If you asked someone what the music of a comedy sounds like and what the music of horror sounds like, you would get very clear answers, but you would rarely think about those two types of scores colliding. Widow’s Bay has been rightfully heralded as a series that mixes and mingles its comedic and horrific sensibilities, and Emmy-nominated composer David Fleming reminds me of a very important element to the Apple series: it’s always charming. Fleming’s score doesn’t just amp up the drama, the absurdity, and the straight-up terror, but I don’t remember a score in recent memory that pays such homage to a place that casts a hypnotic spell.
Audiences have brought up how Widow’s Bay balances its tone, and I think it is such a hot topic because that balance is so well-thought out. When the comedy hits, it really makes you laugh (Matthew Rhys’ Mayor Loftis high on mushrooms is a personal highlight) but the horror is as equally committed. The composer knew that walking that line was going to be necessary.
“It’s an important question, because I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, especially when I heard the pitch from Katie Dippold, and you don’t really understand what that’s going to look like until you see the episodes,” Fleming says. “There’s just such a specific personality in her writing and Hiro [Murai]’s directing, and there’s this joke with a calendar in the first episode where, as soon as I saw that, I just started falling in love with how strange and specific it all is. I love how well-defined this world is and it feels like it really exists out there. I tried to not think about the genre too much so I could really enjoy this specific tonal brew, and I didn’t want the music to be an element of tonal whiplash.
I wanted the music to feel rooted in the personality of the town and this feeling of curiosity and mystery, and I have a bit of an allergy to comedy music. It’s one thing if you need to juice up your comedic stakes, but everyone on Widow’s Bay is so naturally funny. I didn’t want to impede on what they were doing with the writing.”
Loftis is determined to get tourism up on the island, and there is a welcoming track on the soundtrack titled, “Welcome to Widow’s Bay!” that feels evokes a certain time gone by. The cue begins with a bright brass sound, and it hints at an idealistic tone of America making good on its promises. I told Fleming that I responded to a bouncy womp-womp-womp sound that randomly reminded me of some of the score from 1976’s Carrie.
“It’s kind of the only moment in the show where everything is going right, and it’s kind of what this show would be if it was just a nice comedy about a beachside town with a successful mayor,” he says. “We could’ve titled this track, “The Next Martha’s Vineyard” since that’s what Loftis envisions for this town even though he never quite reaches it. It’s his one moment [where] he’s allowed to be content and happy before it’s snatched away from him, but there’s two versions of the same cue. The first one is the one that you hear in the show, and the second was another that I had done that didn’t quite work. I dug them together, so combined them into one track for the soundtrack.
There’s a little bit of a Baroque feeling that was very fun to write, and that womp-womp sound occurred to me from listening to Switched-On Bach. I had done this acoustic guitar, nylon thing, and it was feeling a little too stuffy, but it was fun to dive into those worlds and find the happy boundary since we don’t exist in that space very often with this show.”
In episode four, Patricia’s party takes a dark, sinister turn, and it’s an example of how the horror feels rooted in something that we may not understand if we are told the truth. The stomping percussion feels a pursuit, and there is a plinking of strings that sounds like blood dripping onto the floor. It then takes an even deeper turn as vocalization emerges, as if it is preparing itself for a collective wail.
“One of the first things that Katie talked to me about was the idea of a horror movie being like a ride and that the fun of it was interspersed with the scariness,” Fleming says. “It’s terrifying but it’s always charming and the relief and the tension are always dancing together. What I loved about working on the music for this episode was it kind of being its own self-contained story since it starts with this self-help book, and the musical has this aspirational quality. It’s not quite a fairy tale, but there’s something that makes Patricia feel optimistic about it even though there’s this hidden layer of chanting underneath it. As the episode progresses, the chanting gets more manic and the darkness starts to come to the foreground. Before you know it, you realize this dark, witchy Satanic chant was hiding there the whole time.”
When the action shifts back to the 18th century, we learn just how deeply this darkness has festered. Fleming’s score is noticeably different, something, he tells me, he almost played with for the entire season before changing his mind. I joke whether he had to find period appropriate lutes to fashion a new sound, but he reveals that learning about the history of the island unlocked something that changed the course of the entire score
“We didn’t record with lutes, but you’re not far off,” he assures me. “We did record with an older gamba and a Baroque cello, and there was a point towards the beginning where I hadn’t seen the episode yet even though I knew a colonial-focused story was coming. I flirted with the idea of the entire show sounding like that and it wouldn’t make sense until you got to this point in the season, but we decided to save this sound for the episode itself. It was a challenge to myself that was a little more authentically acoustic and authentically of the time, and it felt like a little mini movie in the middle of this series. My intention and hope was that it would sound like its own thing, and I was thinking along the same acoustic lines as something like The Village. That score isn’t like that, but I mean in terms of getting away from anything modern at all and making it more authentic to its era.
It ended up sort of unlocking the whole show for me in a that the rest of the show after that episode becomes a lot more orchestral, and, up until that point, is a lot of world-building. Then I start to establish a curse motif and a storm motif, and these things start to get a little more traditional for the back half of the season. As we started to understand that there is something more ancient on the island, like when you see him eating the mushrooms at the beginning of episode five, we were wondering what might be older than that sound? It’s a beach town, so what if these conch shells could be a warning sound that sounds much more ancient? We then thought we could thread that sound, and other sounds, like that through the earlier episodes of the season. It was a big awakening for me.”
The final track on the soundtrack, “Come Back Soon!,” is one that I kept thinking about, especially after finish this first season. It shares the same punctuation as the track that welcomes us to this town, but have we changed after what we have experienced here? The characters have change, of course, but so have we, the audience. For Fleming, he wanted to go out on a high.
“When you’re on a project, you can be really focused on getting things done and how you are going to move onto the next thing,” Fleming says. “I had a plan A for that cue that fail spectacularly. Katie rejected it in a very kind, polite but full way and suggested that I have another go at it. At this point, we didn’t know if we were going to get a season two, and it felt like m last moment in the theme park. This is my last time to have fun on this show, so it because my favorite piece of music, honestly. I was always aware of how special the show is, but when I was writing that piece, I had to consider that this was the thing I would write for this show.”
Widow’s Bay is streaming on Apple TV.
