Interview: Discussing the Music of Spider-Noir with Composers Kris Bowers and Michael Dean Parsons

When Kris Bowers and Michael Dean Parsons began to work on the music for Spider-Noir, the first thing they did was “putting together a dense and nerdy playlist of our favorite noir scores, talking about them, studying them, listening to them, talking about what makes them tick, and then trying to forget it all by putting it out of our minds,” which Bowers explained to Awards Radar on Zoom.

“On the superhero side, I feel like that’s just so ingrained in our minds in terms of how much we’ve watched some of that stuff and love it. A lot of that, I think, was pulling on our own history and our relationship with it. Once we had our grounding in these two places, it became about looking at this show, how unique it is, and trying to figure out how to approach it for what it is. Where we always start is with melody because that’s the thing that makes a lot of those noir scores and the superhero scores so iconic. The melodies are clear, they’re memorable, and they develop with the characters. Our first step was writing themes for each of the main characters, and as we’re writing them, developing a sound for each of them, so that by the time we had our first pass on all of the characters in the first couple of episodes, we were able to not only feel really confident about the melodies that we had, but also about the fact that each of them had also a specific sound and sonic identifier to them.”

For Parsons, working in both the noir and superhero sandbox was “a huge opportunity to craft a long-term arc with these different themes and to create an overall sound that was not just marrying the noir and the superhero, but also enabling so many other influences to make it specific to only this story. The show is ultimately so much more than a gimmick that just mashes those two genres. We were able to create sound design elements for every character, whether the grainy sand process for Sandman or the feedback woodwinds playing random notes for the electricity sound of Megawatt. Being able to take this sound design approach, which we could use to hint at certain characters, but also have a really rich tapestry of themes that enabled us to play. If Cat Hardy is talking to Flint, we can juxtapose both of their themes. It basically let us be really thorough in how we scored it, you know. Nothing was left arbitrary. We had to ask ourselves, “What are we saying in this exact moment? Whose themes are we working with? Whose perspective are we with?” It became less about the genres and more about telling this story as earnestly as possible.”

Listen to the full conversation below:

[Some of the quotes in this article were edited for length and clarity]