, it was familiar to me, but I didn't know why. It's something that rings of European cinema.
HH: That's exactly what we were going for. We wanted it to feel like something that felt like a classic piece of European cinema. We were listening to 60s Italian soundtracks and things like that. I started writing music for this before they shot anything because having not had the experience of doing a studio movie before, I kind of had to audition for this movie.
Even though Drew (Hancock) wanted to work with me, the producers and the studio weren't familiar with me. So in order to get the job, I wrote some music based on the script that Drew had written, with some direction from him. That initial music is way more sci-fi, sort of synthy, and had a really different feeling to it. Then their filming got interrupted by the actors' strike, and when they came back, Drew showed me the footage, and he was like, “I was completely wrong. This is not a sci-fi movie, it is not going to feel like that. It should feel timeless. Look at what Sophie Thatcher's portrayal of Iris looks like”. And he showed me this footage, and I was like, Oh, she kind of reminds me of a Godard, kind of like an Anna Karenina, French New Wave thing, or she belongs in an Antonioni movie. Her wardrobe, her hair, her makeup, everything was this very different kind of timeless vibe.
Drew had said from the beginning, that this movie is a relationship drama at its heart. So one of the challenges was to figure out how to bring in the sound of romance. He very sweetly said to me, “The reason why I'm coming to you to do the music is because I know there are going to be action cues and things like that we're gonna have to do, but the most important thing to me is making sure that we have a real aching, romantic sensibility, and that is something I know you can do because I hear it all the time in your music.” This was also completely inspired by Sophie Thatcher's work. She had a huge hand in how Iris was dressed. I did not have a conversation with them directly about it when I started making the music, but Sophie Thatcher and the costume designer Vanessa (Porter) played a big role in shaping what that theme sounded like. Like if I'm writing a theme for Iris, and this is what Iris looks like, then let me make the music feel like that so it all goes together.
“When I started making the music, Sophie Thatcher and the costume designer Vanessa Porter played a big role in shaping what that theme sounded like.”
CS: I listened to this new direction you're taking on the Key Change podcast and I noticed the reference to Rosemary's Baby (In the first episode with Sophie Thatcher). There’s some similarity in the make and mood of the Iris theme to the theme of Rosemary's Baby. Was that incidental, or was that another one of those things where maybe Drew was a big fan and wanted something in there that pointed to that classic?
HH: Because we were talking about films from that era, you know, Rosemary's Baby came up, Polanski came up, Chinatown came up. I took the sort of European inspiration from Sophie's character and one of the things that I brought up was the Ray Conniff Singers. This sort of easy listening, big band, kind of romantic thing but it's almost like schmaltzy in its romance. To get this character's wistfulness and longing, I thought it would be so nice if this melody were actually sung as opposed to just being played instrumentally. Drew told me that Sophie was a singer, and then I thought, oh my gosh – part of the reason Rosemary's Baby’s main theme is so amazing is not just because of the music, but because it's Mia Farrow singing it.
CS: Which I didn't know, Okay, makes sense.
HH: Yeah, it's Mia Farrow! Those vocals are so weird, you know, like, kind of out of tune, and the whole thing has a kind of nightmarish quality to it. Again, it’s how do you make the music be as filled with the story as possible? Well, one great way to do that is if you have a theme for a character, have the character in the theme. When it turned out Sophie could sing it for herself, it was perfect.
CS: You had known Drew before this project, right? Was your relationship exclusively a friendship until now?
HH: We have known each other for decades. Drew’s best friend from elementary school is one of my closest friends from high school. We met through him and whenever he would come to visit LA, we would all hang out. Then Drew and I ended up living on the same block for many years, so even when our mutual friend wasn't in town, we'd just go for a walk, or catch up, go see a movie. I used to go see his comedy videos that he would do for channel 101. But I don't know that I ever anticipated that we would get the chance to work together. I knew that he was writing a lot of TV, but I found out that he got this script greenlit by seeing it in the trades. I didn't even see that he was also going to direct it.
CS: That wasn't the immediate plan, right? Wasn't it going to be the director of Barbarian?
