Warning: SPOILERS for Yellowjackets season 2!Yellowjackets season 2 has come to a close in a fittingly disturbed and gripping fashion. The hit Showtime series grabbed the attention of viewers worldwide when it debuted in 2021, and now has successfully ramped up the suspense, horror, and thrills that made it a hit, even while explaining things like the first season’s cannibalistic ritual. Although production of Yellowjackets season 3 has been halted due to the writer’s strike, there is much of season 2 worth stewing over.
Just as with season 1, Yellowjackets season 2 is given even more depth and impact thanks to its musical score, which has been provided by Anna Waronker and Craig Wedren. Wedren and Waronker created an eerie and at times hauntingly beautiful soundscape for season 1 that they expanded and iterated on in unique ways this time around. They even got to flex their songwriting muscles for a standout scene involving adult Misty, for which they wrote the musical number “Sit Right Down”.
Anna Waronker and Craig Wedren spoke with Screen Rant about their reactions to the events of the season, their partnership, and more. Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Anna Waronker & Craig Wedren on Yellowjackets Season 2
Screen Rant: You both did such incredible work on Yellowjackets season 1. Were there ways that you wanted to kind of expand your sonic palette coming into the second season?
Anna Waronker: Yeah. [Silence]
Craig Wedren: [Laughs] Are you going to be that guy? Are you going to be the punk rock dude, and just go, “Yeah”? [Laughs]
Anna Waronker: We did, actually. With season 1, we were just trying to figure out what everything was, kind of, and we were just creating and defining.
Craig Wedren: We were developing the cosmology, and the themes, and who got what sound, and who got which little riff.
Anna Waronker: It’s also interesting how it started, because the pilot was scored by Theodore Shapiro, he used Caroline Shaw for the female voices,and for some viola playing. Teddy was not available to do the rest of the series, and that led to Craig, who then invited me to be a part of it–
Craig Wedren: And then it was so weird. It turned out that I found him tied up in Anna’s closet.
Anna Waronker: Back-to-back with Caroline in my closet. [Laughs] We absolutely loved what they did in the pilot, but we also know where we wanted to take it.
Craig Wedren: The pilot, which is beautiful and was directed by our pal Karyn Kusama, just barely hints at the insanity and mayhem to follow. Teddy made a very beautiful, very austere choral piano score for it. It became pretty clear pretty fast that things would ramp up. The first scene in episode two is the plane crash, right? They’re literally wandering around bloodied and dazed. Coach Ben’s leg is crushed. Misty is wielding an axe. It’s like, “Oh, okay. Got it.” We needed to parallel or mimic the crash with all of these ideas that Teddy had kind of set up. It was really, “Okay, now let’s create a bloody mess. The table is set. Everything looks perfect. Now let’s have a food fight.” We sort of slashed it and burned it, and then the soil gets real rich, and a whole lot of new sounds and directions came out of that.
Anna Waronker: We kind of started building what the sound would really become for the show. By the time we were finished, we felt like, “All right, we have a really good idea here of what the show needs.” We did a lot of pre-production for season 2 where we took themes and ideas from season 1 that were maybe really small, or an instrumental cue, and we turned them into these lush vocal pieces with crazy instrumentation. We had a lot of fun creating these little songs–no lyrics, but songs, essentially–to use for season 2, and felt really confident, like “Oh, yeah, we know what we’re doing.”
Craig Wedren: We had thought we kind of overshot it, like, “We’re going to have plenty of material for season 2.” Then, we spotted–spotting’s when you sit down with the locked cut with the producers and the editor and talk through the music–and we were like, “Oh, s***, they completely beat us at our own game.” It was so much wilder and more radical than what we had anticipated.
Anna Waronker: We didn’t read any of the scripts.
Craig Wedren: We very deliberately don’t read the scripts because–tell them why.
Anna Waronker: The producers really enjoy watching my reaction to the episodes. I am not a fan of horror or scary–
Craig Wedren: It’s a great gig for Anna.
Anna Waronker: I like to refer to myself as a granny when it comes to this stuff, so they really measure both of our reactions to episodes about how effective certain plot points are.
Craig Wedren: Part of our job was being the gas or the brake, speeding up or slowing down the vehicle, so that we can help the viewer’s attention. At first, the theme sketches that we made prior to the season were very, very dense and maximal. Then we saw episode one of season 2, and it was very, very dense and maximal. We realized pretty quickly that if what’s on-screen is maximal, maybe we want to quiet it down, or sort of slim it down to one element, like an anchor. Then if it’s a quiet thing happening on screen, we have more space that we can play with. It was really fun dance. It just took us a second to get that, because it was different from season 1. We thought there was a lot going on in season 1, but it was almost exponential in season 2.
I rarely get the chance to speak with a composing team, so I’m curious; what was the scene this season where you two disagreed most on the direction of the music?
Craig Wedren: Part of what’s great about our dynamic, one of the many things, is that Anna, as she’s said, is very Tetris-brained. She’s thinking a lot about themes, and connections, and where the pieces go. I salivate over generating new material, so I’m always like, “Let’s write something new. Let’s write something new!” and she’s like, “Slow the ***k down”.
Anna Waronker: Or, like, “Go for it, dude.”
Craig Wedren: Like, “Go for it, but this is a Lottie moment, and we do have these eighteen Lottie things.”
