Tina Kakadelis
Yellowjackets has turned TV Obsessive into a community of Citizen Detectives. Every piece of the show could be the key that unlocks the secrets of the wilderness. From the episodes themselves to the imagery of the opening theme and now, to the score by Anna Waronker and Craig Wedren, Yellowjackets finds a way to reinvent itself on a weekly basis. Ahead of the Season 3 finale in April, composers Anna Waronker and Craig Wedren sat down with TV Obsessive contributor Tina Kakadelis to discuss how the score has changed over the three seasons, the beauty and rage of teenage girls, and how long they would last if they found themselves in that fateful plane crash.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
TV Obsessive: I’m always curious about how duo composers work together. What is your shared composing process, and has that changed in the three years you’ve been doing Yellowjackets together?
Craig Wedren: We just scream at each other and record it, then turn it in and they’re like, wow, this is a wild score. It sounds like you guys are fighting.
Anna Waronker: It’s like a marriage, you know? We share responsibilities and we trade off responsibilities, depending on what’s going on with one person’s life or with the score even. It’s a lot of back and forth, organization, and communication. Luckily, we’re able to accomplish all of those things on a very fruitful level.
Craig: I completely agree with that. And what’s our process? It’s an evolving process. We definitely adapt to whatever project we’re working on. With Yellowjackets, it’s a real multiple-hats situation because there’s so much sound in the show and so much storytelling. Therefore, there’s so much organization also.
It’s a lot of flipping back and forth between the more primal, intuitive creative brain and then the executive function stuff. We reel each other back in when one or the other is too far afield in either direction.
When you say screaming, that could very well be part of the score.
Craig: And it is. It’s not fighting screaming, it’s more like laughing.
Anna: Screaming like I can’t believe we get to use this stuff in the score. It’s ridiculous.
Craig: It’s usually the things that get recorded that are, well, that’s obviously ridiculous, we can’t ever use that. Then 20 minutes later we’re like, wait, maybe that’s actually the thing that makes it work. Of course, those things become touchstones for the themes for the score.
What are some examples of those things? I watch the show, but listening to the score in isolation, it’s so unsettling.
Craig: I feel like the scores get more dense, more dark, and more fun somehow as it goes along.
Anna: But you might need the picture for it to be fun (laughs). Although, I have to say, listening to our Season 3 score, because we just compiled that, it was kind of fun to listen to.
Craig: It’s really fun, but it’s definitely a thrill ride. It feels like you’re at Halloween Horror Nights.
Anna: Look, it’s not a feel-good show.
Craig: It’s not for my mom.
Anna: It’s hardly for me.
My friend, who’s a flight attendant, had to stop. She said your scores were also part of the reason she stopped because they were scary.
Craig: That’s very high praise for the show. I wouldn’t watch it if I was a flight attendant. No, no. Probably wouldn’t if I were a teenage girl either. Or maybe there’s comfort in it because it’s like a release.
Anna: The thing I love about the show is that it can get so crazy. It’s like you get to see a situation where normal rules don’t apply. I think that’s a great outlet when you’re frustrated and don’t know how to process your feelings. I always get sucked in and, by the end of the season, I’m back to being a teenage girl who’s rageful, miserable, and all the things the poor girls are in the wilderness.
Craig: And of course, I’m like, why do you treat Jeff and Ben so badly? Come on, I love Jeff.
Anna: Poor Travis too.
You guys have already talked about all the layering and all of the different components that come together for the score. I can’t imagine what that looks like in the mixing program you use. How do you create something that’s chaotic, but is an organized chaos that’s pleasant, but scary to listen to?
Anna: It’s a lot of organization. Especially as the seasons grow, we’re doing a lot of overlapping themes for different characters and different relationships. The past and the present are now starting to merge, and we dip in and out of that. It’s a really incredible collage, but it ends up needing a part of your brain that you don’t necessarily use when you score. It’s more of the doing your taxes part of your brain in terms of the organizing. Like, you can’t miss a penny or you’re going to get in trouble. Although I find that type of thinking to be a little fun, but not when I’m under the gun of being creative. It’s as if they’re two different jobs.
