For Emmy-nominated composer Dave Porter, scoring ‘Pluribus’ is the product of a creative shorthand forged through almost 20 years of working alongside Vince Gilligan.
“Part of the job of a composer is to be able to have conversations with people maybe who are more visually oriented and don’t necessarily know as much about music or what music can do and translate what those needs are in terms of what music can do and help become, as I call it, a very important assistant storyteller,” says Porter.
Dave Porter discusses the creative process behind his Emmy-nominated score for the ‘Pluribus’ premiere, reflecting on how nearly two decades of collaborating with Vince Gilligan have strengthened their creative shorthand. He explains why the production avoids temp music, how he approaches scoring only after seeing finished footage, the months-long evolution of the series’ main title, and why he expects the music to continue evolving in Season 2 rather than revisiting familiar themes. Porter also looks back on his musical upbringing, his blend of classical and electronic influences, favorite recording studios, and even imagines how he might react to the show’s mysterious wave of forced happiness.
‘Pluribus’ is a genre-bending original in which the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.
Created by Vince Gilligan, ‘Pluribus’ stars stars Rhea Seehorn, Karolina Wydra, and Carlos Manuel Vesga, and guest stars Miriam Shor and Samba Schutte.
All episodes of ‘Pluribus’ are streaming on Apple TV. A second season has already been ordered.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you today. How are you doing?
Dave Porter: I’m doing really well. Thanks so much.
AF: How honored are you to be nominated for your work on the first episode of ‘Pluribus’?
Dave Porter: Oh, so very honored. There’s so much talent out there and so much great music getting made for film and television that anytime your peers can single you out and single out your work in that way, it’s enormously gratifying. It makes me feel proud and thankful for those that throughout my career have entrusted me with their shows and their stories and let me write the music for them. It’s truly a wonderful feeling.
AF: Having worked with Vince Gilligan on a number of series, how has the shorthand improved in your professional relationship?
Dave Porter: It definitely has. I think nothing beats that combination of time and experience together to help get to the right answers creatively when you’re working with someone. And for us, we’re always pushing each other—everybody in our group that’s been so lucky to work together for as long as we have—to get better at what we do.
Part of the job of a composer is to be able to have conversations with people maybe who are more visually oriented and don’t necessarily know as much about music or what music can do and translate what those needs are in terms of what music can do and help become, as I call it, a very important assistant storyteller.
Working with anyone for a long time, but especially with Vince for this long, has made—through our shared experiences—it easier to get more quickly to the right answers because we have this foundation of things we’ve tried in the past and shared experience. That process has made us better at communicating and has made me a better composer.
AF: Did Vince give you any particular notes as far as what we wanted out of the score?
Dave Porter: Yes and no. I think my conversations with Vince are rarely about the specifics of music. For example, he would rarely, if ever, talk to me about a specific instrumental choice.
But more, it’s broader strokes. It’s talking about crucially tone, story beats, things that he wants to drive home in a larger storytelling sense, and then leaves it to me generally in terms of how music could best accomplish those goals.
AF: Do you generally begin working on the score as soon as you read the script or do you prefer to wait until you’re able to watch footage?
Dave Porter: We definitely have preliminary conversations as early as the script, but in general, I don’t. This varies greatly depending on who I’m working with, but for the Vince Gilligan projects, I like to wait because there’s so many important creative decisions that get made between the writing of the script and what appears on my screen in the studio.
One of the benefits of being a composer is that I get to be last and I get to be the beneficiary of all those amazing creative decisions that get made before me. And for me, they are super informative in terms of what is it that I can bring with the music that’s going to complement all those creative choices that have been made already and hopefully elevate the story and the show to a whole new level once we’ve added the music.
AF: When you get footage, does it come with temp music or no music?
Dave Porter: One of the great benefits of working with Vince Gilligan and our team is that we decided early on, almost 20 years ago now, that we were never going to use temp music. So, we never—in any of our shows or film that we worked on—have employed temp music, except in a few rare instances where we’re working with a montage piece, which I love because it just allows us to late in the process really look at a scene once again from a fresh perspective and really talk about and experiment with what could we do originally with music and that is in keeping and in tone with all of the musical creative choices we’ve made for the show and doesn’t burden us with a sensibility from some other project, right, that got thrown in just to use as a temporary placeholder.
