Song Exploder - Brian Tyler - Avengers: Age of Ultron

Episode Date: May 29, 2015

The title card for Avengers: Age of Ultron comes up twelve minutes into the movie. Against a black background, the Avengers logo takes up almost the entire screen. You might expect a triumphant, heroic piece of music, but the film called for something more complicated. Coming up, you'll hear why, and how composer Brian Tyler tackled that piece of score, in his third feature for Marvel Studios. It was recorded at Abbey Road Studios with the London Philharmonic, with Brian himself conducting.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hurway. Avengers Age of Ultron is the second movie featuring The Avengers, a supergroup of comic book heroes. The other character in the title, Ultron, is the villain in this story. If you haven't seen the film, that's all the background you need to know for this episode. Composer Brian Tyler disassembles the cue he wrote to accompany the film's title card. It was recorded at Abbey Road Studios with the London Philharmonic, with Brian himself conducting. Hi, I'm Brian Tyler, composer of the film Avengers Age of Ultron.

The piece that we're listening to here is the title card, where it says Avengers Age of Ultron over the screen, and the scene that precedes that, I was actually thinking it would be some big Avengers fanfare for the good guys, you know, for our heroes. But Joss said, that's Joss Whedon who wrote and directed the film. Joss said, no, no, no, no, no. He's going to say Avengers in big letters. You'll see Ultron in smaller letters, but you're going to be, feeling Ultron. This movie is about our team not having control. It was kind of fun to do a villainous

title card for a Marvel movie. I think it was at first. Let's find a vibe for Ultron was really the first of the marching orders in terms of composition. Originally the Ultron theme I wrote away from picture. It was something that Joss and I had a lot of discussion about and I wrote many versions. At one point I called his theme like the broken clock representing his character, which has to have some logic to it. Well, he thinks he's doing right by hitting the restart button on humanity. He thinks that's the best thing for humanity, which is ironic. How do we write a theme that sounds almost heroic because he in his own mind is justified,

but dissonant and tweaky enough to say, no, he doesn't quite have it right. He is a villain still. So it was a tricky one. There was a number of things that made it really happen and come together. One was having a melody that you could easily get in your head, but there's something weird about it and off about it in that it starts one note off from the key we're in. It's flat by one note.

It sounds like it's nearly wrong, and that was something that Joss really loved about it. Also, things like instead of using traditional piano, we used two pianos and one is out of tune on purpose. I remember Joss wrote me a text and said something like, this needs to be the broken cogs of cognition. So it repeats again. So you kind of get your pattern like, oh, I know this pattern.

And then the very last note is ahead by a beat, not only out of tune but out of time. Then there's a subconscious way back, distorted guitar. I didn't want it to be too much like rock guitar. I wanted to sound a little more like a machine or a robot. We actually artificially down-tuned it an octave. The strings at the beginning, this is where Tony Stark is looking at the Loki Scepter going, hmm, should I, shouldn't I, should I, shouldn't I?

And then the cellos come in with the violas, kind of doing this ostinado. And it's setting the table. And all of a sudden the cellos and the basses come in with us. It's almost like a march. And the idea of the superhero is introduced. When you have marches, you usually think of Superman and things like that. But the fact that he has this really forward momentum thing going in the lower strings against these upper strings kind of makes it feel deliberate.

The violins start running up the scale, just like they're out of control, and they're hitting some wrong notes along the way, quote wrong notes. That's where the rest of the orchestra plays the melody, the big Ultron theme. Usually that is where everyone would come together, and that's where, okay, strings are going to support the brass, and the brass is going to be with the woodwinds, and everyone's going to be playing the melody, and it's going to sound really together.

And it's actually at that point that I did exactly the opposite with the strings. And there's the traditional da-da-da-dum button at the end of the piece to say, he's in control, after all, even though he seems erratic. The grandeur, the pageantry of Ultron's theme here at full tilt is definitely helped by the fact that we have brass playing

in the superhero range. Typically, when you have a hero or a superhero, you're going to have the brass taking the melody. There's just kind of nothing more heroic than brass playing a melody. But the fact that the strings are all violating the scale against this brass majestic style gave it a sense of something's wrong. Abby Road is a very cool room. It's got a lot of volume. When you have that many people playing a piece as Fortissimo like this, it's deafening. And then when it gets to the big part, apparently just sounded like pure distortion.

We had to really record the percussion separately. And I didn't want them to hold back and say, okay, can you blend in with orchestra? No, we wanted them to be loud and obnoxious because that's what makes it aggressive and sound cool. And so we were able to balance it all at the end. So they got to have their percussion solo moment. Knowing that I'm going to conduct the orchestra completely affects the way I write the music because I never want to do something that's impossible, where we rely on technology to have to artificially stitch pieces of music together

that are impossible to play, because to me, that takes away from the human element of what music is. Having been over at Marvel, as much as I have been, it's been kind of a home away from home, I know the origin stories of all these characters via the comics before I was involved with these movies. You get the idea of where things are going, but it was great, kind of as a fan of the comics through the years, to see how they tied these things together. And now, here's the full piece of music for the Avengers Age of Ultron title, You can find out more about Brian Tyler's work at SongExploder.net. In addition to his work on Ultron, Brian also composed the Marvel fanfare, the music that

accompanies the Marvel Studios logo. You can watch the video and listen to that music on the Song Exploder website. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs.

And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April. and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin, Clion, and more.

They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExploder at SongExploder.net

or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PR. X, a curated network of extraordinary story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi-Kesh hereway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.