Wednesday, Dec 15, 2021 • 19min

Danny Elfman - What’s This? (from “The Nightmare Before Christmas”)

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Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas came out in 1993. It’s a stop-motion animated musical, with music by legendary composer Danny Elfman. He’s won Emmys, a Grammy, and been nominated for four Oscars. His work includes the music for Tim Burton’s Batman films, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, Good Will Hunting, and the theme to The Simpsons. From 1979 to 1995, he was the singer and songwriter in the band Oingo Boingo. The Nightmare Before Christmas takes place in a world where different holidays all have their own realm. And the story is about Jack Skellington, the leader of Halloweentown, a place where it’s always Halloween, and Halloween is all they know, and Jack has grown a little tired of it. But then, Jack discovers a portal to Christmastown, with snow and Santa and all things Christmas inhabiting it. He's never seen anything like it, and the discovery changes everything. The song "What’s This?" takes place in that moment of discovery. In this episode, Danny Elfman tells the story of how it all came together, and how writing and singing this song for Jack Skellington ended up profoundly connecting to his own life. For more, visit songexploder.net/danny-elfman https://songexploder.net/danny-elfman

Talking about

Speakers

(2)

Danny Elfman

Hrishikesh Hirway

Transcript

Verified

Hrishikesh Hirway

00:00

You're listening to

Song Exploder

where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. My name is

Hrishikesh Hirway

Break

Hrishikesh Hirway

01:43

Tim Burton's

The Nightmare Before Christmas

came out in 1993. It's a stop-motion animated musical with music by legendary composer

Danny Elfman

. He's won

Emmys

Grammy

and has been nominated for four

Oscars

from 1979 to 1995. He was also the singer and songwriter in the band

Oingo Boingo

02:04

The Nightmare Before Christmas

takes place in a world where different holidays all have their own realm. And the story is about

Jack Skellington

, the leader of Halloween Town, a place where it's always

Halloween

and

Halloween

is all they know and

Jack

has grown a little tired of it, but then

Jack

discovers a portal to Christmas Town with snow and

Santa

and all things

Christmas

inhabiting it. The song, "What's This? " takes place in that moment of discovery.

02:31

In this episode,

Danny Elfman

tells the story of how it all came together and how writing and singing this song for

Jack Skellington

ended up profoundly connecting to his own life, the sights, the sounds, they're everywhere and all around.

Danny Elfman

02:44

I've never felt so good before, this empty place inside of me is filling up, I simply cannot get enough, I want it, oh, I want it, oh, I want it for my own, I've got to know, I've got to know. What is this place that I have found? What is this?

03:01

My name is,

Danny Elfman

Tim Burton

just called me one day, and he said,

Disney

came across this story idea. I had years and years and years ago when I was working there, and it never got made, and it got stashed away and somebody found it and said, oh, hey look, we've got this

Tim Burton

thing.

03:22

By the time

Tim

called me about

Nightmare Before Christmas

, we'd already done five movies together, we've done the two

Batman

movies, we did

Pee-wee's Big Adventure

Beetlejuice

and

Edward Scissorhands

. So we already knew each other fairly well. He would present me with these universes that he was creating, and they all just seemed completely normal to me.

03:43

You know, we kind of came from similar backgrounds, I grew up on monsters and science fiction fantasy as

Tim

did in the same era. So his world didn't ever seem that weird to me. And I guess that's why it worked out, so it's not like I'd ever go, "oh my God, this is weird, what am I gonna do? This is like what? I don't get". It was for me, it was just like "yeah, I totally get it".

04:12

Tim

came over the house, and it was really as simple as this, he sat down, and he pulled out these wonderful drawings that he did. And as soon as I saw what

Jack

looked like, said, oh yeah, right, this makes perfect sense to me, let's just do it. And then he would start telling me the story.

04:37

The way we did the whole musical was I would say, "just tell me the story as if you were telling it to like, you know, some nephew or niece around the fire, or you know, at night, and just tell me a little bit at a time".

04:50

And he said, "okay,

Jack

wanders into the forest and there's three doors, and he's mystified". And I'm picturing this, and he said, "he's going to open the door, and he gets sucked in when he pops out, he's in this snowy world, there's snowflakes falling, and he's seeing things he's never seen before, everything's new to him". And I would kind of write down little notes, and I'd say, "okay, I got it, I got it, go, go, go". And I would kind of shoo him out the door.

05:17

The first things we hear our strings since the last and since I'm doing kind of a classic arrangement here, harp seemed like a natural. And it's

Jack

arriving in Christmas Town and seeing it for the first time, so, before the song starts, it's really a score.

