Adam Blau is a composer and songwriter whose work spans film, television, theatrical productions and podcasts. As the composer for Netflix’s Dead to Me, created by Liz Feldman, he created a musical palette that infuses the show’s offbeat mystery with suspense and emotion.

Adam Blau

“Composing music to picture is an art that combines several different disciplines that I’ve been drawn to for most of my life,” he says.

We reached out to Blau, whose credits also include the FX show You’re the Worst and the IFC sitcom Brockmire, to discuss his work on Dead to Me, a Netflix series that is streaming its final season and stars Christina Applegate, Linda Cardellini and James Marsden.

Before we jump into your work on Dead to Me, let’s talk about what the role of composer means.
First and foremost, it’s about writing music that’s unique to a given project, helping to shape the tone and define the musical world in which the characters and action exist. This is almost always more than just a matter of writing a few concept pieces of music (though doing so can be helpful) — as a media composer I work with producers and directors to try to determine their view of what the score needs to accomplish, even if they don’t initially have a clear musical concept.

It’s a question, too, of figuring out not just how a score will sound, but how the music should be placed within a scene — How does it sit around a punchline or a particular bit of action? At what point will the music reveal a particular emotion or plot point?

What about your experience on Dead to Me?
Working on Dead to Me, our showrunner Liz Feldman always had a very clear view of what the music needs to evoke. Even if our conversations weren’t in musical terms exactly, part of my job as composer was listen when Liz talked about a scene and provide her artistic vision a musical voice.

There is also a significant technical aspect to the job, particularly when syncing music and action in a given scene. There’s a surprising amount of math involved. For example, if I’m working on a scene and I get a new cut that shifts the internal timings, it’s important go through and adjust tempos so the synced moments land where they’re supposed to… all while keeping things sounding musical.

And of course, in today’s world, it’s vital to wear a number of hats as a composer: creating mockups, mixing, orchestrating and composing in a number of styles all within a timeframe that is usually very compressed, particularly when working on a television schedule. It’s this variety and combination of disciplines that I love so much when working on a project.

What is your process when starting a job?
While every project is different and every collaborator has their own way of working, I find that it’s always ideal to get as much insight as possible into a show creator’s vision — communication is key, and I try to get as much time with a showrunner or director as I can because these initial conversations can provide overarching insight into the tone of a project.

I’ll read scripts, look at any concept art and listen to any reference tracks that might give an indication of the musical vibe we’re looking for. While it’s sometimes a divisive topic, I find it’s often quite helpful to have a temp music track of scores cut in from other projects, particularly when working on a tight television schedule. Even if the temp track doesn’t exactly fit the bill, it’s usually a helpful starting point for conversations surrounding music — rather than throwing darts blindly, we’re working off a common reference that can provide a decent shortcut to the best end result.

And for Dead to Me?
On Dead to Me I had done a couple demo tracks for some scenes to help get the job, so that thankfully gave me a good sense of the direction we were going in. I knew Liz liked those tracks, so I was able to extrapolate from there and work with her and the rest of the production team to flesh out the musical landscape of the show — with all its mysterious twists and turns, as well as letting the more emotional moments blossom from those early seeds we planted in the first couple of episodes.

How do you prefer to work with a showrunner?
As I mentioned before, I am a fan of getting as much information as early as I can. On some projects, the creators want to keep early edits close to the chest, only releasing cuts to the composer once picture is locked, or close to it — but I find that if I can see the episodes as they evolve, it can be very informative in terms of figuring out the musical flow not just within an episode, but throughout a whole season overall.

When working on Dead to Me, I was usually able to read the script by the time an episode got to me and had seen an early cut or two. Once we fell into a routine on the show, the editors and directors will have temped the episode with existing music, sometimes from other projects but ideally from my own catalog.

We’d meet with showrunner Liz, music supervisor Tricia Halloran, music editor Amber Funk and the stellar editorial team on the show, and we’d figure out exactly what the music needed to accomplish across the episode, both on a macro and micro level. Sometimes these would be longer discussions, but by the third season, it really did evolve into a shorthand — the feel of the show became so clear in our heads that we’d sometimes watch a clip and all say “yep” or “I know what to do,” and leave it at that.

I’ll usually average about a week to work on each episode of Dead to Me. If the schedule allowed, sometimes I’d take a bit more time, and if we were in a rare crunch, I’d work more frantically over a couple days, but we always made sure the music got the time it needed to make us all happy. Over that week, I’d send over demo cues to the cutting room, revise as needed, then mix, stem out the music cues, and send them over to the dub stage to be integrated with the rest of the sound in the show.

Are they typically open to any and all suggestions?
During productions, I usually have a discussion with the showrunner to flag any unconventional on-screen music moments that need addressing. In Dead to Me, we had an on-screen kids’ show choir that I did the vocal arrangements for, and I’d work with the team to produce the recording sessions. This type of musical moment requires a fair bit of advance work, so I try to determine these as early as I can.

On other shows I’ve composed for, like Stephen Falk’s You’re the Worst, there were a large number of in-show songs that required not only composing but teaching music to the actors, recording them ahead of time, and making sure all went smoothly on shoot days.

