Vreeland has since gone on to have an incredibly successful career of scoring films, but first cut his teeth scoring video games such as 2012’s Fez and Shoot Many Robots, from the same year. When it came to scoring his first feature film Vreeland says he wasn’t intimidated by the process. “[David] found me through Fez, and he really liked the music. [Both David and editor Julio Perez] had the idea to try to integrate some of that music into the temp score and decided that was what the sound should be. At first I was kind of taken aback by hearing that music in the film. It didn’t register with me at first because I had spent so long on [Fez] and so to suddenly see it in a live action context it was very different.” The faith from Mitchell and Perez gave Vreeland the confidence to impart his own flair onto the music which now defines the film, but he is aware of his own limitations. He says, “I feel like I’ve been blessed in my career to have always had some kind of confidence about just feeling like I was capable of pulling something off. But that doesn’t mean that I would be able to do it right away. I think about Under the Silver Lake, which is the follow-up film that I did with David Robert Mitchell. I think that was an example where I was in over my head for sure. It took me a really long time to write the score, it was like 80/90 minutes of orchestral music. That took me a long time to figure out how to do, and so I look back at a project like that and I think, would I really want to invest all that time and energy into something like that again? Probably not.”
Vreeland acknowledges the influence the film has had, particularly on his own career. “[It Follows] certainly had an outsized amount of success that none of us could have predicted. Especially given David’s first film was a very small indie film. I’ve heard from lots of people, lots of composers, filmmakers, etc., who say they were inspired by the film and inspired by the score”. The success of It Follows directly resulted in Vreeland being offered to score other nostalgia heavy projects, looking to capitalize on the growing interest of electronic scores, one such project being Stranger Things but Vreeland was hesitant. He says, “I was a little bit concerned about being pigeonholed and I read the script for the pilot and I thought it was fine but it was very Spielberg-y to me, maybe too Spielberg-y. Then I watched a film they’d previously done to kinda get a sense for their style, and it didn’t really speak to me.” Nowadays, when it comes to choosing projects, Vreeland quizzes himself, “I created a tool to help myself. It was like a quiz and I would basically grade a project on all these different categories, like how fun do I think it will be? You know, how’s the pay? How inconvenient will it be given, you know, my circumstances, and and and so on. [Choosing projects] is a very personal, intuitive kind of thing. I take time and I sit with it. I try to gather as much information as I can so I can make an informed decision.”
Scoring for video games is a very different task than scoring for film. “I think they’re both limited in different ways”, says Vreeland. “But in some ways, limitations are freeing, they make it easier to be creative”, he expands. “[In the past], I’ve found games to be almost academic in the sense that you have to deal with a lot of technical considerations. And you’re trying to make music for this nonlinear experience. That is incredibly challenging from a creative standpoint. But it’s nice sometimes to just be able to work on something like a film where it’s almost like, paint by numbers, you just have a set recording.”
Back in 2012, Vreeland experimented with generative music tools, developing his own game, January, in which a player licks snowflakes each of which correspond to a different musical note, thus creating a unique progression. This idea was done to see how music could guide a game rather than the actual played experience. On the topic of AI, Vreeland says, “AI is not really new. It’s just that it’s kind of been presented in a different way in this kind of shiny way. And, obviously, a lot more resources have been going into making AI things, but, you know, January, that’s basically an AI game because it uses probability tables, right, to determine what notes play. And the only difference is that I didn’t train it. I didn’t, like, ingest, you know, a higher collection of classical works of, you know, Mozart or something to try to build it. But people were doing that in the 90’s.” Vreeland doesn’t get bogged down into the optics of AI and compares it’s universality as similar to most other technology that has come and gone. “The barriers of entry have gotten much lower and so there’s pros and cons to that. But from an objective viewpoint, I just think of it as a tool. How can I use this thing to make interesting art, and certainly use it to make non-interesting art, but that’s no different than any other tool.”
The music that inspires Vreeland, like most people, is that which he grew with. These days he mostly listens to Christian rock and computer music from the 80’s and 90’s. Vreeland says he is currently working from A-Z through an iTunes library that has endlessly grown over the last 20 years, that can swing from Aphex Twin to Antônio Carlos Jobim. It has been reported that David Robert Mitchell is working on an It Follows sequel, titled They Follow. When asked if Vreeland will be teaming up with Mitchell once again, he coyly replies, “we shall see.”
Richard Vreeland’s music can be found on his website and his Bandcamp page.
Article originally published 18/02/2025 on Screensphere and can be found here.
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