Check out Anna Waronker’s interview with Vanity Fair discussing her recent scores for Amazon Freevee’s High School and Showtime’s Yellowjackets.
“Working on High School was one of the best experiences I’ve had as a composer,” Waronker tells Vanity Fair. “The way that Clea DuVall, co-showrunner and executive producer handled their coming-of-age as musicians, I just thought was the sweetest, most honest representation of how it actually goes down,” she says. “There’s so much heart to it.”
When composing the score, Anna was inspired by 90’s bands like Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Throwing Muses, and Lush. “It was fun because scoring is so specific to whatever you’re working on, and oftentimes you don’t get to dig into something that you’re super inspired by. And that’s okay too, I love that challenge,” Waronker says. “But with this, it was like, ‘Oh, my God, why don’t you go back in time and pick out your favorite music and then just get inspired by it and create a score with all of those elements in them?’”
Regarding her process for Yellowjackets, Anna gushed about her and writing partner Craig Wedren’s relationship with the show’s creators and how “by the end of the show, they wanted us to get as weird as we could. And we were so excited to do that, but didn’t trust it at first,” she says. “We just kept waiting for them to want to dumb it down and they kept saying, ‘No, make it weirder.’ And we were like, ‘Okay!…this is so fun!’”
Anna just began work on Paramount +’s School Spirits. Although it is not set in the 90’s, she’s making the “90’s attitude timeless now. I’d like to say that I’m making the ’90s just a timeless sound.”
Click here to read the full article
Click here to listen to Anna’s cue “Hospital” from High School
Image credit: Josh Groom