“The multi-faceted score features vivid piano, electronics, and orchestra that enhance both whimsical moments as well as the darkly sinister side of the mysterious thriller.” – ComingSoon.net
Endeavor Content Soundtracks and Lakeshore Records have released Severance: Season 1–Apple TV+ Original Series Soundtrack, featuring score by Theodore Shapiro (Yellowjackets, The Eyes of Tammy Faye). View the full album track list, listening links and series trailer below.
“Thrilling and loopily inventive” – James Poniewozik, New York Times
The series directed by Ben Stiller and created by Dan Erickson and starring Adam Scott and Patricia Arquette premieres on Apple TV+ February 18.
Listen to “Main Title,” which previously premiered at ComingSoon.net:
Soundtrack Available Now: [Download/Listen]
Track List:
01. Main Titles
02. Labor Of Love
03. Kimono Hallway
04. Hall Of Eagans
05. Note To Self
06. Tokens
07. Expiration Date
08. Still Vibrating
09. Tree Of Life
10. Done For The Night
11. Secret Places
12. Interdepartmental
13. After Hours
14. Batter Up
15. Safely Situated
16. The Four Tempers
17. That Innie
18. Cobel At Lumon
19. Alive
Listen and Follow on Spotify:
Listen on Apple Music:
Mark Scout (Adam Scott) leads a team at Lumon Industries, whose employees have undergone a severance procedure, which surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives. This daring experiment in “work-life balance” is called into question as Mark finds himself at the center of an unraveling mystery that will force him to confront the true nature of his work… and of himself.
The series is written and created by Dan Erickson. Mark Friedman, Chris Black, John Cameron and Andrew Colville are executive producers alongside Erickson. Ben Stiller, Nicky Weinstock and Jackie Cohn executive produce through Red Hour Productions, and both Patricia Arquette and Adam Scott serve as producers. Endeavor Content serves as the studio.
Says Shapiro: “Although ‘Severance’ can be classified as science-fiction, at its heart it’s a mystery. The music of the score, built around four repeating chords, is a gigantic question mark. As the mystery unfolds, so do variations on our theme.”
Lumon’s doors are finally open. The first two episodes of Severance are now streaming on @appletvplus. http://apple.co/Severance
ABOUT THEODORE SHAPIRO
“The thing that I love to do is solve puzzles,” Theodore Shapiro says. “And to me, every score is like a puzzle that you crack.”
For two decades, Shapiro has been solving cinematic puzzles both light and dark. He’s scored some of Hollywood’s classic comedies—including Old School, Tropic Thunder, Dodgeball, and Blades of Glory—as well as Paul Feig’s hilarious, female-powered films (Spy, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call). He’s also cracked the code of political dramas (Bombshell, the Emmynominated Game Change, Trumbo), animated adventures (Spies in Disguise and Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, both of which earned him Annie nominations), and unconventional adventures (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) and mysteries (A Simple Favor).
He pulled a jazzy score with Gene Hackman in Heist, accentuated the tyranny of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, made the tears flow in Marley & Me, and found the humanity in an incorrigible Bill Murray in St. Vincent. His dark, jagged score for Destroyer, starring Nicole Kidman—was described by The A.V. Club as “knife-on-bone.”
That versatile, musical codebreaking began when Shapiro was five, drawn to the family piano like a magnet. Growing up in a household where music was “part of the ambient ethos,” in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., his diet was a healthy mix of Debussy and the Beatles, and he kept on playing music through high school and college.
After majoring in music at Brown University, where he also scored and acted in theater, he sharpened his compositional skills at Juilliard—studying with renowned composer John Corigliano. His classical chops took him to the concert hall, where his works have been performed by orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, and the New York Chamber Symphony.
But his first love, ever since he got sucked into the cinematic adventure of Raiders of the Lost Ark and fell under the spell of Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Chinatown as a boy, was the movies.
“The idea of marrying composition with some sort of a narrative format, that was what spoke most to me,” he says. “I always liked the wide accessibility of film, and the openness of film scoring as a medium. I feel like movies have such a wide open canvas that they encompass—and that has always excited me.”
So when his fellow Brown alums, Michael Showalter and David Wain, co-created the sketch comedy series The State for MTV, Shapiro was eager to write for the screen. He was simultaneously scoring student films for another former classmate, John Hamburg, who introduced Shapiro’s outsized talents to the future filmmakers at NYU—and soon a full-fledged film scoring career was born.
After the success of his first feature, the Sundance darling Hurricane Streets, and the Michelle Rodriguez-starring boxing drama, Girlfight, Shapiro had Hollywood’s attention. He’s since collaborated with top-flight filmmakers, including Karyn Kusama, Paul Feig, Ben Stiller, Jay Roach, David Mamet, and David Frankel.
Shapiro treats each film, whether playing for laughs or drama, with a musical seriousness that not only demonstrates his serious technique—but strengthens the movies in the process. There’s nothing funny about how good Shapiro makes every film look, which is why no genre has been able to contain him. No matter the mood, the director, or the star… they’re all puzzles.
“Whether it’s coming up with the right melodic material, or instrumental choices, or even just solving individual cues and how to tell the story in the best way,” he says, “that just fascinates me, and I love the challenge of it, and I love the process of it. It’s really that part of my person that loves to decode things and work out these problems that drives my creative process, and makes my job really fun.
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