‘The Vampire Lestat’ Songwriter Daniel Hart Reveals Hardest Song of the Season (Exclusive)

Interview With the Vampire struck gold with composer Daniel Hart. The musician, who has toured with the likes of David Bowie in his day, composes the orchestral scores for each season of the AMC drama, but he had the chops to make all of the original diegetic music for Season 3, titled The Vampire Lestat. TV Insider connected with Hart to discuss the music from this season. He revealed his favorite original songs and orchestrations, in addition to the song that was the hardest to write.

In the new rock-and-roll-centric season, Lestat (Sam Reid) goes on an electric multi-city tour with his self-titled band while being haunted by “muses” from his wild and rebellious past. As his band’s popularity and star power rises, so does Lestat’s influence over vampires and humans alike, leaving others to contend with Lestat’s power in the face of the Great Conversion, an unnatural surge in the vampire population.

Reid performed the songs live during filming, and he performed six of them live at The Vampire Lestat One-Night Only concert at New York City’s Beacon Theatre on Tuesday, June 2. TV Insider was in attendance at the concert, and the theater was enraptured with his performances of the six songs, some the audience knew already and others they were hearing for the first time. One of them was a song called “The Loneliness,” which will soon make its onscreen debut.

Hart played guitar and backup vocals in the band for the concert, along with Reid’s vocal coach this season, Matthew Santos, who was on guitar and the keys. Meg Toohey, Bobak Loftipour, and Nelly Efron made up the rest of the band. They are not in the band in the show. Those characters — Larry, Alex, T.C., and Salamander — are played by Noah Reid, Seamus Patterson, Sarah Swire, and Ryan Kattner. In the weeks leading up to the concert, AMC released Vampire Lestat singles, the announcements for which came with statements from Hart and Lestat himself. Lestat was trolling Hart in most of his statements.

“My favorite song that I wrote this season — I will say to you that we are performing a song tonight called ‘The Loneliness,’” Hart told us on the red carpet before the concert. “Not been released yet, but it is currently my favorite song to play. It’s the most fun one to perform.” It’s Hart’s favorite to perform because it’s “got lots of different rhythms in it, and it feels like it’s a bit new.”

“‘Long Face’ is very obviously a sort of homage to David Bowie and glam rock,” Hart said. “This one feels like it’s a new thing, but for Lestat, it’s also supposed to feel like a new thing, so I like that a lot. It’s got some guitar solos in it and I really like playing these guitar solos, so that makes it a lot of fun.”

His favorite song he wrote this season and the hardest song to write this season were not the same.

“Hardest song this season is a song called ‘Stained Glass Eyes,’ also has not been released yet,” Hart revealed. “I spent more time on it than any other song. I rewrote it from the ground up at least three times. I finished it, and then I was like, ‘Yes!’ And then I listened to it a couple more times and I was like, ‘No!’ And then I did the same thing a couple more times and finally got to a place where I was happy with it. I showed it to Sam Reid, and I showed it to Rolin [Jones]. They were really happy with it, and it made it in the show.”

“Stained Glass Eyes” wasn’t performed at the concert, so fans will have to wait to see what the powerful song is about.

Hart said that creating music for Lestat “absolutely” inspired ideas for songs for other characters. He feels he’s tapped the vein of writing lyrics from the POV of vampires.

“Because I’ve spent so much time with these characters now over years and years, I feel like I was really able to distill some of the core themes that affect vampires that would be things that they would want to sing about or think about, and they’re very common,” Hart shared. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Lestat or Louis or Claudia or anyone else. They all have lots of things in common, like loneliness, for example. Vampire loneliness is supposed to be the most intense loneliness. I guess I’ve never felt that, but life can be lonely sometimes, so I took some of my own loneliness and injected it in there, or tried to anyway.”

Daniel Hart performs at The Vampire Lestat: One-Night Only Live Premiere Event (Mike Coppola/Getty Images for AMC/AMC+)

Hart continued composing the score for Season 3 in addition to making the original songs. Because the songs are such a big part of this season’s storytelling, Hart was brought into the writers room and given a writing credit. What was it like to switch between original song and original score mode?

“I got really lucky in that I started working on the songs right at the beginning of the writers room, and then I finished all of the songs before I had to do any of the score, so I was able to compartmentalize a bit. I did have to do a tiny bit of overlap,” Hart said. “For the most part, I did this one thing with the songs, and then I was able to do the score. Because of that, though, the songs did influence the score in a way that I didn’t expect and a way I wasn’t planning on. Because all the music of the songs came first, I was like, well, it would make sense if the melodies from some of these songs made their way over to the orchestra so it all feels cohesive. Because it is about Lestat, I want the music to feel like it all comes sort of from him and is about what he’s feeling and going through.”

If you’ve been a fan of the show from the first season, you know how gorgeous Hart’s orchestral scores are. They’re some of the best scores currently on TV. There is, in my opinion, a new addition to the list of Hart’s best Interview With the Vampire scores to come in Episode 4 of The Vampire Lestat. Hart said this was a standout score from the season for him and the team.

“There’s a piece of score in Episode 4 called ‘Blood Marriage,’” Hart said. “I don’t think this has ever happened to me before, but the day that everybody in our crew watched back that episode after it had been edited and mixed and the score was in and everything, I got so many texts and phone calls from actors in the show, from our executive producer Mark Johnson, from Rolin Jones the showrunner. Everybody was like, ‘This one piece of music, it’s really, really good. Bravo, you’ve outdone yourself.’ So, I’m really proud of that one.”

“I will tell you my favorite, it’s in Episode 5,” Hart went on. “I feel like I can’t say too much about it, but it’s probably the most complex orchestral piece I wrote for the show so far, and it happens in a very intense scene between Lestat and another character. I was really happy with the way that one turned out.”

We’re all ears.

The Vampire Lestat, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC, Streaming on AMC+