Danny Elfman Had “No Propensity for Music” Yet Became One of Film’s Greatest Composers

And we continue with our American stories. Danny Elfman came to prominence as the lead vocalist and songwriter for the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the early nineteen eighties, a scene in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School. Since scoring his first studio album in nineteen eighty five, Elfman has composed over one hundred feature film scores like Batman, Beetlejuice, Men in Black, and Goodwill Hunting, to name a few, as well as compositions for TV shows like The Simpsons and other work as well. You had to share his story. Is the man himself, Danny Elfman. Let’s take a listen.

Music came to me very late in life. I didn’t grow up with music around me. By the time I was in middle school, I was pretty certain I want to do pursue a career in nuclear biology, although I’m sure I wouldn’t have lasted long in that, but it just seemed like a cool thing back then. And really, the luck part was that my parents moved from one neighborhood to another in Los Angeles between middle school and high school, and so I started high school with no friends. I had to make new friends from scratch, and I happened to fall in with a kind of an rdy group, and I realized that I’m like the only one in this group that doesn’t play an instrument. I was like the non musical member. But in that group of friends was a trumpet player named Michael Byron, and he turned me on to Stravinsky, and suddenly it was like a whole new world for me. And Stravinsky led to Prokofy Off. Prokofyoff led to Shostakovich, led the bar talk, led to, you know, and then before I knew it, I was really, I know, when I, when I first time I heard… Prokofy Off, I felt like this is just music from my blood, and, you know, I have Russian roots, but I knew nothing of Russian music, and somehow it just felt like it was just connecting on this deep kind of cellular level. And so, two and a half years of high school I didn’t quite finish, but I had planned to travel around the world with a friend, and I decided I will secretly pick up it in instrument and try to learn it, and so we both bought on this world travel. He bought an Alto Saxon. I bought a violin. Also, during that period of time, I became infatuated with a thirties jazz artist named Jango Ryan Hart. But I ended up, by another coincidence, starting off this world travel. In Paris, because my brother lived there, quite. Randomly, and I was practicing in his apartment one day. And I’d only been playing for about five months, and the director had come in while I was practicing. When it came out, he goes, “Why don’t you come with us on the road?” And I got me. It’s like, “I can’t play.” He goes, “Yeah, you’re good enough for us,” and I did, and I did my first performing and wrote my actually first couple of pieces. One year before that moment, I had never even picked up an instrument. And by the time I came back, my brother had started a musical theatrical troupe modeled after the group that I toured with in France, which was called Laground Magic Circus, and he started a group called the Mystic Knights of the Ouengle Buenco. And even though I arrived very ill with hepatitis and malaria and a number of other things, he does, “It’s okay. You could take a couple of days off. Then I’ll bring you to rehearsals, and you can start. You’ll be our musical director.” That’s how I started in music: In the six, seven years I spent with the theater group, we actually started getting better and better musically, went from eight to twelve pieces, and everybody had to play three instruments, so we could be a string ensemble, a brass ensemble, or a percussion ensemble. And it was a very weird group. But in the string and brass stuff, I did a lot of. I was still infatuated with thirties jazz, and I wanted to do arrangements of early Duke Ellington work from about nineteen thirty two to thirty three, and I figured the only way I’m going to get it right is to learn how to write it down. So, transcribing Duke Ellington was my first time writing on paper. And at the end of those seven years, I wrote my first very ambitious piece. It was about a six to seven minute twelve, written for, you know, all everybody in the group, and I called it the Piano Concerto Number One and a Half. But it was kind of inspired by bits of Prokofy Off and bits of Stravinsky and, uh, and it was my first time writing, in fact, you know, like a small chamber work. And after that, I disbanded completely and started a rock fand.

That thing I walked down the street. I did class up the studying your body. So that. And then year, five years after that, Tim Burton brings me into Phebe’s Big Adventure. So I almost said no, but I remembered writing that one piece—the last piece I wrote for the Mystic Nights—and I said, “Well, if I can write for twelve pieces, I can write for an orchestra.” It’s not that different, because, you know, I finally thought about it, and I said, “You know, it’s a sixty five piece orchestra now, but I’m not writing sixty five individual parts.” You got your first violin, second violins, and I said it, and I just decided I’m just gonna take a chance and do it. But I knew nothing about that. I never dreamed of becoming a film composer. I was just a… Lot of random accidents in my life. And I just had so much fun writing Peop’s Big Adventure that I said, “I’m going to keep.” And it’s also the first time I ever… stood in front of an orchestra, and the sound was so amazing, it was pretty addictive. I think, right at that moment, I was like, “I want to do this.”