05:42

I often write for chillest and I often write for voices and I think probably just goes back to

Tchaikovsky

, the use of chillest in the

Tchaikovsky's

Ballets. So I talked with

Tim

, he'd give me some ideas. I'd grab a steno pad, and I'd start writing down lyrics. And as I'm writing down lyrics, I'm hearing the cadence, and I'm going, okay, I'm starting to feel this as it, you know, kind of a quick tempo, he's all excited. So, I would just start with just going pa-pa-pa-pa-pa.

06:22

At that time, I didn't even have a studio. I was living at my girlfriend's house in

Burbank

and I set up a makeshift studio in her garage. I'd have like a four or five or six samplers and one would be loaded up with string samples, one with woodwind samples, grass samples, percussion samples. Now that many years ago the orchestral demos were pretty cheesy sounding.

06:49

So we got our French horns played their little fanfare and again, that's

Tchaikovsky-esque

. And now it's score, and it's just kind of creating an energetic vibe for all the things

Jack

is saying.

07:12

I really wanted it to sound timeless but not, self-consciously, timeless. Like I'm not trying to recreate an old style that somebody would go, oh, that's an old style song of such and such, but to feel like it could be any time or place. I mean the only thing consciously, I thought about a little bit when I was doing what's this was

Gilbert and Sullivan

, "I am the very model of a modern major, general... animal and mineral". That very kind of a tongue twister type of the thing.

07:42

So I thought it would be fun if

Jack

was... was like, "what's this? What's this? There's color everywhere. What's this? There's white things in the air. What's this? " And it's like, okay, I'm getting the cadence of it, and I'm blocking it out with some basic chords and by the end of a couple of days I'd have a demo,

Tim

would come by, and he'd listen, and he'd go, "oh yeah, okay, cool". What's this? What's this? There's color everywhere. What's this? There's white things in the air. What's this? I can't believe my eyes, I must be dreaming, wake up, Jack, this isn't fair. What's this?

08:17

So I did my vocals to the demo and those were just really funky because you know, I was just using a Radioshack microphone in my garage when I first laid them down. And then what I did is I took all the instrumental tracks, and we went into a studio was just

Tim

and I late at night and I got in front of a real microphone and did all of

Jack's

vocals and all the other vocals. And we recorded all the songs for the whole movie in one night.

08:46

What's this? What's this? There's color everywhere. What's this? There's white things in the air. What's this? I can't believe my eyes, I must be dreaming. Wake up,

Jack

, this isn't fair. What's this?

08:56

Jack's

voice is kind of theatrical, it's more theatrical than my voice is going to be if I'm just singing one of my own songs. His voice like dips down into this part and then back up again, it is a little bit of talk singing. What's this? What's this? There's something very wrong. What's this? There's people singing songs. What's this? The streets are lined with little creatures laughing, everybody seems so happy. Have I possibly gone daffy? What is this?

09:23

By the time I did those demos, I hadn't written them for myself, but I had, in the process of writing those 10 songs, became so attached to

Jack

that I didn't know how to bring it up, afterwards I was kind of hemming and hauling about it. And I was going, "uh,

Tim

about

Jack"

, and he goes, "yeah, don't worry, you'll you'll sing

Jack"

. I was like, because if not, if he said no, no, no, we have to hire a professional singer. I would have gone, "okay, all right". But you know, all kinds of mysterious accidents would have happened.

10:02

And they finally come back to me go

"Danny

, I mean, we've just had the most incredible bad luck of threes. Three singers all got killed in the most mysterious ways. Would you mind doing it? " And I go, "well, if you really want, I suppose I could, not a problem". The demo sounds cheesy, but all this is going to get replaced with the orchestra is going to sound wonderful.

10:38

But there's a lot of detail that goes between my finished demo and getting it on paper when I got

Pee-wee's Big Adventure

. I've never done a score before, and I was like, "I don't know what the f- I'm doing, I need a orchestrator to work with me and I didn't know any orchestrators". So I turned to

Steve

my guitarist in the band

Oingo Boingo

and I go, "have you ever orchestrated? " He goes, "I took a class at

UCLA"

. And I go, "that's good enough".

11:04

So it was

Tim Burton's

first feature, my first time composing an orchestral film score and my guitarist, first time being the orchestrator, he's still working with me now by the way. So we've done I think 100 and five films together.

11:20

But what I learned working with

Steve

is that he doesn't reinterpret the music. He just gets it to express itself as best it could be on paper for the orchestra to play. So if I have a bunch of woodwinds going, like that, you know, it's like he'll take the time to write down, okay, is four, it's actually three different instruments, and they actually go.