It’s definitely different from composing a score in my studio, but coming from the world of theater, working in person with performers on songs is something I really enjoy doing, and it adds to the variety of the job.

Do you write based on project – spot, game, film, TV — or do you just write?
While I do enjoy just writing music for myself, music for television and film scoring projects are by definition a bit more collaborative and therefore unique to each project. The music provides the aural identity of the show’s world, and it’s important as a composer to key into what that world is for each project.

For example, some directors/producers, like Stephen Falk, get into the specifics of the instruments and musical styles, weaving music into the show’s environment through in-show songs, musical punchlines and theme episodes.

On Dead to Me, it was important to Liz Feldman that we musically strike the balance between playful mystery, emotion, and comedy to create a sonic template for the show. It became clear early on that for a show as incredibly funny as Dead to Me, we needed to avoid any overt “comedy music” around the action.

Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini are both so magnetically funny themselves that playing a traditional comedic score ended up detracting from the humor between them. Instead, Liz quickly set a tone in which we let the score play up the drama and mystery side of things, letting it heighten the dramatic stakes so that the fantastic chemistry between the two leads could shine through amidst a backdrop of tension.

If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing instead?
Great question! It’s hard for me to imagine a life outside of the musical world, so in all likelihood I’d still end up doing something in music — maybe music-directing theatrical productions, as I have always been passionate about live theater.

I love working on big, social, collaborative projects with lots of variation and moving pieces, so theater seems like a good fit and something I’ve enjoyed doing in the past.

I also enjoy tinkering — I used the pandemic lockdown to teach myself to solder and learn a bit more about electronics, even making some basic synth components, so maybe I’d do something in that field, too. I’m also puzzle- and crossword-obsessed, so maybe I’d end up dedicating my time to something in that world. Heck, maybe I still will!

Did you come from a musical family?
That’s a big yes. My mother, Nancy, is a piano teacher who worked out of our house, so my background soundtrack growing up was nonstop piano music — some of those pieces are just embedded in my ears. I learned so much from my mom, not just the technical aspects of playing the piano, but also about how much fun music can be.

Our house was the place where friends would come over for big singalongs around the piano. People pulled out all kinds of instruments to sing everything from old show tunes to ‘80s pop hits and everything in between. It’s a mentality I carry through to this day, and it’s not uncommon for my family and I to still get a group of friends together to call out songs and sing whatever’s on our minds, like live-action karaoke.

My stepfather, Herb Deutsch, is another musical part of my family. Herb was the co-inventor of the Moog synthesizer along with Bob Moog, among other things. He’s the one credited with the idea of putting an actual keyboard on the synthesizer. Herb, along with his music and synths, has been a significant presence in my life.

I’ve also enjoyed collaborating on musical projects with my brother Daniel Rogge, and we’ve even written a stage musical together that had a brief run in New York. I love getting to create music with the people I love, so I’m grateful for these opportunities, and I’m enjoying seeing my own young kids be a joyful part of it as well.

What are your favorite instruments to write with?
While I don’t necessarily have a single instrument I like to write with, I often gravitate toward the piano since it’s my primary instrument and the one I’m most comfortable playing. Being surrounded by computers and synths all day long, I find it refreshing to detach and just let the music be music at the piano, independent of picture, focusing on creating the sound by itself and then bringing it back to my computer to record after the fact.

That said, I do like to play around with new sound libraries on my computer, and I try to incorporate new and unique elements into each score I do. I took advantage of some of Spitfire Audio’s boutique string libraries for Dead to Me, giving the more suspenseful parts a hushed, mysterious air. For You’re the Worst, I spent a fair amount of time coming up with unique synth patches, often improvising on a modular synth for hours and chopping the recordings up into pieces to be integrated into the score.

I’ve learned over the years that I can think best when I’m physically in motion — not exactly ideal for someone sitting in a studio chair for hours on end — and so I find that it can be a huge benefit to go on a long walk with a voice recorder and just sing or hum parts that I’ll later flesh out into proper songs or score cues. I probably have hours and hours of these voice recordings, which is only really an issue when I accidentally switch them on in my car and my family has to suffer through bizarre mumblings of half melodies. But I think they’re pretty much used to it by now.

My Year of Dicks

Can you name some other recent projects?
I recently enjoyed scoring an incredibly fun alternative animation project by Sara Gunnarsdottir and Pamela Ribon with the very colorfully named film My Year of Dicks. The film is a coming-of-age comedy that takes place in the ‘90s, and it incorporates a wide variety of animation styles and musical genres. It’s a touching, funny and innovative project that’s been winning all kinds of awards on the festival circuit.

I also recently wrote music for a Stephen Colbert-/Funny or Die-produced comedy special for Comic Relief on CBS called Pickled. It involved writing some sports-/Olympics-style orchestral pieces for a very silly celebrity tournament, so I got to draw on some of the work I did arranging music for films like We Are Marshall, The Express and The Longshots as well as from my experience composing music for the baseball comedy Brockmire.

I have an audio drama project I’m scoring that’s in the works from a major studio. It has yet to be officially announced, but I’m excited for people to listen sometime in the coming year.