So for ten years, I was both in a rock band, writing and producing and performing and touring. But I tried to get in two films every year around my band schedule so I could learn. So in those first ten years, I did a number of albums and tours, but I also tried to get twenty film scores in there, more or less.

And you’ve been listening to Danny Elfman tell one heck of a story about his life, and if one word comes to mind for me, it’s serendipity. He just wanted to learn an instrument to tour the world, and he picked up the violin, and while practicing in Paris and his brother’s apartment, some guy, random guy, walks in and says, “Hey, come join the band!” He goes, “I’ve been playing long.” “You’re good enough,” the man said, and he was good enough, and he kept on going—one band, another band, all of it, by the way—sparked by one composer, Stravinsky, and then the call from Tim Burton himself, the legend. And as he put it, “I never dreamed of being a film composer.” When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of Danny Elfman, here on our American Stories. And we continue with our American Stories and with Danny Elfman’s story, beginning with his theme from the nineteen eighty nine Batman movie starring Michael Keaton.

So for ten years, I was both in a rock band, writing and producing and performing and touring. But I tried to get in two films every year around my band schedule so I could learn. So in those first ten years, I did a number of albums and tours, but I also tried to get twenty film scores in there, more or less. You know, this was nineteen eighty five. There wasn’t MIDI notation or anything like that yet. So I would kind of the best I could to play parts into a tape recorder to play for the director because I wasn’t a pianist, and also Tim, you know, and other directors… They want to hear. They were getting to the point. In the old days, Bernard Herman would… just play on piano for Albret Hitchcock. “Here’s your themes, here’s ou cos.” But they wanted to hear more of what’s going to sound like. So I started getting cheap sample synthesizers to kind of mock up strings and brass, and I found myself recording all the parts and getting the cue approved. Eventually, after a couple of scores, I realized that I’m mocking up the entire cue before the director signs off on it, and then when he finally does, I’m going back to square one and writing all of it down. And it’s true. I was working sixteen hours a day, like seven days a week. It was crazy. So that was my first ten years, was very intensive training. And also, it was still in the band during those ten years, so it was, it was just insane. But slowly, I built up my confidence. I mean, I just, just, you, you’d look at me and… I was covered with eraser dust, you know. It was just my hands were cramping, and I had tons of pencils and I had my custom music paper made and my knees… I’d look at a certain point, I was just going through erasers after erasers, and so I was very happy when the MIDI notation happened, and then I would just put a lot of work into creating the full fleshed out version. And then being able to get the MIDI to print out that I could then take it the next step there, and my sixteen hour days then went down the nice, easy eleven twelve hour days. Stumbling into The Simpsons theme was much just like winning a lottery or something in the sense that… All right. In Engle Boinco, we did a show one night and got this terrible review in The LA Reader by a critic named Matt Groening, and it was such a nasty review that I took exception because normally I loved our bad reviews, and like the worse the better. That was energy. Bad reviews and criticism and negative energy always provided a huge fuel source. That’s what that was my atomic fuel that’s kept me going, that’s what motivated me. But in this one case, I really took exception because he admitted in the review that he only saw the on cars; he missed the show. And I wrote this letter back saying, “If you’re gonna say what you’re gonna say, that’s fine, but you gotta sit through the show if you’re going to write the review.” So they printed the rebuttal. As the years go by, I started seeing this comic in The LA Weekly called Life in Hell, and I said, “Matt Groaning! He said, ‘Who did that review?’” But I like this comic and I hated the fact that I really liked what he was doing, which means he had talent, because when you really don’t like somebody, you don’t like them to be talented. You like them to be talentless hacks. And clearly he had talent. So now it’s many years later and I get a call. “There’s this show.” “It’s called The Simpsons. It’s an animated show, and Matt Groening is the, it’s his, he created it.” “He wants to meet you.” “Ah, this will be interesting.” “I go in, and you…” Know, we talk, and they play a pencil sketch and a version of the thing. I really liked them, and I liked what they did, and I said, “No one’s ever going to see this, so never make it past, you know, a couple episodes.” “But it looks like fun. And I said, ‘If you want something really retro, I’m the guy for it. If you want something contemporary and modern, I’m really the wrong one.’” Because I saw it, and it just really brought me back to Hanna-Barbera, The Flintstones. In fact, the opening kind of has a Flintstone energy to it, you know, going to work and the car driving and the whole thing. And I grew up on The Flintstones, so I said, “I think it should be like in that mode that, you know, should feel like that kind of weird sixties TV thing.” And Matt was like, “Yeah, cool.” And as I’m leaving and we shake hands, he goes, “By the way, you probably don’t remember,” but I say, “I remember,” and he goes, “We’re cool.” “Now, yeah, we’re cool.” And I wrote it in the car on the way home. Literally, I wrote the whole thing in the car on the way home, and I got it called back the next day saying, “We love it.” And then a few weeks later I was in with the orchestra recording it. You know, I just have to keep challenging myself. After ten years, now I’m just a film composer, and it was starting to get frustrating because the thing is, I love writing for film, but it’s also very, you can’t write what you want to write. You have to write what serves the film. And so many times I’d be writing a cue for film, and it ends go, “Oh my God, that was just like a minute and a half or two and a half minutes,” and I could have taken that to eight minutes long and really enjoyed it. And so there was a point where we started touring live concerts. Of my film music. It was called Me from the Films of Tim Burton, and I would look at the audience listening to it, and I remember we were at Lincoln Center in New York, and somebody came from the other side, you know, from the oppera sit. He says, “God killed to get that audience in our concerts,” because it was a very enthusiastic audience. And that’s where I started thinking, “Why not try to write music that bridges between what I do for film and what I love about classical and just give myself this huge challenge?” And so the first piece was for American Composer’s Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, and that was great, and I did a few more, and then it wasn’t until eight years ago that I decided, “I’m writing a violin concerto, my first, and I’m going to do a piece every year, which means I’m going to start saying no to paid work.” But it felt right because I—who was going to take my income down significantly, but yet I did so well as a film composer—it felt like I should be giving it back. Also on the other side and keeping myself sharp. Writing the classical concert music is so much harder, infinitely harder. For me than writing a film score.

