MRH: For the Leverage soundtrack album, were the cues expanded for the CD, or are those the actual cue lengths in the series?

JLD: It’s a combination of both. As I mentioned, some of the music actually had existed before and became a very identifiable part of Leverage, [whereas] the majority I think comes from specific scenes, but the music is retooled a lot in Leverage. Any one of those cues could take on ten or twelve different versions throughout the season because some of them have been so identified with a situation.

This is once again something that Dean has made a really interesting decision on, and a good decision: the format…When the heroes are on top and have successfully either foiled the bad guy or are really in high gear on the move in their caper, there’s a theme for that; this is going to be the same from week to week, and I think it’s a way of once again making it that much more fun for the viewer to participate.

MRH: What’s it like working with Dean Devlin, because he’s got this hugely successful feature film career behind him – Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), The Patriot (2000) - and I don’t know if this is his first foray into television series?

JLD: It’s not, and I was fortunate to start working with Dean when he started his foray into television, which was on the first of the three Librarian telefilms that he did for TNT [The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (2004), The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines (2006), and The Librarian: The Curse of the Judas Chalice (2008)] as well as a few other projects that we worked on together.

I think he would say that he’s found television very interesting because it’s very immediate; you have an idea, and you can run with it. Sometimes the developmental stages, like trying to get a feature film off the ground, can be very challenging, and film years are not like TV years, so I think he really enjoys the immediacy of that. I certainly do.

Because he’s a creative producer, television really is the medium of the creative producer as opposed to film. In film, he’s very much an anomaly, much like great producers of the past. I think that’s really the difference: he’s very involved, he’s a huge music fan (which is also great), and he has a tremendous eye for detail.

MRH: Was it difficult to come up with fresh music for Leverage’s second season, or were there specific things you knew you had to retain?

JLD: To be honest, having worked on many long-running series, the development of the music parallels what the writers are going to do for us, so it’s going to be as challenging as the writers make it for us, because we’re the musical storytellers in our roles as composers.

In Season 2, it was interesting as we had an episode take place entirely in an Irish pub, so that defined the setting in the music in that episode. We had one job that took place during an Italian wedding. Those types of things make it interesting, and we have these little excursions of combining the genre music with the caper music with the ethnic idiom that we’re in.

MRH: I think some of that it reflected on the CD. There are some cues with interesting instrumentation. The Irish stuff is on their as well.

JLD: Yeah, because it was fun. It was quite a diversion, and it’s sort of complete in and of itself. Some of those things were actually used just as source music; some of them were source / score, used to do both background music [and] also play during dramatic situations. I think they were worth putting on the CD just because they were so different.

The idea was to just give an overview of the show and choose some interesting bits that compliment each other. I don’t know if it was more of a schizophrenic attempt that way, but I just wanted to pick some of what I thought was interesting.