Composer George Shaw talks Stan Lee, Marvel soundtracks, and John Williams [Exclusive Interview]

George Shaw is a geek, and he couldn't be less ashamed of it. The classically trained composer from Los Angeles has worked on films, TV shows, videos games, and YouTube videos that have racked up 150 million views collectively, many of which allow him to express his passion for all things nerdy and for all the great movie scores he grew up on. His latest project was a collaboration with one of his personal heroes, Marvel legend Stan Lee.

In Ode to Geeks, Shaw composed a love letter to fandom, asking viewers to send in videos of themselves singing along. Those videos would be put together into a “virtual choir," with lyrics written by Stan Lee himself. Shaw’s final song is now available to watch on YouTube. He has also worked on some pop culture mashups like the Star Wars Musical, which combines Star Wars music with classic Disney songs, as well as the Netflix Musical, a parody featuring songs from Frozen.

Shaw sat down with us to discuss working with Stan Lee, geekdom, movie scores, and his plans for a sequel to the Star Wars: Musical.

The Celebrity Cafe: So I wanted to talk a bit about Ode to Geeks. How did this project come about and how did you get involved in working with Stan Lee?

George Shaw: I was the music director at the Geekie Awards. It was actually the very first one - it happened in 2013 - and Stan was receiving the lifetime achievement award that year. I happened to actually get to meet him very briefly backstage, which was really exciting to meet one of my heroes because I grew up reading his Spider-Man comics. So he went on stage to receive his award, and he wrote this Ode to Geeks…he wrote the lyrics set to the tune of Yankee Doodle, and he actually sang it there at the award ceremony. And I was sitting there thinking ‘oh my gosh, I’ve got to write an original tune for this.’ Because Yankee Doodle’s great, but to have something rousing to celebrate how awesome it is to be a geek…so that planted the seed right there almost two years ago.

TCC: You were talking about how Stan wrote the song to the tune of Yankee Doodle. You’ve done a lot of original work, so what was the experience like coming up with new music for lyrics that were originally built around another tune? Was that a different creative process?

GS: The first thing for me was to just completely forget about Yankee Doodle and just focus on the words themselves, what they mean, and the feeling they’re trying to evoke in the audience. So I sat at the piano just with a sheet of paper with the words on it, and I tried to imagine how I’d sing it if I were to just make something up. Fortunately, what came out was a very rousing anthem that I felt would give a sense of excitement and celebration for geekdom.

TCC: About how many submissions did you get, and what was that process like of going through all of them and selecting?

GS: So my idea to do this virtual choir was inspired by another composer’s videos…he’s a very well known choral composer named Eric Whitacre, and he’s had videos where thousands of singers will submit, and they arrange them into a YouTube choir video. So I thought ‘Hey, that’d be really great,’ and Stan Lee has this YouTube Channel, World of Heroes. They were very supportive of us and we used that platform to reach out to his fans, and we got between 30 and 40 submissions. Even that number was a lot of work to actually put together and to make everything blended and sound like a real choir, so I don’t know how Eric handles the thousands of people. But we were just so happy to see the fans get excited about being a part of this, and I’m very glad they did.

TCC: From when the videos started coming in, about how long did it take to put them all together?

GS: We actually spent several months on it. Part of it was just working between other projects I had going on. For me, I had to download all the videos, strip out the audio, bring them into my music software, do all the editing and mixing and all that stuff. On the other hand, we had a great video artist named Patrick Williams from the U.K, and he did all the animation. I basically told him ‘I want something that evokes the look of comic panels.’ And that was it, and he just kind of came up with this cool concept of the camera flying through a metropolis, and we see the faces of all our singers fly through in comic style panels. He did an amazing job, and really that’s what took a long time. He said he ideally would have had a room full of computers to render that work, but he had to do it on his home computer.

TCC: What is the geekiest thing about yourself? What makes you a geek?

GS: Oh my gosh. I pretty much grew up in the '80s and '90s loving all the comic books and Saturday morning cartoons, a lot of the sci-fi and action/adventure/fantasy movies of Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis and so on. But I think…growing up, I wasn’t as open about being a geek, and in a way it wasn’t as accepted. With the rise of the Internet, it’s brought people together who realize 'hey, we love the same stuff,’ and that’s what’s amazing about the age that we live in now.