11:43

The orchestra is amazing, there's nothing I can write that the orchestra can't play. It blows my mind even after 37 years, I write some really big long pieces for films and the first rehearsal that they do, never having seen it before is already insanely good. And they're sight-reading because they don't take this music home and study it, they just walk in there and play it.

12:11

This take 20. Three, four five.

Danny Elfman

12:41

I really felt a strong kinship to the character of

Jack

, because I was at a place right at that point in my life with my band

Oingo Boingo

, were really starting around 1990, I wanted to leave the band and every year I kept saying, "you know, I think this is our last year, I think this is our last year", and they were like, "Oh, you know, it can't happen, can't happen".

13:06

And I felt really bad and so that feeling of guilt really kept me going for at least another five years, which, you know, I don't regret, but I felt for

Jack

who's this character, that was really the king of his own world, but wanted out, he wanted something else because that's exactly how I felt at that moment.

13:24

You know when you're a songwriter singer in a band, you know, that's your universe, you've created that universe, and you're kind of the center of that universe, and that's exactly what

Jack

was in Halloween Land and like

Jack

, I was looking for a door, I was really looking for a door to take me into another world.

Speaker 4

13:46

The monsters are all missing and the nightmares can be found and in their place there seems to be good feeling all around, instead of screams, I swear I can hear music in the air, the smell of cakes and pies are absolutely everywhere.

Danny Elfman

14:02

I poured a lot of myself into

Nightmare Before Christmas

and when it came out, it was really, really misunderstood, nobody got it, and I was really kind of heartbroken, it wasn't a flop, but it was far from a hit. I mean, I had to do like 100 short interviews and every one of them asked the same thing, "so this is too scary for kids, right? " I go, "no, it's not too scary for kids".

14:26

It was just this thing, that was the perception of it, It's not for kids, kids hate it. But my daughter Molly, she was around 10 because I remember she listened to all the songs as I was writing them and so when people kept saying "oh, kids are gonna hate these", I said "no, my 10-year-old daughter has heard them all and really loves them" and it was one of these incredibly lucky things of a movie that took on a life after it came out which is so rare.

14:56

I think if I was going to have any one piece that gets to have a second life on its own, what's it going to be? And I would say

Nightmare Before Christmas

because you know every other film, I've done, I've only worked on it for three months and here I've worked on this film for close to two years, and so I felt really, really lucky when years afterwards I saw that it hasn't gone away, in fact it's kind of growing.

15:21

I mean the idea that I created any kind of iconic

Christmas

sound is ironic in the extreme for me because I am a creature of

Halloween

in every way, shape or form, you know

Halloween

is the night I looked forward to, and

Christmas

was just like this, put my head under the pillow and cry, you know, it was just like I want this to be over.

15:49

I grew up as a lonely Jewish kid growing up in a neighborhood that there were, I had no Jewish friends. So Christmastime every year I was by myself and lonely and just wishing it would be over, so I can get back to my life again.

16:05

And so my appreciation of

Christmas

, I'm a late comer to it because then I had my two daughters and I started getting into it for the first time in my life through them. And so I developed this kind of real excitement about, oh making a perfect

Christmas

, having a

Christmas

party, getting the presents just right. All for the pleasure of seeing their faces in the morning. So at the point when I did

Nightmare Before Christmas

I was in the transition of like starting to think positively instead of like a dark cloud of depression rolling my way.

16:47

The just pure anticipation of having this night before

Christmas

and the anticipation of what's going to happen and then the presence in the morning, it's really wonderful.

Hrishikesh Hirway

17:05

And now from

The Nightmare Before Christmas

, here's what's this by

Danny Elfman

in its entirety.

19:21

To learn more, visit songexploder. net. You'll find links to stream or download this track, and you can watch a trailer for the movie.

Break

Hrishikesh Hirway

21:31

And that wraps up this year, the eighth year of Song Exploder. Thanks so much to all the artists who shared their stories and music with me this year and thanks so much to you for listening, we'll be back in January. This episode and the show's theme music were made by me editing help from Craig Healy and Casey deal artwork by Carlos Lerma. Music clearance by Kathleen Smith and production assistance from Chloe Parker. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. A network of independent listener supported artist owned podcasts. You can learn more about all our shows at radiotopia. fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @hrishikeshhirway and you can follow the show at song exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder. net/shirt. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. Thanks for listening and have a Happy New Year. Radiotopia from PRX.

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