Just when it looked like they might be out, a number of TV shows have pulled the art of opening title themes back in.
Some title tracks are bespoke pieces of score created by composers — like the delightful romp of piano, vocals, and paintbucket percussion in Siddhartha Khosla’s theme for “Only Murders in the Building.” Existing songs can be a great gateway into an episode, particularly when a show engages with it head-on (or helmet-on, in the case of the iconic “Peacemaker” opening). Custom themes written especially for a series can also (pun intended) sing a show’s praises — or six different shows’ praises, as the “WandaVision” opening theme song adapts to each decade.
“Your Friends and Neighbors” blends these different approaches in a fun way, with series composer Dominic Lewis transforming the main title theme from the show’s score into a singable track, for which the Apple TV+ series then brought in lead vocalist Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen to collaborate on the lyrics and performance. What resulted is “The Joneses,” which somehow manages to straddle the line between a sleek, produced sound that reflects the upper-class milieu of the series and the platonic ideal of a rock song playing at a dive bar.
Reflecting the themes and tone of a TV series back to it through the music is the name of the game for all composers, of course, but “Your Friends and Neighbors” in particular was a tricky needle for Lewis to thread. “[The score] is very piano-based and that’s tricky in itself because so much stuff is piano-based. So to make it unique and different around the piano is tough,” Lewis told IndieWire.
But showrunner Jonathan Tropper felt the piano was right for the world that Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm) inhabits. The gloss of manners and wealth in Coop’s country club world is coiled as tightly as piano wire, and the show explores what happens the moment it (and he) snaps. So Lewis explored that volatility. “The main motif in the chorus and throughout the show is a tritone. Without getting too nerdy, that is not a stable interval at all,” Lewis said.
Building a sense of danger and potential explosiveness — something which the visuals of the “Your Friends and Neighbors” opening title theme also takes advantage of — into the structure of the music, Lewis and his team could have crafted just an instrumental track. The slowly-building ambient dread of Theodore Shapiro’s main title for “Severance” does Keir’s work to bring us down to the Severed Floor each episode; and perhaps no one in recent memory has created the musical equivalent of riding out to fantasy battle the way Ramin Djawadi’s main theme for “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” does.
But it was important to the world of “Your Friends and Neighbors” to have a human voice, too, for all of the very human greed and pride that inspires Coop to start doing some light crimes. “The [main theme] had to have what the show has. It’s sleek. It’s expensive. But it’s also got a little bit of cheekiness to it. There’s some darkness in there,” Lewis said. “It lent itself to this style of song pretty well.”
Leithauser’s voice was one of the first that came up for Lewis and the “Your Friends and Neighbors” music team as someone who could channel that cheekiness and that dark edge while still playing in the show’s manicured sandbox. Luckily, the lead singer for The Walkmen was very game to come into a recording studio with the work that Lewis had already done and put his spin on it.
For “The Joneses,” polishing the track actually meant opening it back up and playing around with different iterations and spontaneous additions to the lyrics. “We kicked around for a while,” Leithauser told IndieWire. “You get to a point where we’re all psyched because it’s working. Everybody’s there. The mic’s on. The tone’s right. Everybody’s ready to go. But you just have a line [missing].”
Reworking a line so it fits better is certainly not a new challenge for either Lewis or Leithauser, though. “I’ve been there so many times in my life,” Leithauser said. “Then you start coming up with the stupid shit. But that’s when you brainstorm, and that’s when stuff happens, and then it’s great.”
A particular point of pride for both Lewis and Leithauser was a (very cheeky) reference, “Don’t count the microdoses” which eventually fit into the song’s second chorus, but for a while was one of a number of loose lyrical ideas they played around with to reflect the high-status but emotionally rotten nature of the show’s world.
When it works, getting an opening theme song right doesn’t just get an audience excited to dive into the episode. It can also be a tool to create a sense of resonance, importance, or completion when it then pops up in the episode itself. When watching “Your Friends and Neighbors,” Leithauser himself was excited to hear glimpses of “The Joneses” pop up within episodes and underline key moments without fully tipping the Apple series’ hand. “I was thinking how great it is to get mileage out of that one little [melody] and then you’ve got [it in] different keys and stuff,” Leithauser said.
“I take it off into a different world like halfway through the season,” Lewis said. “I’m not going to give anything away, but it’s sort of the perfect thing to do for a TV show, to have the theme in the main title but also be a song. It’s relatable to the audience.”
“Your Friends and Neighbors” is streaming on Apple TV+.
