Season 3 of the Showtime series Yellowjackets began streaming in February. The show centers around a team of talented high school girl soccer players who survive of a plane crash deep in the remote northern wilderness. The show is equal parts survival epic, psychological horror story and coming-of-age drama, and in Season 3, the team has made it through the brutal winter, but is now facing distrust in leadership and other tensions that could jeopardize their rescue chances.
The show’s stars include Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, Lauren Ambrose, Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Samantha Hanratty, among others, with Hilary Swank guest starring too. Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker (pictured) have been the composers and songwriters on the show for all three seasons.
“Score-wise, the sweet spot for Yellowjackets is to balance destabilizing horror with transcendent beauty,” note the duo. “The show navigates hair-pin curves in terms of tone, storytelling and relationships, so we think a lot about when and where we want to help slow things down so that the audience really zeroes in on a particular plot point, and when we want to move things along, particularly when there’s action, or a hunt.”
Theodore Shapiro scored the show’s pilot, with Caroline Shaw handling main vocal duties.
“Once we got a sense where the story was going - in particular that it was like a poison piñada, or a bomb that explodes in every direction - we knew we needed to follow its lead and go wild, sonically,” Wedren and Waronker. “This was also the direction of our fearless producers ‘JAB’ (Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle, and Bart Nickerson) - to go as far out as possible and hopefully do something uncharted, which is a rare and precious mandate for a TV show.”
Wedren and Waronker were both singers themselves, with roots in ‘90s alternative/art rock, so they do most of the singing, in addition to the material that Shapiro recorded with Shaw.
“It all began blending together and mutating quite quickly and naturally, to the point that we have a hard time telling who’s who, vocally, and what sounds are coming from where.”
Gear-wise, the team use whatever’s at hand, passing around a microphone and making mouth noises, then treating it with various mangling effects, or leaving it pristine and raw if that’s what the scene calls for. For Season 3, they began incorporating modular synths to establish the sound of the forest floor, the cave, and menacing, psychedelic frog and tree sounds.
“Getting to make the music for Yellowjackets is truly a blast like no other,” they share. “We’re very grateful.”