So between my love for music, and film music, and movies, I actually wrote and produced my very own fan film I released last year that’s called Star Wars: The Musical. It’s sort of a parody of if Disney actually made Star Wars into a musical, so I took A New Hope and created a six minute version of that as a musical…actually mashing up Star Wars music and Disney songs. Very well known stuff from Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and all that. I had so much fun doing that…that’s probably the geekiest thing I’ve ever done.

TCC: Yeah I actually wanted to ask about that. We were talking about taking lyrics that already exist and making a song around them, but you’ve also done the opposite which is taking really famous songs and giving them new lyrics. Is your creative process different as you’re approaching these songs we all know as opposed to when you’re doing something original?

GS: Well, I’m actually a terrible lyricist, so I think that kind of helps. The way I grew up was I wasn’t a big fan of songs early on aside from Disney stuff. I was very into instrumental music. I grew up playing piano and clarinet, and I sort of ignored this whole different facet of music that involved lyrics for a while. Even now when I listen to music, the melody is what catches my ear first. I think that’s why my ignorance of lyrics kind of helps. When I hear lyrics, I often hear the wrong thing, or if I don’t know lyrics, I just kind of make stuff up. [laughs] I think that’s why I was able to do this…to just not be completely tied to the lyrics. In fact when I hear some of these Disney songs now, I kind of forget the lyrics. I hear my own lyrics now, so it kind of messed me up a bit. [laughs]

TCC: What were some of your early influences in terms of composers of movie music?

GS: I can actually remember the first few soundtrack albums I had. They were Jurassic Park…I got a cassette tape of that for a birthday and then eventually got a CD. Then I bought the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack, so Alan Menken was a very early influence on me with all his amazing Disney animated musicals. Because of John Williams, I really got into Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, and then when I realized ‘hey, that’s the same composer’ — and we were playing this stuff in middle school band — I just fell in love with the tunes. I immediately went out and bought a John Williams Boston Pops CD because it had Indiana Jones and E.T on it, and I had amazingly good memory of those tunes from seeing those movies as a child. That’s what really drew me into film music.

I actually remember recording the end credit music from Back to the Future onto a cassette tape off a VHS, so I had very good memory of how that melody caught my attention long before I even started studying music. Another thing I remember is having a tape of Disney songs from cartoons and things. So as you can see, very early on, Disney and John Williams were a huge influence on me.

TCC: I saw an interview with you where you were mentioning that in movie soundtracks today, the melodies aren’t as distinct…it’s not really something you can hum as you’re leaving the theater. That’s something I really like about your work is that it has very distinct melodies. So do you feel like modern film soundtracks aren’t as memorable in terms of themes you can hum?

GS: Absolutely. I grew up and loved to collect soundtracks, and I just don’t hear those kind of themes as often anymore, except when you’re remaking movies like Star Wars and Mission: Impossible. Obviously those will have the recognizable tune, and I hope they do. But I think what really had an impact on me was the fact that while I collected soundtracks, I didn’t necessarily always listen to all the background music…all the moments of tension and fear and drama and suspense. What really drew me was the melodies. So a lot of film music CDs that I bought were actually Boston Pops and the Cincinnati Pops where they’d do the main title theme from all these amazing movies.

I think that fascination with melody not only drew me into music and into composing, but even now, it’s hard for me to write a movie without a melody. There are times a director will tell me ’no melody here,’ and I’ll have to go ‘oh, dang it.’ [Laughs] You know, I obviously have training and the craft to write non melodic music, but my first love is always melody, and I don’t think I could ever not write melodies. So any chance I get, I try to find a place and a way to fit in melodies, whether it needs to be in your face or whether it needs to be more subtle. And that’s really not an easy task, but I can see how on the bigger movies, with all the politics between studios and filmmakers and all the people who have to approve what a composer writes…and on top of that, the very short schedules they’re getting…that might be one of the reasons we’re hearing less and less melodies in these big movies. It’s kind of a shame.

TCC: What’s that balance of wanting to have a melody that the audience really remembers, but also not wanting to be too repetitive?

