‘Yellowjackets’ Composers on Crafting Their Haunting Score: “It Was a Nightmare in the Dreamiest Way”

For Showtime’s Yellowjackets, composers Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker were tasked with creating the thriller series’ brooding score, which heightens the tension for the show’s gnarlier sequences in which a team of high school soccer players struggle to survive in the wilderness after their plane crashes en route to a national tournament in 1996. Wedren and Waronker, respectively the lead singers of ’90s rock bands Shudder to Think and That Dog, also returned to their alt-rock roots to record the show’s theme song, a ’90s pastiche that channels the emotional furies that the survivors — now grown women in the present day — struggle with as they work through the traumas of their adolescence. The pair spoke to THR about their excitement for the project and the joy of experimenting with new — and old — sounds.

How did you come on board to score Yellowjackets, and what were you most excited about?

CRAIG WEDREN [Executive producer] Karyn Kusama got in touch and sent me the pilot. I was pulled in two different directions, because you can’t tell from the pilot what the hell this show is going to be — the total hornet’s nest of mayhem and mindfuckery. My first thought was that Anna and I needed to do this together. We had been talking about doing something dark and bloody and weird.

ANNA WARONKER We needed to freak out. And everyone was encouraging us to get even freakier. We kept waiting for that other shoe to drop, and it was the opposite. They were like, “Um, can you make it weirder? Can you add weird to that?”

WEDREN It really was a dream. It was a nightmare in the dreamiest way.

How did you approach horror differently than your previous collaborations?

WEDREN Anna and I do a lot of comedy, and comedy and horror are very similar. There’s something similarly rhythmic about it. Americans dread silence, so you want to play the trick of ratcheting up that discomfort that we feel in silence with music.

WARONKER As the episodes progressed, we would get assigned [longer] sequences. We got to really explore some weird stuff. Here’s a funny story: We sent the producers [an unfinished track].

WEDREN We just had a technical issue, probably late at night. We were like, “Oh my God, let’s just get this out there.” It was missing half the track, and it was already pretty —

WARONKER Very weird. Like, breaths. Just the weirdest stuff. And they gave it so much thought. They gave us these like really caring notes, and we were like — wait a second.

WEDREN [They said], “There’s a real point of view.”

WARONKER First of all, we totally appreciated it, but we also thought it was hilarious. It opened up the field: “If they’re willing to accept that?”

The show is set in the ’90s and the present day. How did you balance the two eras in your score?

WARONKER We both started playing music in the very early ’90s. It was pretty easy for us to marry the two time periods, but also to jump back and forth, like when we’re with the girls in the woods. There’s a different headspace going on. When we’re in current day with the grown women, we made it a little more contemporary, but there’s always a ’90s element because they’re still the same people. It’s also our aesthetic, and we were encouraged to wring that part out. Craig and I were never in a band together — our bands were always crossing paths. When we [score TV] shows together, we treat it like our band’s new record. We have a very band-like chemistry, and so we get to try out a lot of new ideas.

WEDREN Somehow the score was able to time-travel, to occupy the strange, haunted time in between. We’re both parents to teenage boys, and we’re constantly time-traveling. Our kids remind us of what we were like then, because they’re listening to the ’90s indie rock that’s popular right now with teenagers. Being at our age, and parents, already feels kind of psychedelic.

What was the process behind writing the theme song, “No Return”?

WARONKER First of all, we love a good theme song for a TV show.

WEDREN We’re Gen Xers, we grew up in the golden age of the TV theme song.

WARONKER When the producers said they wanted to do a longform main-title theme, we were so excited because we knew the visuals were going to be really cool. But it started out that they wanted a song at the end of each episode.

WEDREN Something that bridged the ’90s needle drops with the score.

WARONKER We recorded many versions, and they chose one that ends most of the episodes. When they [decided they wanted] a theme song, we reapproached those end-credit songs. We loved them all, and we took elements of each. Writing the lyrics was effortless for us. It was just us getting to play [and find out] what we would do if we got to put our musical personalities together.

WEDREN There are parts of our musical DNA that we would not have allowed ourselves to indulge in our bands. There’s a pride in originality and uniqueness. Speaking for myself anyway, I would not have let myself indulge in Nirvana guitar riffs like in “No Return.” For this I was like, “Turn up the My Bloody Valentine!”

Have your individual music styles changed since you were in your bands in the ’90s? Was this a fun exercise to reimagine your old sound in a contemporary way?

WEDREN It was an invitation to call upon our [musical] DNA. It doesn’t require a ton of thought — it requires a lot of experimentation. Both of us were in touring bands, as opposed to composing for film and TV, where you write something and you record it at the same time and then you’re on to the next project. When you’re in a band, there’s so much muscle memory and repetition. It’s quite natural and reflexive, so it doesn’t feel nostalgic. It feels more unconscious.

WARONKER There’s a level of experimentation that we brought to this project, because it’s horror and it’s scary and you can go anywhere with it. We were able to marry these different parts of our musical backgrounds together and have it within the framework of our little band.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in the June 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.