'The Sandman' Season 2 Composer David Buckley Discusses Final Season Score

The Sandman Season 2 David Buckley Composer Interview

COURTESY OF NETFLIX

We recently had the chance to interview Emmy-nominated composer David Buckley about his work on Netflix’s The Sandman season 2. We discuss composing challenging scenes, the show’s new themes, mythologies, and locations, among other topics.

David Buckley composed the soundtrack to The Sandman season 1, returning for its second and final season. Over the course of 12 episodes, the season introduces dozens of new characters, not least the remaining members of The Endless family, while exploring different world mythologies, such as Norse and Greek. There are so many musical styles Buckley had to balance in the final season. The final result is glorious.

We recently got the chance to chat with Buckley about his work on Netflix’s The Sandman season 2. Check out our interview, which includes a couple of questions from fans!

What excited you the most about Season 2’s musical journey— be it new characters, new settings, or something else?

The Sandman Season 2 Volume 1 Review: Highlights, Surprises & What’s Next In Volume 2

I think the most exciting thing about coming back for a second season of a show is that you get to play once again and you get to re-explore what you created in the first season, but perhaps with an added sense of confidence because you know that the show has already been out and that it’s been embraced and liked and recommissioned. And I think that in all departments, you feel a sense of people genuinely want more, and people want you to develop and discover and continue searching for things. So I think that’s the most exciting thing.

It’s returning to something that you created that’s familiar, but you have the opportunity to start presenting things in new light. And absolutely with the new characters. And not only experiencing their journeys and emotions, but also Dream, the Sandman, he has a lot to contend with in this season. I’ve got to be careful about spoilers. But showing the development of his character and the depths and the highs and lows that he goes through is something that was really, really enjoyable.

And overall, I think it was what the showrunner [Alan Heinberg] said to me: this has always been a show about emotions and never more so than in season two. It’s selling human emotions.

For season 2, did you transform and build on Dream’s theme to reflect how he has changed? If so, what did you change?

Yes, I mean, absolutely. He’s navigating significantly new pastures. And the theme does change, it finds new twists and new turns, as his character does. And he goes through some pretty gut-wrenching experiences, which his theme needs to be able to accommodate.

I didn’t shift the note up this way or shift the note down that way. I mean, possibly I did, but that’s sort of a little bit of a bizarre analysis. It’s more, as I’m watching the episode and seeing what Dream has to contend with, I’m sort of trying to let the music and his theme kind of similarly follow his trajectory

Each of the Endless has a unique theme. How did you approach the task of giving each sibling a distinct musical motif, while ensuring they all complement each other?

In different episodes, different siblings appear. Sometimes we see one for a number of episodes, sometimes they appear and then disappear. But almost exclusively they have a musical theme or sound, I think with one exception, where she just didn’t appear that often compared to the rest. That was Despair. There’s a couple of instrumental moments where she is there, but it was never enough really to wedge in a theme for her. But the others definitely have thematic identities.

It was really fun to expand that. There are a couple of key moments in the show where they all gather together for various events. And it was fun, sort of weaving their themes into a kind of suite of here comes one person presenting the theme, and so forth. I mean, clearly, we live with certain characters more than others. There is a ranking and a hierarchy. I suspect that’s largely based on the sort of source material that was selected.

Season 2 takes a deeper dive into mythology, exploring stories like the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and encounters with Norse gods, Faeries, and so on. Were there any specific instruments or musical textures you used to give their themes a cultural and emotional identity?

Faerie is a really interesting one, as a collective. They appear throughout the show; they’re probably one of the most significant additions. And they have what I would like to consider quite a strong theme. The first introduction is within the context of a Shakespeare play.

There’s a quasi-Elizabethan-Shakespearean sound world to them. So it allowed me to sort of indulge my fantasies in early music, which I always like to do if I can. And in this case, it seemed very appropriate. They have a sort of slightly ancient sound world going on intermingled with a little bit of Celtic. And then there’s a Greek tragedy component where I did use some ancient Greek instrumentation.

