Disney Channel's Primos is an animated comedy series about a large Mexican-American family living in the Los Angeles suburb of Hacienda Hills. The show is told through the diary of nine-year-old Tater Ramírez-Humphrey, who finds out that her 12 cousins will be spending the summer with her - greatly interfering with her alone time.
Jim Lang (pictured) served as composer on the show and created the end credit song too. Primos spans 28 episodes, and Lang says he got involved as far back as 2020, when show creator Natasha Kline mentioned that she was working on an animated series based on her own family, growing up in Southern California in the 1990s.
"In our early conversations about the music, she gave me a sort of blue-sky playlist of influences, which included an awesome mix of musical styles, among them ‘90s rock, classic Mexican corridos from the ‘40s and ‘50s, and the score from Amelie, which she loves," recalls Lang. "The musical diary I wrote based on that conversation yielded about 10 sketches, and quite a bit of that music eventually made its way into the score. That initial experience of writing music for a show that only exists in my imagination – free from the constraints of pesky things like pacing and dialogue – is always exhilarating, and Natasha’s enthusiasm for the results was inspiring."
Lang stayed in close communication with Kline throughout the process of making the early episodes. By the time it went into production, they had a pilot and an animation test complete, so there were a lot of opportunities to try out musical ideas to see if they worked with picture.
"The first half hour always does a lot of heavy lifting in any series, and Primos was a prime example, having to introduce not only Tater, the main character, but also her parents, grandparents, siblings, and, oh yeah – her 12 cousins," he shares. "So, in making that first half hour, we made a lot of revisions and tweaks before the final mix."
Things got a bit easier following the animation tests, pilot and first half hour.
"There was thematic material to go on, and certain characters and visual conventions were making sense," he explains. "That said, I still ask a lot of questions and get a lot of schooling about references that I [missed]."
Lang was in touch with sound effects editor Nicole Fletcher, making sure their work didn't step on each other’s.
"I’ll get the occasional call from Eric Freeman, who is our mixer," he adds. "There are always times when something isn’t working just right on the stage, and since I’m in Northern California, instead of hanging out on the stage, eating Red Vines, I’m usually at my computer and able to send off a quick fix on-demand."
Primos covers a lot of musical territory, notes Lang. The editing and the dialogue are fast-paced, and the music is just as kinetic.
"Fortunately, the editor, Andrew Sorcini, is a terrific music cutter, and I use the temp score like detailed spotting notes," shares Lang. "It's great to have a road map to the many different genres and musical Easter eggs in the show. There are nods to horror movies (Saw, The Exorcist), anime (
Death Note), classic Mexican kids’ TV (
El Chavo de Ocho), lots of ‘Pasito Duranguense’ rips, and much, much more."
But beside those references, Lang also wanted Primos to have its own musical voice - something that would catch the warmth of Tater’s family.
"It's hard to describe what that is, but what it ‘is not’ is an overtly 'south-of-the-border' sound," he explains. "It's more akin to what I get when I close my eyes and channel the feel of my old neighborhood in Echo Park back in the late ‘80s."
In the episodes that focus on the characters’ struggles with language, culture and tradition, Lang's friend Jesus Martinez contributed a number of beautiful compositions and requinto performances.
"It is some of my favorite music in the series," he shares.
The show's music schedule typically allowed a couple of weeks from the spotting session to the music preview, and then a couple of weeks after that before the music was to be delivered.
"I write 11 minutes of music a week for two weeks, and then I have a couple of weeks to address notes and make the final mix," says Lang. "As schedules go, Primos is pretty relaxed. Natasha gives great notes — not too many — and concise, so I have a pretty easy time of it."
Some of Lang's challenges included matching the score to picture, where the animated characters were playing certain instruments.
"Making a score that sounds and looks natural with the animation can be a challenge," he reveals. "It becomes easier when I can write music and give it to the animators to animate to, but that is often impossible or impractical."
Tater’s cousin Lita, for example, is an aspiring rock guitarist, who plays on-screen quite a bit in several episodes. Her genre of choice is Flamenco Death Metal!
"A few years back, Craig Bartlett of Hey Arnold! fame introduced me to Brendon Small, the creator and composer of
Metalocalypse, an Adult Swim series that follows the fictional Scandinavian metal band Deathklok," he shares. "Brendon is a serious shredder and word has it he insists that the guitar playing on his show is animated accurately enough that other guitar players can learn to play the licks by watching the fingering. I was lucky enough to get him to make a couple of raging FDM tracks for Lita. He also gave me a selection of licks that came to be known as the ‘Stupid Pet Tricks’ that I sprinkled throughout the series."
Lang has been employing an instrument plug-in for a couple of years now that uses acoustic modeling instead of digital sampling to recreate the sounds of solo instruments.
"I really love how playable these instruments are – much more expressive and flexible than samples," he shares. "They were really useful for the trumpets and tubas that are such an important part of Norteño music. Violin, cello, French horn and bass clarinet also make it into the mix."
He points to a beat in the first half hour of Primos, where Tater crawls through a heating duct to spy on her cousins.
"In the cue I wrote for that, I used a clavinet with an envelope follower to make that familiar funk-wah clavinet sound. I kept the release time on the filter super short to make it sound as dorky as possible. Natasha cracked up when she heard it, and what we ended up calling 'the farty clav' became a signature accompaniment to Tater’s many moments of inept scheming throughout the series."
Hey Arnold! was Lang's first experience scoring animation.
"All of the ins and outs of the animation process were new to me. The songwriting element that happens very early on, working with voice talent, Foley-ing animated musicians, writing music that is super tight to picture, and the arranging chops that it takes to keep up with the writers’ and animators’ references to classic animation, movies and TV – all of that had to be picked up on the fly. It was a 100-episode animation composing boot camp."
The show also marked his first experience scoring a series and discovering the use of thematic material to glue a show together.
"I also discovered the delight that goes with building a musical team whose voices light up the show episode after episode," he adds. "On Hey Arnold!, we had the very best. As budgets dry up and technology evolves, less of that goes on, and I always love the chance to get in the studio and away from my writing rig."
Lang also scored the new PBS Kids series Weather Hunters, produced by famed weatherman Al Roker.
"I’m still in the process of scoring Weather Hunters, which premieres on July 7th," he shares. "In contrast to the crazy energy of
Primos, Weather Hunters tells its story at a more relaxed pace and the score is much more cinematic, with some lively West African flavor thrown in. Al Roker is great as TV weatherman Al Hunter, who is a relentless teller of dad-jokes. Eight-year-old Lily Hunter and her older sister, younger brother and mom explore meteorology and Earth science, making observations and creating their own weather reports as they go. It is the kind of STEM show that PBS Kids does like no one else."