Danny Elfman

• 1. Introduction

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  Danny Elfman retired his rock band Oingo Boingo on Halloween night in 1995, after five sold-out concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre. The band had made him a name in Los Angeles new wave. Yet the career waiting for him afterward was larger. Elfman has since written the themes for The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives, and he has composed more than 100 feature film scores. He is also the child who was turned away from his elementary school orchestra "for having no propensity for music." How does that child become a composer whom directors call on for comedies, thrillers, horror and comic book epics? What did a rock singer with no formal training learn from a theater troupe that played instruments made from beer cans? And why do his scores so often sound like affectionate conversations with composers of the past?

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• 2. Strange Education

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  On the 29th of May 1953, Daniel Robert Elfman was born in Los Angeles to a Jewish family of Russian descent. His mother, Blossom Elfman, was a writer and teacher, and his father, Milton, was a teacher too. His brother Richard would become an actor, musician and journalist.

  Baldwin Hills, an affluent and racially mixed community, is where Elfman grew up. He spent much of his time at the local movie theater, watching classic science fiction, fantasy and horror films. There he first noticed the music of film composers such as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman.

  Amarillo, Texas, is not where Elfman was born, though he once claimed it was. He has admitted to inventing stories about his past out of boredom. Another invention gave him parents who served in the United States Air Force.

  In his early school days, Elfman showed a talent for science and almost no interest in music. That changed when he switched high schools in the late 1960s and fell in with a musical crowd. They introduced him to early jazz and to Stravinsky and his twentieth-century contemporaries. He attended University High School in Los Angeles but dropped out. Among his classmates was Kim Gordon, whom he dated as a teenager and who later joined the rock band Sonic Youth.

  France came next, because his brother Richard had gone there. Elfman played violin with Jérôme Savary's Le Grand Magic Circus, an avant-garde musical theater group. Afterward he set out on a ten-month, self-guided tour of Africa, busking along the way and collecting West African percussion instruments. A series of illnesses ended the trip and sent him home, just as Richard was forming a new musical theater group in Los Angeles.

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• 3. Junkyard Orchestra

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  Up to 15 performers playing upwards of 30 instruments made up The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, the street theatre troupe run by Richard Elfman. After Danny returned from Africa in the early 1970s, Richard asked him to be its musical director. His job was to adapt jazz and big band music from the 1920s and 1930s, by artists such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Josephine Baker.

  An aluminum gamelan was among the instruments Elfman helped build for the troupe. There was also the "Schlitz celeste," made from tuned beer cans, and a "junkyard orchestra" assembled from car parts and trash cans. He composed original pieces for these odd instruments as well.

  The Mystic Knights played on the street, in theaters, and later in nightclubs across Los Angeles. Richard left in 1976 to pursue filmmaking. As a send-off, he produced Forbidden Zone, a film based on the troupe's stage shows. Elfman wrote its songs and his first film score. He also appeared as Satan, performing a reworked version of Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher."

  Elfman took over the troupe as lead singer and songwriter in 1976, before Forbidden Zone was released. In 1979 he pared the group down to eight players and turned it into a ska-influenced new wave band. That summer, the name changed to Oingo Boingo.

  Eight studio albums came from Elfman's pen. The biggest success was 1985's Dead Man's Party, which featured the hit "Weird Science," from the film of the same name. The band performed the title song on screen in the 1986 movie Back to School, which Elfman also scored. His pop influences ranged from the Specials and Madness to Devo and XTC. He wrote the lyrics to all of the band's original songs from 1979 to 1994. Several satirized social politics, though Elfman said his message was to "question, resist, challenge" and that no single political agenda lay behind them. In the late 1980s he moved the band toward a more guitar-oriented rock sound, which lasted through its last album, Boingo, in 1994.

  Eighteen years with the band left Elfman with permanent hearing damage. He said it was so bad that he could not "even sit in a loud restaurant or bar anymore." Conflicts with his film-scoring career also played a part in ending the band. Performing in front of orchestras proved more tolerable.

  On the 31st of October 2015, Elfman and Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek played "Dead Man's Party" with an orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl. It was an encore after a live-to-film concert of The Nightmare Before Christmas score. Elfman told the audience the performance came "20 years to the day" after the band's retirement. Bartek's name would turn up again and again in Elfman's film work, in a role that had nothing to do with rock guitar.

