Interview: THE LONG WALK Composer Jeremiah Fraites Gets to the Heart of Stephen King

The Long Walk doesn’t dress up Stephen King’s story to be anything that it isn’t. Francis Lawrence’s adaptation stays true to the lean, often cruel spirit of the book, in which young men walk for their lives and a fat cash prize. All the complexity is behind the simplicity — that’s the spirit of The Long Walk.

Composer Jeremiah Fraites went for minimalism as well, mostly through piano and strings.

The Long Walk is the first feature-length film Fraites has scored in his career, which includes The Lumineers and two solo albums. Only a month from now, his next score hits theaters with the Bruce Springsteen film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which the composer notes is an even darker score than The Long Walk. Needless to say, it’s a thrilling time for the composer, who’s dreamed of scoring films since his teen years.

Recently, Fraites spoke with Daily Dead about writing an elegant and emotional score for the horrors of The Long Walk.

Simplicity and elegance works best with The Long Walk. Was that always your instinct when approaching the score?

Jeremiah Fraites: Leave it to Stephen King to make walking this abysmal horror thing. I really appreciated Francis Lawrence's vision about trying to preserve elegance in humanity. Obviously, violence, some gore, and horror are inevitable for a story like that, but the way he did it was really elegant. Before I started composing the ideas, he said, “I don't really want to make the violence too much in that sense.”

The goal was trying to service those aspects of the film that were inevitable, but also trying to have the music shine a spotlight on the friendships between the boys, particularly Ray (Cooper Hoffman) and Peter (David Johnson), but really, all of them. All these kids are creating these relationships in the bleakest of locations on pavement walking day and night, tired, exhausted, sleep deprived. Musically and artistically, trying to not glorify that violence and the gore, but focus again on the relationships between these boys, that was the mission.

There aren’t any cues in the score that scream, “You better start getting scared now.” 

Jeremiah Fraites: It was funny, when I got the job, I was like, oh man, I'm going to make the craziest score ever, super dark, super atonal, depressing. For sure, going crazy and dissonant at times, that's inevitable, but what can we do to elevate the minimalism here? What can we do to not just follow the tropes of horror and thriller musically speaking, but really try to do something that when there's a dark scene, how can we show some light? And when there are scenes of light, how can we still keep some of the tension to not let the viewer off the hook? It was a tightrope walk in that sense. 

Another tightrope is, you’re scoring a lot of death. You want every death to have an impact, but also, you can’t always score at an 11, right? How’d you – and I don’t mean this as a bad Long Walk joke – want to pace yourself?

Jeremiah Fraites: There was this cue that developed that was really simple. It was basically these four PCO notes – just boom, boom, boom, boom. Nothing groundbreaking or genius about that, but it was a simple way that we could notify or telegraph that something is coming. 

The first scene that we think something's about to happen is Gary (Charlie Plummer), he stops down, bends over to tie a shoe. I needed to give a cue that would indicate something may happen, but we don't want the audience to be entirely sure. 

You're teasing the thriller aspect, teasing that anxiety aspect, but let's not take it to a 10 yet. And then the first bonafide death on screen musically, it's like, okay, let's build something out here and make each person's passing unique and distinct. Yeah, that was the challenge, trying to make every moment feel that they are going through different states and different landscapes. 

When you listen to the track “Olson,” there's a little synth there, which is the rare track with a touch of futurism. Were there beats where you did want to bring the future into the score? 

Jeremiah Fraites: When I talked to Francis Lawrence on the phone last summer, I said, “I think a nice blend of piano and strings will serve the story because strings and piano are those two types of instruments that, if you want to make gross, gnarly, dissonant, disgusting sounds, those two instruments have a chock full of that. And if you want to make beautiful consonants, make you cry, those instruments serve those emotions well too.” I felt that would give me an expansive dynamic range – emotionally – with those two instruments. 

But then also the idea of sound design and some weirder stuff. When I sent that “Olson” over to Francis, I sent him a bunch of stuff and didn't shine a flashlight on that idea. I thought, let me see if he picks up on this, or if he says, “What's up with that synth cue?” 

He loved that particular cue, so I was like, oh hell yeah, this is going to be a great collaboration. 

How did the track evolve from there?

Jeremiah Fraites: I worked a lot on this with my wife Francesca, who's the score producer. When we were working on “Olson,” she was the one that said, “I think that this synth track seems like the Olson (Ben Wang) cue.” We spent a day and a half writing and rewriting all that synth stuff blended with real acoustic strings to take it over the edge.

Baker (Tut Nyuot) is the most seemingly distraught from losing Olson. So when we had the Baker cue ready to work on, we thought it would be touching and heartbreaking to repurpose the cue. Change it a little bit, like a variation of a motif, of a theme – trying to connect the dots of the loss of both characters. 

A character-first approach is fitting for Stephen King. Ask any fan, they’ll say you can take out all the horror and you’re still left with great characters and drama. Anything about King himself that inspired you while working on The Long Walk?

