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HEROES' LISA COLEMAN AND WENDY MELVOIN - Page 1
 
 
 

Even if you’ve only seen the Heroes pilot, it would be hard not to be moved by the refreshing scoring approach by series composers Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman. Their music is sometimes ethereal, with light touches of exotic sounds from an eclectic collection of ethnic instruments, or the fusion of addictive percussion motifs that propel scenes while giving us a hint of a character’s psychology.

There’s also the haunting vocal contributions of Shenkar that amplify the yearning and exhaustion of characters struggling to maintain or establish some sense of normalcy when their sense of security is hacked away by human monsters hungry for greed, power, or revenge.

Melvoin and Coleman have been scoring films and TV series for about 14 years, but they also enjoyed a dynamic career as members of Prince and the Revolution, and it was through Prince’s move into feature films that the two composers gradually eased into film scoring.

The popularity of Heroes has moved the spotlight on the show’s composers, but they’re hardly newcomers in the scoring field. Melvoin and Coleman scored the entire six-year run of Crossing Jordan, and that series was undoubtedly a great training ground for working under tight schedules while creating haunting themes and underscore for a complex cast of villains and ephemeral victors.

With a CD of music from Season 1 just released by La-La Land Records, fans can finally enjoy some of the most refreshing music in TV, and in our conversation with Lisa Coleman, you’ll get some insight into how the sound of Heroes was created.

 

Wendy Melvoin (left) and Lisa Coleman (right)

 

Mark R. Hasan: I understand that you’ve been collaborating with Wendy Melvoin for over twenty years. Has your working relationship as co-composers changed over time?

Lisa Coleman: It changes in the context of what we’re working on, because we each have strengths in different areas. I’m the keyboard/piano player and I do more of the string arrangements and that sort of thing, whereas Wendy is a lot more rhythm-based.

What’s really great about collaborating is having that extra set of ears there to do the meta-brain activity… I’ll start playing something on the piano or a string line or something like that, [and] where I can concentrate on the harmonic beauty or dissonance or something that I think it needs, Wendy can watch and really be affected by it, and tell whether or not it’s working, if it’s too much, or whether it needs to be pushed more or less.

When we’re doing an album project where it’s drums and bass and that sort of thing, Wendy really excels at that… We both play drums, but she usually ends up doing most of the drumming and is a great bass player… It’s a really beautiful partnership.

 

 

MRH: How did you get involved in film music, because you both came from a different background, even though your earliest work included Prince’s Purple Rain (1984) and Under the Cherry Moon (1986)?

LC: We really wanted to score those films, but the film companies and the suits at the time felt more comfortable hiring a professional composer. We hadn’t done anything yet [and] there were a couple of little string pieces that we had done for albums that they placed in a couple of spots, but really, we didn’t get our first break into film scoring until the Kinks came to us for a song for Dangerous Minds (1995).

We had written a song called “This is the Life.” It was a ballad, and they needed a piece to represent Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, so somebody had heard that song and really liked it and came to us [for] a new version for the film, and in doing so, we met producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer.

Mark Isham was scoring the film at the time. I’m a huge fan of Mark Isham, but they weren’t happy with the style that he was doing for the film and they wanted something more contemporary. So at first they paired us with Mark, and we tried that for just a day, and… it wasn’t fair for anybody to be pairing us, so Mark was extremely gracious and kind of just backed off and said, ‘You guys should just do the film. I don’t think they’re happy with what I’m doing. You guys are great.’

He was so supportive, and we sort of got the film handed to us. That was a huge break… because we had both abilities to do string and piano or funky drums and bass, so it kind of fit perfectly.

Purple Rain DVD cover

 

 

 

 

Under the Cherry Moon DVD cover

Dangerous Minds DVD cover

   
 
   
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