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• 4. Learning the Orchestra

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  Tim Burton and Paul Reubens were fans of Oingo Boingo, and in 1985 they invited Elfman to score Pee-wee's Big Adventure, their first feature film. Elfman felt apprehensive, because he had never scored a studio feature. Burton accepted his first demo of the title music. With orchestration help from Steve Bartek, Elfman finished the score. He later described hearing his music played by a full orchestra for the first time as one of the most thrilling experiences of his life.

  Comedies filled the late 1980s, including Burton's Beetlejuice and the Bill Murray film Scrooged. Emilio Estevez's crime drama Wisdom received an all-synth score. Martin Brest's buddy cop film Midnight Run got big band and blues-infused music.

  In 1989, Elfman's score for Batman won a Grammy and marked a sharp turn toward dark, densely orchestrated music in the romantic idiom. He wrote and orchestrated its theme on an airplane to Los Angeles, after visiting the set in London. The same style carried into three films released in 1990: Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, Sam Raimi's Darkman and Clive Barker's Nightbreed.

  Nearly 20 Burton projects now carry Elfman's music, and he has scored all but three of the director's major studio releases. Edward Scissorhands arrived in 1990 and Batman Returns in 1992. Mars Attacks! and Sleepy Hollow followed, and then Big Fish in 2003 and Alice in Wonderland in 2010.

  Raimi and Gus Van Sant became frequent collaborators too. Van Sant's films Good Will Hunting and Milk both won Academy Awards. Elfman's scores for Good Will Hunting, Milk, Big Fish and Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black each received Oscar nominations. His other directors include Brian De Palma, Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, Errol Morris, Ang Lee, Richard Donner and Guillermo del Toro.

  From the mid-1990s, his range widened to thrillers like Dolores Claiborne and A Simple Plan, and to documentaries such as Standard Operating Procedure and The Unknown Known. In 2025 he composed the music for Luc Besson's French film Dracula.

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• 5. Songs and Voices

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  Ten songs had to exist before The Nightmare Before Christmas had a script. In 1993, Elfman wrote both music and lyrics for Henry Selick's stop-motion film. He worked from Tim Burton's parody poem of A Visit from St. Nicholas and from concept drawings, consulting Burton on each song.

  The full-cast numbers include "This Is Halloween," "Town Meeting Song" and "Making Christmas." Elfman wrote four songs for the hero, Jack Skellington: "Jack's Lament," "What's This?," "Jack's Obsession" and "Poor Jack." He sang all of them himself, and he also voiced Barrel and the Clown with the Tear-Away Face. Other characters got "Kidnap the Sandy Claws," "Oogie Boogie's Song" and "Sally's Song." An eleventh song, "Finale/Reprise," reworks lines from three earlier ones. Burton quietly contributed some lyrics, including "Perhaps it's the head that I found in the lake." The songs drew on Kurt Weill, Gilbert and Sullivan, and early Rodgers and Hammerstein.

  In 2005, Elfman returned to the form for Burton's Corpse Bride. Screenwriter John August co-wrote the lyrics to "According to Plan," and added lyrics to "Remains of the Day" and "Tears to Shed." Elfman sang "Remains of the Day" as the character Bonejangles. "The Wedding Song" is credited to Elfman alone.

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, also from 2005, demanded something stranger. Elfman set Roald Dahl's words for the Oompa-Loompas as four distinct songs. "Augustus Gloop" leans on Bollywood, "Violet Beauregarde" on funk, "Veruca Salt" on psychedelic pop and "Mike Teavee" on baroque rock. At Burton's request, the songs drew inspiration from Bollywood, the Mamas and the Papas, ABBA, and Earth, Wind and Fire. Elfman sang every Oompa-Loompa part himself, layering and manipulating his vocals to build the harmonies.

  His song structures borrow from Tin Pan Alley and early musical theatre, with its 32-bar form, and from the verse-chorus pattern of 1950s and 1960s pop and rock. The lyrics serve the plot and the inner life of the characters. He wrote "The Little Things" for Wanted and sang it in both English and Russian. He also wrote the lyrics for "Lullaby" in Charlotte's Web and "Alice's Theme" in Alice in Wonderland.

