Everything Everywhere All At Once wants you to experience every emotion you never knew that you had inside of you. It urges you to go into your past and try to look into your future at what could have been and what could possibly be. How does one score that kind of film? The Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert) elicited the help of the band Son Lux (comprised of members Ian Chang, Ryan Lott, and Rafiq Bhatia) for how they experiment with sound and the construction of instruments. I’ve never heard a score quite like the one for Everything Everywhere, and it taps into something beautiful, primal, and silly. It’s easily one of the best scores of the year.
Everything Everywhere is score from beginning to end (the soundtrack has 49 tracks). It never overwhelms the story or the arcs of the characters. As Evelyn hops around the multiverse, Son Lux is accompanying her journey–it never overshadows it. When speaking with Chang and Lott (Bhatia was out sick when we chatted), they revealed just how long they were working on this film.
“The amount is quite extreme, and it’s different than most movies out there,” Chang said. “There were about a hundred cues and roughly two hours of music, so it’s pretty much wall-to-wall. Ryan did the lion’s share of the score. It took us almost two years, but we were able to score to picture in the final year. It was a lot of late nights. It felt like there was no end in sight for a while, but when we got it done, it was very rewarding.”
“It felt like fate intervened,” Lott admitted, bringing up the pandemic. “Production was stopped a day shy of filming being completed, because it was March 2020. What transpired was a production schedule that had no horizon. Normally, when you are working on a score, you have your mix date and you work backwards from there. You can schedule something like three cues a week or ten a week. This was us staring down a growing list of cues, because there was no way that we were going to score this movie the way we wound up scoring it if everything hadn’t been shut down. This pause on everything allowed us to take a deep breath, expand, and let this become what it is now. The original idea was to do a lot of our original work–like Rafiq’s solo work or Ian’s solo stuff–since they knew music was going to be a huge component of it. Within Son Lux, the music goes many places all at once, but the film demanded, without exception, a bespoke approach. I think it’s better for it.”
One of the first cues that we hear is titled, “Wang Family Portrait,” a wistful, forgiving introduction to Evenlyn, Joy, and Waymond. It almost sounds like it is blooming as it plays with strings that accentuate the soft piano at the beginning. As it progresses, it builds to a section of darkness that signals what may lie ahead before retreating to a sense of melancholy.
“The trick with the opening cue was to immediately create a vibe that was quite sentimental and melancholy but also give you a strange feeling,” Lott explained. “The feeling of the music and the feeling of the picture feel disconnected on purpose which makes you wonder if something is under the hood. Something unexpected. It’s the smallest hint, because we don’t want to give anything away. The way the film is structured, you don’t feel that way for a while. Having this cue out of the gate was actually our idea, because, originally, we were going to hear what they were singing. We wanted to create an emotional foreshadowing. On the soundtrack, it’s extended, because we flicker into a fragment into a cue that reinforces the primary theme of the movie.”
“I always thought about that it was in the past,” Chang said. “Holy shit–I never thought about it. I thought it was an activity that the family loves doing together, and the original concept was that the family was singing Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl.’ It was going to appear again at the end.”
For the introduction of Jobu Tupaki, Son Lux knew they needed a sound unlike anything else in the movie. With the help of Nina Moffatt, the music is strange, and it makes the hairs on the back of beck stand straight up. You can feel like something isn’t right, but you can’t quite understand why. You know you are in the presence of a unique evil.
“There is one particular voice and melody that we use as a Jobu Tupaki theme,” Chang said. “Funny enough, most of the theme are not one-to-one attributed to a character–it’s more about a certain feeling. This one is more a theme for her, and we only hear it for her. The singer is Nina Moffatt, but you can hear it in that scene and in a few other occasions that are Jobu-heavy. We wanted to have a big sense of mystery, so we added long droning textures. It was fun to get really detailed on moments like the nails that change color or when she was playing duck-duck-goose. If you listen to the score separately, there are a lot of little gestures that feel almost like ghosts in other universes that you’re hearing. There are some channel switching sounds too. We wanted it to be unsettling but fantastical at the same time, and some of the sounds are heavier in a classic, villain vibe.”
“Even Nina’s approach to some parts are kind of creepy but zany at the same time,” Lott added. “She destroyed it. We spent some time trying to find the sound of Jobu, and we toyed with doubling the sound of her voice.”
As Evelyn and Joy come closer to a breakthrough in the final battle, the band needed an emotional end to this physical and mental fight. As much as Joy wants Evelyn to understand her, she’s not entirely ready to hug it out. Space is key. “Let Me Go” is one of Joy’s darkest moments as a character and it segues right into “Specks of Time,” a track that helps aid the huge-ness of the Daniels’ brilliant film.
“It was always the plan, and the Daniels always had a vision with a montage of everything we’ve seen before,” Lott said. “There are some things we see from universes that aren’t in the movie. It was tricky, because they needed it early in the process, but it needed to incorporate all of the themes that we will still writing. On the soundtrack, it’s one of two locations where the hot dog musical even happens. All these different melodies need to help you feel things all at one–not hear everything. Getting it just right was one of the most difficult things, and it followed a different arc originally. We had to compress and adjust it.
[For the] parking lot cue, It begins with this choir melody that is a deconstruction of one of the themes. It’s the Evelyn and Joy theme together, and then it evaporates and settles into this simple, arpeggiating piano. It’s a synth made from a gong–it was an instrument that we created. That’s something that we do a lot. What’s being played, interestingly, came from one of the earliest sketches when I was doing a theme exploration. They were still shooting, I think, so this might have been played with in January of February of 2020. I did some left hand arpeggio with some right hand melody type of sketches that I assumed would be off brand for the movie. I wanted to play with melodic material at first. On the gong instrument that we designed that was almost verbatim really, really early as part of that exploration.”
It would be impossible to dissect every cue or every note, but the band includes a juicy section of music that scores the different fight sequences. I know I would want to throw some punches to “Opera Fight” or “Drummer Fight,” but Chang appreciated another cue that he worked on.
“The Opera Fight makes me feel like I have a secret weapon that I have a hidden weapon that I am about to unleash upon my enemies,” he said with a laugh. “I also really like the Buttplug Fight–that’s one of my favorites. I’m more fond of the part after the guard sits on the plug, because it’s very weird with psychedelic drums.”
Everything Everywhere All At Once is streaming now, and you can listen to Son Lux’s lush, gorgeous score across all platforms.