Jeremiah Fraites: I just read an interview with Stephen King where he talked about something that changed his life from a writing perspective. I think it was a poem he was introduced to when he was younger. The poem was old English, but the essential meaning that really inspired Stephen was to stay away from the words “things” and “stuff” and be as specific as possible. Stephen King was like, “The character in my stories never goes for a beer in the fridge. They go for a Budweiser or a PBR. The characters in my stories never smoke cigarettes. They smoke Marble Reds or parliaments.” 

The brilliance of his writing is that he takes you into these worlds that are so hyper specific. All those details that sometimes almost seem inane are, whether you realize it or not, building this lush Stephen King world around you. I have one little anecdote about his writing that really inspired me, one of many inspirations from the novel, but again, it's one of these really random facts that he throws in there. 

Please, do share.

Jeremiah Fraites: When the walk begins in the novel, Ray Garrity checks his wristwatch and realizes the race has started. His watch is either one minute fast or one minute slow — I can’t remember exactly — but I thought it would be cool to extrapolate that detail into music. What if I recorded a violin doing a steady pulse at 131 BPM, then 132 BPM? That became the cue we called ‘Spoon,’ which accompanies an extreme use of an actual spoon in the movie.

That was one of many things where his writing is so lush with detail, so thought-provoking, and specific that I think a lot of it seeped into the score in ways that I'm not even conscious of. 

It’s funny, the two movies you’ve scored this year are very American with a King adaptation and a Bruce Springsteen movie. 

Jeremiah Fraites: I didn't actually think about that. That's an interesting connection. I don't even know what the word is, but this year has been a pinch me moment. A year flashed before my eyes. Here we are talking about these two films, one that just came out on Friday, of course, being The Long Walk, and Bruce Springsteen around the corner. Yeah, I didn't realize how deeply American both these movies are, but it has been such an inspiring experience to do two movies almost back to back that couldn't be more different from each other in terms of story, in terms of dialogue, in terms of score composition.

A lot of writers listen to music while they write. When you’re working on music, whether for film, The Lumineers, or your solo work, do you find movies inspiring? 

Jeremiah Fraites: Movies inspire me a lot. When I was in high school playing in different bands and learning how to play the drums and stuff, my buddy said, “I think films might be cooler than music.” And I was like, “Nah, music's the best.” And he was like, “I don't know, man. Films are kind of sicker because you have music and then you have the added bonus of the film. When the director gets it right, everything comes in harmony.” Now, I think he was right. 

When did you first think about scoring films? 

Jeremiah Fraites: I have wanted to score a movie since I was probably 17. It's always been in the back of my mind as something I want to do. I put out two solo records called “Piano Piano” and “Piano Piano 2.” If you listen to those, I think one could argue that they sound like they could have been in films or could be in future films, dare I say. 

I always appreciated some of my favorite composers – John Brian, Thomas Newman, and, of course, John Williams. When you sit down and try to do it yourself, you're in awe of these composers that have consistently hit it out of the park. It's not an easy task. You're trying to solve hundreds or thousands of problems constantly, and you're collaborating with the director and the music editor, the picture editor, and producers and studio executives, and everybody's trying to uplift the film together. 

I thought of Thomas Newman while listening to your score earlier, actually. He’s never afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. I don't know if that specifically inspires you about his music, but you hear that quality in your music, too. 

Jeremiah Fraites: Oh, thank you so much. With the music and the scores, especially as a piano player, piano can be instantly a sentimental instrument. It can make you think of overly sugary, saccharine, cheesy scenes. The way that drums can ruin a great song if they're not the right drums, the piano and strings can ruin a great scene if they're not done properly. I was careful in trying to navigate and help usher in the audience, not trying to overly telegraph, “Hey, this is when you're supposed to cry. Hey, this is when you're supposed to feel a heartbreaking scene.” But also conveying that, know what I mean? 

As creatives, I think we're all enamored with this idea of wanting to be unique. We want to stand out. We want to reinvent the wheel, and I think that that's incredible to strive for. On the other hand, it is the pragmatic aspect of serving these fundamentals, not cliches, not tropes, but the fundamental aspects of film scores that I think one must abide by and one must do – unless you really want to make a crazy score. If you can do that and get away with it, though, that’s awesome. Hats off and props to you. 

Were there any cues in The Long Walk where you felt you got to go a little crazy, though? 

Jeremiah Fraites: A scene with Curley (Roman Davis) about 20 minutes in when we see the title called – The Long Walk. I had wanted to get really dissonant. Instead of going to the obvious strings, I looked at my electric guitar sitting idly by my studio. I didn't have a slide in my studio – but I had a battery. I took a battery and slid it down super, super slowly, recorded that and put it off to the left, hard left, pan left. 

And then I did the same thing opposite, going from high to low with the battery again on an electric guitar, cranked to the max in the amp, and then panned that hard. I thought, this is interesting, because I'm using a non-traditional guitar in a horror trope, but I'm using an electric guitar where typically strings would have this nasty dissonance sound. 

If you watch the movie again, you'll notice, you'll be like, oh, that's an electric guitar being slid with a battery. It's obvious and not camouflaged at all. It was just so fun.