I’m so thankful for that. Believe me, that takes a lot of courage from a lot of people. It takes courage from the picture editors who are cutting without any music. It takes courage from our producers and our network and studio partners to listen to these cuts and these assemblies of the show early on without music, trusting that doing it that way allows us the greatest creative freedom later and hopefully for the best creative result for the music.
AF: Was there a cue in particular that evolved the most from start to finish?
Dave Porter: The piece of music that we spent the most amount of time on, without doubt, is the main title queue. We spent months on it and that, I think, came about through the experiments and the lessons that we had learned in scoring the series as we moved on.
As a natural byproduct of exploring our way through creating an entirely new universe, we learned a lot of lessons as we went along. I think it took that process of scoring the show many episodes in until we really understood what the best role for music would be and how to approach the main title, which of course, in its best moments, hopefully, a main title is capturing all the nuance and the vibe and the story of a show in a very small piece of music.
AF: Given that a second season has already been ordered and you already have this library of themes available from the first season, does it make composing the second season more or less challenging when the time finally comes?
Dave Porter: If there’s one thing I’ve learned about working with Vince Gilligan, it’s like everyone else who watches, I’m enormously surprised, always about where the story is going to go. I wouldn’t dare predict where things are going to go, and for that reason, I couldn’t possibly predict where we’re going to go musically, except that the one thing I’m sure of is that we will not retread ground that we already have.
This is why—in my Vince Gilligan work, for sure—big thematic statements are rare, and we’re very judicious about them. They are always evolving. The score is always evolving, just as the characters are evolving and the show is evolving as it goes.
AF: How did you first become interested in composing?
Dave Porter: That’s a great question. I grew up in a very musical family, although I guess I’m the first professional musician of the group. But music was a huge part of my household growing up, in particular, classical music, when I was very young. I started playing the piano when I was five. But it was actually my introduction to popular music as a teenager that got me interested in making my own music. My early experiments with composing music were largely electronic. It wasn’t until I got to college outside of New York City that I had some wonderful mentors that encouraged me to blend my knowledge and love of classical music with the things I had learned experimenting with electronics and synthesizers and computers into the sort of same world of making music.
And as you know, nearly all film scores these days are some combination of the two. I also loved that sense of collaboration. That power of music when it is married to other mediums, like film, theater, modern dance—all those things were very interesting to me and just such a great way to, I think, really showcase the power of music in a way that brings other people’s stories and other mediums of art together in a really powerful combination.
AF: Do you have a favorite studio that you like to record at because of the way it sounds?
Dave Porter: (Laughs) I have a few. There are sadly so many of them we’re losing these days and this is a sad byproduct of the way the business is running that it’s really hard to work and keep these big studios running. But certainly, I have a few.
For big orchestral stuff, I’m very fond of the room in Vienna that I used for ‘Pluribus.’ And in fact, two different rooms there at the Synchron stage in Vienna. They have a beautiful, huge, big hall that we did the big orchestra in. But then just as important to me, they have a much more intimate room downstairs, which is where I did the vocals, because I wanted the vocals to be very upfront and very personal and present. The combination of being able to do both those things in the same place for Pluribus was wonderful.
Here in LA, there’s so many amazing rooms that I work in, including my own, which I’m lucky to have, but also I love to work at East West and I love to work when it’s available at what used to be United, which I think it’s still called United, but it used to be Ocean Way here in LA. That Studio B there, I’ve worked in for many, many years, and it is a magical place for me. I love those rooms.
AF: How would you react if the world got taken over by a mysterious wave of forced happiness?
Dave Porter: (Laughs) I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I think my reaction would probably be the closest to the way our character Manousos reacts. I think I would be a shut-in for a while, and then eventually I’d start to get angry (laughs) and I would come out swinging.
But it’s really hard to know, and I think that’s one of the wonderful things about ‘Pluribus.’ I just love that it allows for everyone to think about how they would respond to these kinds of pressures. I think we would all respond differently, as so many of our characters do. Beyond that, I think in truth, we don’t really know, do we?
It’s just impossible to know and that’s such a human trait to think about. That put under that kind of pressure, we might actually surprise ourselves in how we respond. It’s really hard to know.