  Choirs and solo voices run through his instrumental scores as well. Women's and children's choirs appear in Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and The Grinch. For the Batman cue "Descent into Mystery," he set made-up, Latin-sounding text for choir, evoking Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana. The Beetlejuice main title opens with Elfman singing the "Day-O" call in the style of Harry Belafonte. For To Die For he sang with director Gus Van Sant, credited as "Little Gus and the Suzettes." In 2013 he composed the music and sang the English-language vocals for Mystic Manor, an attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland.

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• 6. Echoes and Homage

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  Lalo Schifrin's themes from the original television series sit inside Elfman's 1996 score for the first Mission: Impossible film, alongside music of his own. He has made a habit of this. His Spider-Man scores of 2002 and 2004 supplied themes and selections for Spider-Man 3, which Christopher Young scored. His Spider-Man theme later reappeared in the Marvel film Spider-Man: No Way Home, composed by Michael Giacchino.

  Marvel itself came calling in 2015, when Elfman provided additional music for Avengers: Age of Ultron and shared composer credit with Brian Tyler. In 2022 his score for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness reused Giacchino's theme from the first Doctor Strange. It also borrowed themes from WandaVision and X-Men: The Animated Series, and music from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Bach's Toccata and Fugue.

  Similar blending marked his work in the 2010s. Justice League combined John Williams' Superman theme, the Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL Wonder Woman theme, and his own Batman theme. The Grinch brought back "Welcome Christmas" from the 1966 How the Grinch Stole Christmas! For Dumbo he worked in "Casey Junior," "Pink Elephants on Parade" and "When I See an Elephant Fly" from the 1941 Disney original.

  Bernard Herrmann is the composer Elfman names as his biggest influence. As a child, hearing Herrmann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still taught him that film music was a cinematic art form. In Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the cue "Stolen Bike" directly references Herrmann's music for Psycho. "Clown Dream" references his music for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Batman makes subtler nods to Journey to the Center of the Earth and Vertigo. Mars Attacks! and Hitchcock pay a fuller homage, as does the "Blue Strings" movement of his concert work Serenada Schizophrana.

  His other heroes fill a long list. From Hollywood's Golden Age come Dimitri Tiomkin, Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Carl Stalling, whose cartoon work inspired Elfman's score for Meet the Robinsons in 2007. From the concert hall come Prokofiev, Bartók, Shostakovich and Orff. Ellington, Harry Partch, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich stand among his jazz, experimental and minimalist influences. Specific scores have their own models: Erik Satie for Forbidden Zone, Nino Rota for Pee-wee's Big Adventure, George Gershwin for Dick Tracy, Tchaikovsky for Edward Scissorhands and Jimi Hendrix for Dead Presidents.

  His idioms range from funk and hip hop in Notorious to minimalism in Good Will Hunting, and from folk and indie rock in Silver Linings Playbook to atonal experiment in Freeway. A vast collection of instruments from non-Western cultures shapes his choices when a film has an international setting. He used African percussion for Instinct and pan flute for Proof of Life, set in South America. The oud, a Middle Eastern lute, appears in The Kingdom, set in Saudi Arabia.

  Many listeners hear Richard Wagner in the Batman score. Elfman says that influence more likely arrived through Herrmann, Steiner, Waxman and Korngold, because he was unfamiliar with Wagner's work at the time.

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• 7. How He Works

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  A rough cut of the film is where an Elfman score begins. He draws inspiration almost entirely from watching the picture, and sometimes from set visits. He prefers not to work from a script, story or concept. Dumbo was an exception, because he composed its main theme before filming began.

  Once a cut is ready, Elfman and the director hold a spotting session. They decide where music belongs, what emotions run under each scene and what the overall tone should be. Then he spends a few weeks in free composition and experiment, developing thematic material and the harmonic palette of sounds.

  After the filmmakers approve his first ideas, he writes anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes of music, cue by cue. He says the two most important things to capture are the tone of each scene and the rhythm of the editing. Beyond thematic development, action set pieces take him the longest, because timing music to action is so complex.

  Early in his career he wrote his scores in pencil. Since the mid-1990s he has composed largely on computer. He demos each cue by imitating orchestral and choral parts on a synthesizer, so the director can approve it. Then he hands his lead orchestrator, Steve Bartek, a detailed, multi-line sketch. Bartek breaks it down for the orchestra's sections, the SATB choir and individual players.

  Elfman also samples or records his own percussion and guitar to layer over a live orchestra. More than half of some scores feature his playing, including Dead Presidents, Mission: Impossible, Planet of the Apes, The Kingdom, The Girl on the Train and The Circle.