GS: Honestly, I don’t think you can overdo it. I mean, when you look at a movie, you kind of have a structure in place…it’s like a blueprint of where all the dramatic things happen. So I haven’t really come to a project where there were so many places where I had to have the same melody. And as a composer, you learn to write variations on melodies, you learn to write secondary melodies…and yeah, you don’t want to just write one melody and keep replaying it over and over, but you can also vary the way it’s orchestrated.

John Williams is a master of this. A great example is Darth Vader’s theme: The Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a very dark, old, militaristic march, but particularly if you look at Anakin’s theme from The Phantom Menace, the way he just slightly hints at that theme in the very last notes is just sort of brilliant. And that’s a perfect example of how you can take a theme but repurpose it so it’s not always completely familiar….There’s also ways to have a theme playing where you might not even notice it’s playing. I’ve been listening to this amazing podcast called Star Wars Oxygen where they analyze the music of Star Wars, and I’ve been learning there are all these places where there’s melodies happening that I never noticed. Because when you’re watching the movie you are so into it, you’re so wrapped up in the action, and then there’s dialogue and sound effects. So hearing every note of the music isn’t always possible, particularly the way movies are mixed very loud these days. But as a composer, I don’t really worry about too much melody. If you can fit it in, it makes a good listen on the soundtrack. That’s the way I see it, because you’re not always going to hear it in the movie.

TCC: While we’re on Star Wars, you mentioned The Imperial March…are there any other tracks that stuck with you, and maybe that you’re hoping to see again in the new movie?

GS: I’m absolutely certain we’ll hear the force theme, and obviously the main theme will most likely appear in the main titles. There’s so many good themes in Star Wars…but I’m mostly excited to hear the new stuff, because every Star Wars movie has had some iconic theme. That’s what I’m excited about.

TCC: We've been talking about John Williams a lot, but are there any lesser known composers that people should keep an eye out for? Who’s really doing interesting things who maybe isn’t getting as much attention?

GS: Absolutely. Christopher Tin, who has actually won a few Grammys for his choral music, particularly the one that’s well known is Baba Yetu from Civilization IV. That theme is phenomenal…I love his music. There’s also another composer named Wataru Hokoyama. Primarily he’s known as a video game composer, and he’s done some fantastic stuff as well. Sort of the more well known guys that I really like are Bryan Tyler and Michael Giacchino, and I’m sure anyone who’s a soundtrack fan will know their work.

TCC: Now that you mentioned Giacchino, we were talking about the Jurassic Park soundtrack and how that was a big influence. Did you get a chance to see Jurassic World, and what did you think of that soundtrack and Giacchino's updated version?

GS: I did see it and really enjoyed the movie. Yeah, I loved those moments when it harkens back to some of the John Williams themes. I really appreciated as a fan that they included that. I mean, Michael Giacchino did some wonderful work, but in a way it’s really some of the John Williams stuff that stands out in that score.

TCC: This summer you worked on a short film called Single By 30, which you scored in just five days. Was it difficult to produce something that quickly?

GS: That video was done by a group on YouTube called Wong Fu Productions and…we’ve been working together since 2007, so about seven, eight years almost. Fortunately, we’ve worked enough together they that trust what I can do, and they don’t give me too many notes unless they really feel something’s important or that there’s something I’m not getting. So I was able to sit down and knock out the music pretty fast, and I knew it was coming up and that they were editing it, so what was interesting was that I created my own instrument. I wanted to do something unique, and I was able to borrow a cello from a friend, and I wanted to create something new sounding with it. I was trying all kinds of things like tapping the strings with various things, and I came across a drumstick that…I actually don’t know where I got it…but it has kind of a rubbery tip, and when I struck the strings with that, it sounded really cool. So I thought 'well, let me sample it,' so I went and recorded every single note, which took hours, and then spent a couple of days just editing all the sounds that we recorded so I could play every note on the keyboard. So I based the score on that sound and then used a lot of other keyboard sounds and some strings here and there. Yeah, fortunately it was a short film so it was manageable to do it in five days.

TCC: Is that an exciting feeling to sort of discover a new sound to work with? What was that like?