Anna Waronker: I think one of our favorite pieces of our dynamic is that one of us will do something and then volley it to the other, and sometimes it gets slashed and totally reworked, but it always comes out right. There were definitely times where I came in and was like, “This melody is great. The instrument is wrong. I like it, but not for this show.”
Craig Wedren: Yes, yes. The biggest one was this Coach Ben stuff that I was inspired to write. I was really psyched about this progression; it was this ascending, or descending, or sideways-scending–
Anna Waronker: It just kept going, which is great.
Craig Wedren: It was cool. There was no bottom or no top to it. There are a few of those in season 2. There’s a theme that pops up in the finale, this descending thing that never stops, where you can’t tell where the bottom of it is. Coach had a similar thing, and that was sort of becoming a theme as people were starting to lose their minds around episode six–the childbirth episode. It had a Hitchcock-y thing, but it was maybe a little too literal. It had a real Bernard Herrmann feel with that very raw staccato cello sound, and Anna was just like, “This is not the show.” I was like, “Why? Why can’t it be?” But then we just kept putting it through devices, and different sounds, and different instruments until it turned into this cloud of Bernard Herrmann–like an impression of it–and Anna was the gauge of that. She was like, “That’s Yellowjackets,” once we hit it.
I want to hear about “Sit Right Down,” because that’s a great, bizarre, awesome moment from the season. How did that get written? Did you start with the hook line and build out from there?
Anna Waronker: They approached us and they were just like, “We really want some kind of Fosse-meets-MGM number.” They knew our rock sides and they knew our composing histories, but they didn’t know that we’re songwriting freaks too.
Craig Wedren: In the Brill Building, Tin Pan Alley sense of the word; we both have a songcraft fetish, each in our own way.
Anna Waronker: And they didn’t know that, so I think they were a little bit nervous. Then, I think we spent a workday on it.
Craig Wedren: It came pretty easily.
Anna Waronker: We sent it to them, and they were like, “Well, we’ll never doubt you again, ever. We know you guys can just do anything.” It was a real joy and super fun, and we enlisted Mikey Ferrell, who’s this amazing musician that’s old friends with Craig, and he just helped expand it.
Craig Wedren: We were ridiculously busy scoring it, so we were like, “Let’s get Mikey. He’s an amazing musician, amazing arranger, and so fun to work with.” We were like, “Just give us the schmaltz. Give us the ukulele, and the muted trumpets, and the big harps and strings.”
Anna Waronker: It was a really fun exercise in the middle of some really intense score that we were working on.
Craig Wedren: It was a crisp beam of light in the middle of a whole lot of dark. I mean, we love the dark. Don’t get me wrong.
Anna Waronker: We love the dark, but even in the show certain characters have darker themes than others. Some are more sensitive, and Misty always has this playful feel. I mean, as we’ve learned Misty’s traumatic history, that shifts, we’re having a little fun with adult Misty. Then, when Walter’s character, played by Elijah Wood, comes into the scene, it doubled down on the fun. Then, with the musical number with the bird singing, it was just like, “We’re going all the way. We’re just going to have some fun.” It’s such a relief sometimes when we get to work on those scenes, because we’re crying through others.
I love your music for this. Even though you make it eerie, you have beautiful melodic things happening, but then you have music that’s less melodic and really interesting, sonically. How different is your composing process when you do the more melodic writing versus the driving, almost sound-designed pieces?
Craig Wedren: I would say it’s the same.
Anna Waronker: I would say it’s totally different.
Craig Wedren: Oh my God, that’s great. You go.
Anna Waronker: For me, they’re just totally different brains to put on. One is taking the lead, in a way. If there’s a melody going on, it’s figuring out where that melody can live, because it’s a melody and it’s kind of pushing through. With score, you’re trying not to do that, usually. While our version of hanging in the background is not quite traditionally what hanging in the background score sounds like, it’s just getting out of the way and supporting underneath versus pushing forward, and making room for something.
Craig Wedren: For me, it’s all discovery. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a nursery-rhyme-simple hook or some churning industrial sound; it’s either pulling me toward the screen or I’m just hanging out back here. They’re not mutually exclusive, what Anna said and what I’m saying. The more you do this job, the more instinctual and sensitive you become to which ideas work and which don’t. In a way, you’re just organizing sound, and we know when we hit it. Sometimes it’s very traditional, and sometimes it’s about, “Oh, what genre is this? This is sneaky hijinks comedy,”and sometimes it’s like, “This is no genre. This is something that’s ours to invent.”
Anna Waronker: “Is this music?”
Craig Wedren: “Is this even music?” Yeah. But the feeling that we’re going for, the way we want to feel when something’s working, is the same feeling, no matter what the demands of the scene.
About Yellowjackets
Equal parts survival epic, psychological horror story and coming-of-age drama, “Yellowjackets” is the saga of a team of wildly talented high school girls soccer players who become the (un)lucky survivors of a plane crash deep in the remote northern wilderness. The series chronicles their descent from a complicated but thriving team to savage clans, while also tracking the lives they’ve attempted to piece back together nearly 25 years later, proving that the past is never really past and what began out in the wilderness is far from over.
Check out our other Yellowjackets season 2 interviews:
Yellowjackets season 2 is streaming now on Showtime Anywhere, and the finale episode will air on Showtime on May 28.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