HH: Yes, originally it was going to be that Zach Cregger was going to direct based on Drew's script. But as soon as Barbarian had this monster opening weekend, Drew was like, “He's not gonna direct this.” Sure enough, Zach told Drew he wasn’t going to be able to direct, but that Drew should direct it because he had a vision for it and that he would help make it happen as a producer. Zach stayed true to his word and thank god he did because I only got this opportunity through Drew getting to direct for the first time.
CS: So you were both on the same trajectory in a way, side by side throughout this whole movie-making process. He's a first-time director and I know you're not a first-time composer for film, but it had been a long time…
HH: And I hadn't done anything on this scale before.
“I think listening is a big part of creating.”
CS: Did that rear its head in some way? Did that present challenges that were unusual with you both kind of being on a parallel track in your first major work?
HH: I don't think it presented challenges that were so wild for anybody who's had to do this. Originally, when he said let's talk about the music for this movie, we went on this walk together because we still live in the same neighborhood. And it was three days after I'd read the script. This is February of 2023. I was like, “Have you thought about this composer for the score? I know you're a fan of this composer. Have you thought about them? And what about this person? And he basically stopped me, and was like, “So do you not want to score this yourself?” I said “Oh, yeah, but I don't want to let you down. This is a huge opportunity, and you could work with huge people.” He said, “As a first-time director working with somebody that I'm a huge fan of, I might not feel comfortable saying to them, ‘This is wrong’, or 'I don't know exactly what I want here, can we have a conversation about it?’ But with you, I know that I can come over and we can talk about it for an hour, and I can sort through my ideas, and I'm not going to be intimidated by you. I think that my chance of getting what I actually want is higher if I have a relationship with someone professionally that I already have a relationship with on a friend level.” And so, yeah, I was the lucky recipient of all those years of friendship. We didn't necessarily have the shorthand of immediately being like, it's this kind of scene so we're gonna do A, B, C and D, to get to E. We were kind of like, well, we know we want to get to E. What are the ingredients? And we would figure it out together. Maybe it took longer for him to articulate it, and longer for me to capture it. But it didn't feel so much like a challenge as it was just what we needed to do to find our way there.
CS: How does constant active listening, whether to your own music, others' work, or interviews -affect your need for moments of emptiness and space to recalibrate?
HH: I have two answers for this. One, for sure there are times when I've had headphones on for eight hours, and I have to step away and go for a walk and not look at my phone, not listen to something, not engage with any kind of audio information, just to give my brain a reset and give my ears a reset. That's almost biological. There's another way that I think was implicit in your question, and this gives us a chance to end on your favorite subject, Trent Reznor!
One of the things that I heard articulated by him, and I think about all the time, was something that he said in his Song Exploder episode. He talked about the role he has with Atticus Ross and that there are moments where they're (swept up) in pure creation, just throwing ideas out. Then he’ll step away and let Atticus sort of edit what they’ve worked on. But he separates moments of listening. I think listening is a big part of creating. One of the things that's important is listening to the stuff that I make in a way that's different from the way that I listen to other people's music for the podcast or the way I listen as an editor versus when I'm listening as a creator.
I have to separate those two different ways of listening. One of them is very critical and very judgmental, not necessarily, pejoratively judgmental in a way where I'm like, “This is bad”, but more like, “Does this work? Does this make sense? Is the timing here correct? Do I need an extra second before they start the next sentence?”, or whatever that kind of production way of listening is. Part of the reason why I hadn't made music for so long, is because I couldn't listen to my music in a non-judgmental way. I'd immediately apply the critic's ear to it, and it would prevent me from making anything because I couldn't recognize that these were two separate processes. What Trent Reznor said is, “There's plenty of time later to hit it with the IT SUCKS hammer.” That's the thing that I keep in my head. There are different ways of listening, and they aren't interchangeable. There are times when you need to actively forget to listen like that. And so it's slightly different from what you're saying about active listening and more about sort of generous listening versus critical listening. I think the physical, biological part of taking off your headphones and not listening to anything plays into both sides of that.
Find out more about Hrishikesh here.