And you’ve been listening to Danny Elfman tell the story of his life, and my goodness, the story of how he got to compose the score for The Simpsons. We all can learn a lot from it. It turns out he gets the call from the very man who gave his band a terrible review in an L.A. newspaper, and worse, he hadn’t even really seen the full show. And of course, we learned from Danny that he got motivated by that kind of thing. He actually liked the negative review; got him going. And then he gets the call from the same person who had a lot of talent, and he was developing little show called The Simpsons. And when he meets him, rather than hold a grudge, he basically lays down the law. “If you want retro, I’m your man. If you want modern, I’m not.” And we are all blessed with that remarkable score and Danny burying the hatchet on this guy who ripped him in public. When we come back, more of the story of Danny Elfman, here on our American Stories. And we continue with our American Stories and with Danny Elfman’s story as told by Danny Elfman himself, beginning in this segment with his score from Tim Burton’s nineteen ninety three classic The Nightmare Before Christmas.

I used to argue with this conductor who worked with me and Elton Bridge, “[F]ilm music is the classical music of today,” and I go, “No, it’s not.” People come to a film music concert to hear music from films they love. You can’t take the films away from it and still have an audience really show up to hear that music. Not only that, but frequently we really have to simplify, and I’m not allowed to get in. Occasionally there are scores that can get very dense and elaborate, but it’s not often. You know, I’ll write a certain thing, and I’m really excited about it in… The director goes, “Oh God, what’s that?” I go, “Sorry, let me just take the counter, take all the dissonance out, take the counterpoint out.” “How about now?” “Oh, it’s much better, thank you.” So it was just the ability to get away from that and really push myself further. It keeps me going because, like, and when I finished that violin concerto, I felt like it almost killed me literally, and I said, “I’ll never do it again.” Until the next year when I was offered another piece, I said, “Sure,” and I realized, “Okay, you know, it’s just like childbirth.” You know, my mother, I think after my brother was born, saying, “No more children!” But then, you know, you have a cute baby a year later, said, “Well, maybe more,” kind of similar. What you do is you forget the painful part and you remember the fact that I really like how this thing turned out. This, you know, this baby is actually really… cute, and then the pain that getting there doesn’t seem so intense. Then, before you know it, it’s like we’re doing it again. I don’t actually plan out anything that I write. I just listen to a lot of music that I really like, and then I start improvising, and I might start with between eight and twelve short compositions, and then I’ll go, “Okay, so here’s a bunch of stuff.” Now let me pause and go back and look at what I was: number one, two, three, and start to write a little more, and I’ll find that number one, number three, number six, number eight are starting to expand. And now, rather… Than just being like a thirty forty second idea, now it’s, “Oh, but this is like is developing into something.” And I find that certain of the pieces tend to just evolve, and some of them, I’m just hitting a dead end, going, “No, it was an interesting idea, but it doesn’t want to be more…”