Craig: Aesthetically, the chaos versus, let’s say, order, beauty versus noise, or however you make that distinction. Personally, that’s always been my jam. Where those two create friction and a sort of third thing, which is beautiful and unsettling. My old band was like that. I think Anna’s old band had some of that too.
Most of my favorite records from growing up were scary to me when I first heard them. Even if they’re not scary and they may seem quaint now. Anna and I put together a Spotify playlist called COUNTER//CULTURE that’s a couple hours of music that’s our inspiration for this score.
It’s really interesting because you get a lot of beauty, a lot of noise, and a lot of scary. That’s the beauty of horror as a genre, right? You get that catharsis of ugly or uncomfortable and turn it into something hilarious, beautiful, fun, or sensical somehow. We really enjoy walking that line.
Anna: We understand the priority is the chaos. We also understand that, in order to keep the score alive and fluid, we have to know where everything is.
Craig: For me, no matter how chaotic, disorderly, or noisy, if it doesn’t stand up compositionally as a piece of music, if it’s not grounded in something exciting to listen to, then we try and make another choice.
The chaos and beauty that create a third thing are the essence of being a teenager.
Craig: Right? We wind up there every season in the wilderness, which is a good metaphor for being a teenager. It’s right there. All that chaos, all that rage, all that beauty, all that passion, all that drama. That’s a good hodgepodge.
Speaking of the wilderness, Episode 6 ends when the researchers come into the girls’ campsite. There’s all this incredible vocalizing, which plays such a large part in the score as a whole, but it really hits a high, I think, at that scene. Can you talk about that scene and the larger use of vocals in the score?
Anna: I didn’t know yet when we started the session, but I had Covid. I remember I was holding out these crazy long notes that would turn into these screams that we thought were hilarious and unusable, which then became the focus.
Craig: Within the session, it started off as like, oh, just scream louder. Do it more. We were laughing and were like, well, obviously we’re not going to use that for anything. By the end of the session we were like, maybe that’s kind of awesome.
Anna: I remember saying, my throat’s going to hurt later from doing all the screaming, but I’m not sick. Then it turns out that I had Covid, which we then used to help create some of the really guttural sounds. My throat was so compromised.
Craig: Then we just kind of kept layering onto that. She was at her place and I was at mine because she had Covid. I would just send sessions or post-sessions and the scream was just all over it. And then it wound up in the entire score. Every season we have some of that. There’s the monkeys from Season 2 and there’s this weird symbol scream whenever you see the symbol.
The finale’s about a month away, and apparently it has one of the most ambitious and immersive musical sequences the show has ever done.
Anna: I’m glad they’re acknowledging that (laughs).
Craig: It almost took us under.
Can you say anything without spoiling it?
Anna: On a regular TV show, when you get about halfway in, you kind of have your rhythm and you know what you’re doing, and you can start reusing things.
Craig: Sort of plug and play. You’re like, oh yeah, that theme goes in here, it works perfectly. That goes here, it’s great.
Anna: If you’re working on a show that has multiple seasons, you have nothing but stuff to pull from. It makes it a lot easier.
Craig: Usually by Season 3 or Season 4 on most shows, you’ve developed such a library that you’re not on cruise control, but you can kind of oversee everything. Then, something occasionally new needs to be written. Yellowjackets isn’t like that.
Anna: No, this is like a new show every episode sometimes. At about Episode 8, I remember feeling like, oh, we have this slowdown now.
Craig: I didn’t feel that way (laughs).
Anna: You did more than you certainly did before in other seasons. Then we got to Episode 9, which is an amazing episode. Then we got to Episode 10, and not only does Episode 10 have probably 45 minutes of score, but it also has two songs in it, one of which we wrote, and it plays throughout the episode. Of course, in our ambitious way, we had to write three versions of the song.
