The making of
This reimagining of The Wonder Years follows the Williams’ Family. The father figure (Bill Williams) this time around is a jazz/funk musician who teaches music at the collegiate level while also keeping his performance career alive with his own band.
Early on in our process Roahn & I decided it would be cool to try to score the entire series with what could be Bill’s actual band. Rather than switching to something like piano/strings for somber moments or plucky strings for comedic moments we wanted to keep the ensemble steady and explore what that could do.
Luckily it’s been working and we’ve continued to record the same musicians in New York (Brooklyn to be exact) ever since the Pandemic days when our first audition happened.
Release date
2021
Studio
ABC
Press Article
The Theme Song
Some time in the midst of scoring the first 5 or 6 episodes they were still debating about the new theme song. (Re-using the Joe Cocker one was apparently a non-starter as they really wanted this to be it’s own world)
We got a call from Burt Blacharach, the music supervisor, that he’d convinced the showrunners to give us a shot. The competition was stiff as they had gone out to some of the heaviest music icons you can name. So we went crazy throwing ideas together and called some of our favorite songwriter collaborators. We made tons of songs but the one that stuck out was actually the first one we finished.
It started as an instrumental piece I’d written specifically as some underscore. Roahn heard the band recording it and said, ‘Hey, let’s kick the tempo up 5-10 clicks and see if this could be the theme song!’ Easy enough to do so we tracked it and then started hashing out melody and lyric ideas with our great friend Scotty Grand.
A few weeks later (with several all-nighters mixed in) we had a final version and the backing of Saladin Patterson and Fred Savage. The first time we heard it on the show was life changing! Can’t say enough how grateful I am to be involved with this show.