  To record, he rents a studio and hires a conductor and an orchestra or choir. From the control booth he troubleshoots with the director and the recording engineers. The film's sound department then mixes the final recording with dialogue and effects. He usually makes a separate mix of select cues for an album, and he has produced nearly 100 of them.

  Tight deadlines, or major edits after a score is finished, sometimes require extra hands. Jonathan Sheffer worked on Darkman, David Buckley on the Fifty Shades films and Pinar Toprak on Justice League. Since the 1990s, Elfman has also shared writing credit on projects such as Spy Kids and Men in Black International. Other composers have adapted his themes, including John Debney on Heartbreakers and the Newton Brothers on Before I Wake.

  In 1992, the studio needed a song for Batman Returns very quickly, and Elfman worked with Siouxsie and the Banshees on "Face to Face." Siouxsie built the foundation and sent it to him, and the track traveled back and forth between them. It remains his only collaboration with another artist. He later said, "I'm not used to collaborating at all with anybody. I did one track with Siouxsie and the Banshees but that's it. I've always been in my own bubble, and that bubble has been very fertile."

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• 8. Beyond the Screen

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  On the 23rd of February 2005, the American Composers Orchestra premiered Serenada Schizophrana at Carnegie Hall. It was Elfman's first original concert piece. In the liner notes for its 2006 recording, he described writing "several dozen short improvisational compositions, maybe a minute each." Some of them developed into six movements that felt connected "in some abstract, absurd way."

  His Violin Concerto "Eleven Eleven" premiered at Smetana Hall in Prague on the 21st of June 2017, with Sandy Cameron on violin and John Mauceri conducting the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. Elfman wrote the cadenzas with Cameron, for whom he wrote the piece. In 2022 came a Cello Concerto for Gautier Capuçon, premiered by the Vienna Symphony on the 18th of March. A Percussion Concerto for Colin Currie followed at London's Royal Festival Hall a week later. His Wunderkammer, written for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, reached the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms. His Suite for Chamber Orchestra premiered on the 4th of May 2023 at St Mark's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.

  The stage called in 2008, when Twyla Tharp's ballet Rabbit and Rogue premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House on the 3rd of June. Cirque du Soleil's Iris followed in 2011, and incidental music for Taylor Mac's Broadway play Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus in 2019. In October 2013, Elfman sang again for the first time since Oingo Boingo disbanded, in Danny Elfman's Music from the Films of Tim Burton. The concert has toured Japan, Australia, Mexico, Europe and the United States. In 2025 he reprised Jack Skellington for the 10th anniversary of the live Nightmare Before Christmas shows, starring Janelle Monáe, Keith David and John Stamos.

  On the 16th of April 2022, Elfman made his Coachella debut with a show called From Boingo to Batman to Big Mess to Beyond! Steve Bartek conducted, and Josh Freese played drums. Elfman sang, played guitar and played percussion. Two Halloween weekend shows at the Hollywood Bowl followed.

  Television has carried his themes for The Simpsons, Tales from the Crypt, The Flash, Wednesday and Desperate Housewives, which won him his first Emmy. He has made residuals on the two-word opening phrase sung in the Simpsons theme since the show first aired in 1989. Since a Treehouse of Horror episode in 1991, the show has credited him under "scary names" such as "Danny Elfbones" and "Boris Elfmonivich." In 2002 he wrote the music for Honda's "Power of Dreams" campaign, the first cinema commercial shot in the IMAX format.

  His honors include three Emmy Awards, seven Saturn Awards for Best Music, the 2015 Disney Legend Award, and the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award in 2017. In 2022 he received the Society of Composers and Lyricists Lifetime Achievement Award.

  His music has traveled well beyond its original films. "Clown Dream" from Pee-wee's Big Adventure appears in the video game Grand Theft Auto V and often opens Primus concerts. In 2019, the third season of Netflix's Stranger Things used selections from Midnight Run. Family Guy lampooned his orchestral style in 2007, and South Park mocked Burton's reuse of what it called the same music in 2010.

  On the 18th of January 2025, Elfman made his first appearance on Saturday Night Live, playing drums with A$AP Rocky on "Punk Rocky." Oingo Boingo, a mostly West Coast act, had never been invited. In 2021 he had released Big Mess, an album of 18 songs and his first solo studio album since 1984's So-Lo. Elfman announced a further solo album in 2025.

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