Craig: We were just like, we don’t know what they want, so we know they want a song, let’s give them options.
Anna: Yeah, we have to give them options because they’re really good at narrowing it down.
Craig: There was a song they were trying to license for these very important scenes. It’s a wonderful song that the producers all had a relationship to and that we do too from our lives. They couldn’t get the rights to it, so we were sort of like, well, hey, we have to beat that song, right? All along, we felt like, well, our song will feel more like it’s from the world of Yellowjackets, which is a good thing.
Anna: A lot gets revealed in that episode. I think it’s cool to be the voices that carry you through these environments and every episode in the score, then all of a sudden we’re in the forefront singing a song as these big moments are happening and things are being revealed.
Craig: The songs that we write, like the theme song that we wrote, everything winds up feeding into this larger tapestry of the Yellowjackets world, the wilderness, and the relationships. When we write a song for the show or the theme song, all of those elements can be developed, mutated, and played on different instruments. It’s really fun that there’s this sort of communication.
Usually, on a TV show, never the twain shall meet. There’s licensed music, the songs (aka the needle drops), and then there’s the score, which is the entire instrumental background music. Because our score for Yellowjackets is already so vocal and because we wrote the theme, this upcoming song, and a couple other little things peppered throughout, it’s really neat to see it all developing and, for lack of a better word, cannibalizing on that.
Anna: Episode 10 is a great episode. Bart Nickerson, one of the creators, directed it. So much happens in it and it looks so beautiful. The way it comes together is so exciting. It required a lot of planning on our part with no time.
While Craig was working on Episode 8 or something, I was sneaking off to map out certain themes to make sure things didn’t overlap too much. Everything does overlap to an extent because there’s pretty much a constant score in this episode. When there isn’t a score, it’s deliberate, whereas usually it’s the opposite. There’s dialogue and then you bring in the score when you need support. Not in this episode. It was just interesting to have the conversation that’s instead of, where does the music go? It was like, where do we take it out?
I did a whole pass of mapping stuff out where I was like, where can we take music out? It was a different process, but it was so exciting. Both Jonathan Lisco, who’s one of the producers, and Bart, directed a lot of the season, and their episodes are amazing. Jonathan did the cave episode, and we really wanted to do them justice. With this final episode, there’s so much that happens, and if you’re into the show, it’s also so important.
Craig: Things happen so fast too. We were trying to thread the needle, connecting everything so there’s no whiplash and also really supporting the storytelling, which makes hairpin turns all the time.
Anna: It would have been great to have three months (laughs). Luckily we had a couple weeks because we were able to extend some deadlines for things. It was really a pleasure to work on, even though it was hard all right. We’re so tired.
My last question for you guys. If you were on that plane, how long do you think you’d last in the wilderness?
Craig: Zero. Zero time. I’m a nice Cleveland boy. I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland. I went to Indian Guides. That was the closest I got to the wilderness.
Anna: Well, first of all, I don’t even like to fly, so I would have probably found a way to implode before the plane even went down. Had I survived, I’d need an RV. I guess I would have figured it out. My friend wrote to me last night and said not more than five minutes would I last.
Craig: Especially with that kind of psychic warfare happening out there. Not to mention the physical stuff. I’m not good with that. I like people to be nice, open, and talk about the things that are on their minds, like, let’s work it out.
Anna: I am kind of jealous of what they get to do. Just getting the rage out. I don’t want to kill anyone though.
I’d rather go to a rage room than be stuck in the wilderness.
Anna: Oh, for sure.
Craig: That’s what we have heavy music for. My old band recently started playing together again. All of us were in a room and we’re like, oh my God, we didn’t realize how much we needed an outlet. That force of volume and heavy music. I actually think we get a lot of that catharsis. Speaking for myself, I get a lot of that working on this score because some of the sounds are just so heavy.