GS: Yeah, I didn’t even know quite what it would sound like, but yeah it was kind of cool to sort of load the sounds into my computer and then start tweaking them to create my own version. I absolutely love collecting instruments and trying different things. I write orchestral music, but I’ve got a whole group of ethnic and wind instruments particularly from China and Asia, and whenever I have the chance to break out some new toy, it’s always fun and exciting.

TCC: Going back to Star Wars: The Musical, are there any plans to return to that and maybe do something with Empire or Jedi?

GS: I’m actually planning to do a Kickstarter, which I’ll hopefully launch later this year, in the fall. We’re planning to do Empire Strikes Back, but only if we raise enough money to actually do it, because it was not easy the first time around. It took a year and eight months when you have no money and have to beg people to help you out. [laughs] So in order to do it again, we’ve got to raise some money. So if anyone is interested, go to StarWarsMusical.com or my website, which is GeorgeShawMusic.com, and just sign up for one of the newsletters and you can find out when all that is happening. I’m very excited to do it. Would you like to hear the opening lyric?

TCC: Sure!

GS: So we start off on Hoth, and it’ll be, ‘Do you want to ride a Tauntaun?’ [Sung to the tune of 'Do You Want To Build A Snowman?']

TCC: [laughs] That’s great.

GS: So there you go, that’s the opening song for The Empire Strikes Back.

TCC: So one other thing I wanted to ask, is there a dream movie or franchise you’d love to write the music for? Would it be Star Wars, or is there another one you’d imagine yourself writing the score to one day?

GS: Actually you already named it, but there are three things I hope to do in my life. I’d like to do a Star Wars project…it doesn’t necessarily have to be a movie, but maybe a video game or TV show. The other would be a Marvel project, and then thirdly I would love to write a Disney animated musical. And of course they’re all owned by Disney, so I guess my hope is just to work for Disney some day. [laughs]

TCC: With Marvel, is there a character you could see yourself doing the theme for?

GS: You know, I never thought of a specific character, but I think my favorite Marvel characters are actually the X-Men, so that would be a great project to do. Although John Ottman already wrote such an incredible theme for X2 that I don’t know if I could outdo that, so maybe it’d be better to do something new.

TCC: While we’re on Marvel, what are you feelings on some of the Marvel scores in the cinematic universe, like the work of Bryan Tyler and Tyler Bates? Are you a fan of those?

GS: Oh absolutely. I actually got to meet both Bryan Tyler and Tyler Bates at Comic-Con a couple of months ago and that was really exciting. Yeah, I love the tunes…particularly my favorite would be Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy. I also love the Marvel Studios fanfare that Bryan Tyler wrote that you see at the beginning of almost every Marvel movie. Those are amazing. And yeah, those are some of the most memorable of all the Marvel scores.

TCC: Besides the Empire Kickstarter, do you have any projects coming up that people should keep a lookout for?

GS: Absolutely I’ve got a couple of fan films I’m working on. The first one is called Star Trek Wars, and it’s a mashup of Star Wars and Star Trek, and sort of there’s a story about George Lucas and J.J. Abrams in a battle. For that I’m just writing the music for the trailer, but when the trailer comes out, you’ll hear the influence of both Star Wars and Star Trek in the music, so I’m really excited to be doing that.

I’m also doing an Indiana Jones fan film called Treasure of the Templars. It’s a feature length project that’s been ten years in the making. So when you talk about passion in fan films, it hasn’t died. The original idea was ‘oh, we’ll probably never see an Indiana Jones 4, so let’s go make one.’ And of course in the meantime, Spielberg actually made Indiana Jones 4. We’re still trying to make ours, and we’re hoping to finish it later this year or early next year and have it online for the fans to see. So for that I’m also planning to crowd fund a little bit of money just to record some orchestral elements. I’ve actually been working on it for eight years, and I’ve recorded bits and pieces over the years whenever there’s an extra 10-15 minutes at the end of a session for other projects. I just want to record the rest of it so it’s all nicely presented on a soundtrack.

TCC: Is there anything else you’d like to mention before we wrap up?

GS: Yeah, for anyone who’s interested in hearing more of my music and checking out other projects I’ve got going on, just visit GeorgeShawMusic.com.

TC: Thanks so much for talking to us.

GS: Great, thank you.

photo via George Shaw Music

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