I did consult with a Greek specialist just to find out what we do know. And I realised that — for the musicians who are reading this — often things are written in slightly unusual time signatures compared to what we might expect today. I learned a little bit on the job about some of that stuff. I always think that to sort of try and recreate something from the past is not as fun as saying, let the past inform the future. So take what you love about it, and let that be a sort of springboard for whatever you want to do..

We definitely have taken cultural and historical ideas and played with them throughout the season with some of these new characters.

In the closing moments of Volume 1, Dream reaches his most emotionally vulnerable state in the entire arc. How did you approach scoring that moment of tragedy?

It really was an opportunity for me to do what Allan said he wanted me to do, which is to make people cry. I mean, it’s already pretty persuasive what’s on screen, but let me be a part of raising he emotional stakes and letting the audience suffer and experience the tragedy that Dream and everyone around him is experiencing.

And it’s interesting, because I’ve worked on other projects where directors want me to keep a perhaps a cooler head and not comment so much and let the drama do the heavy lifting. But what was really nice about this process is that it was, “No Dave, you can pour your emotion into this as well, let you cry into your music and let that be part of it. Let that be part of the mourning and the wailing and the upset.” And I enjoyed it, it felt liberating to just put out some sort of raw emotions.

There are some absolutely spellbinding scenes of tragedy and loss in this season. I think people are gonna be in for a ride with lows, but there’s some highs as well.

Was there anything new that you discovered or learned while composing the score for The Sandman?

Across the two seasons, I’ve gotten to know and fall in love with characters whom I didn’t know before. It wasn’t a set of comics that I knew a whole lot about. My wife actually had read them and really loved them. I was learning on the job and discovering these people as I went.

It’s hard for me to imagine these characters won’t have entered my life as it were. And I don’t think they’ll ever go away. So I don’t know if I learned anything about the actual art of composition, necessarily during this process, but I’ve learned something about the fantasy characters. And they feel like they’ve become sort of a part of me in their own way, which I think is quite lovely.

Questions submitted by fans!

Wren (@WrenM2004): What was your favourite piece to compose?

I’ve just been cutting the soundtrack album this last week, which comes out at the end of the month, it will come out in time with the second delivery of the show. That was a process of whittling down… God knows…8 hours of music into 80 minutes of music, which was quite in its own way quite a traumatic experience.

I think the Faerie stuff I’m quite fond of. I think it’s got a bit of everything. It’s got some fun. It’s got some deeply felt emotion. It’s got some epic grandeur. I think of all the new sounds and themes that I created for the season, that’s probably the one that is the most multifaceted, just because that collection of people from the fairy has quite a bit of real estate within the show.

Cal (@Cal_120) What was the most challenging piece to compose?

Everything’s a challenge, but nothing sticks out as being, “How do I do this?” At the beginning of the season, there was a sense of jumping back onto a horse, which I described early on in this interview as being fun and exciting. There is also that slight intimidation about opening up a box that had, you know, sort of closed at the end of season one and knowing that you could still do it could you could still operate within that universe.

I think it was helped enormously by the fact that season two doesn’t feel like a repetition of season one. You know, I’ve worked on other shows that’ve gone into multiple seasons, and occasionally you feel like we’ve sort of done this before — that wasn’t the case here. There was so much new stuff to be learned and gathered that it made it less of a challenge.

I don’t recall any moment where it’s like, “Oh, God, you know, what are we doing? We need to think about this.” It was hard work, exceptionally hard work, but it was challenging in the best sense of the word.

And finally, one thing that fans have been pondering for years is the lyrics to the choral version of the show’s main theme. What are they? Well, now, at long last, we have ourselves an answer. The lyrics are as follows:

“Two gates of shadowy dreams, baffling and unclear of meaning. One gate is of horn, the other of ivory. Dreams which pass through ivory deceive, while those which pass through polished horn bring true things to pass when any mortal sees them.”

With Buckley’s work on The Sandman complete, he’s now focusing on the new season of The Lincoln Lawyer. He’s also working on Runaway, based on a Harlan Coben novel.