“Welcome to micHELLe” | The Music of Harvey Beaks

June 13, 2016 - We play around with many musical themes on Harvey Beaks. It’s a way to sonically expound upon each characters’ personality, their motivations, and how we want the audience to perceive them. I had met with Carl Greenblatt many months ago to discuss Harvey’s little sister and walked away with some very specific ideas about her tone. Before I knew it, we were in Seattle recording with about 60 talented musicians. It took some 40 strings, a bunch of brass (french horns, trombones, trumpets), some delicate flutes, human voices, and some guttural contrabassoons to convey want we wanted to say about Michelle. 

Alas, programming decisions came in to play and we ended up only needing about 3 seconds of theme music for the Little Bugaboo episode, but that’s fine because we will have plenty of other opportunities to use this theme and it’s variations.  Here’s a video which would exist if I were to have lost my mind and gone full EGO.  I would have demanded that the episode end with 90 seconds of cold, hard Michelle stare set to my complete omen-inspired theme. At least it will live on here! 

PS- An honorable mention should go to our genius orchestrator, Steve Bartek, for bringing this music to life in a way I could never have done on my own. Steve’s experience in orchestrating all of Danny Elfman’s film scores makes itself clear in pieces like this. (I still have to pinch myself when I think about a tremendous talent such as Steve working on our sweet little Harvey Beaks show!)

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