Ramin Djawadi on the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience, composing for season 8

Ramin Djawadi has been composing music for Game of Thrones since the beginning, and it’s been uniformly excellent. Wether its the show’s opening theme, “Goodbye Brother,” “Dracarys” or “Light of the Seven,” it’s impossible to think of the show without thinking of the score, and there’s still one season left to go.

Unfortunately, Djawadi can’t say much about the scoring for the final six episodes. “To be honest I haven’t even started yet,” he told Watchers on the Wall. “I don’t know when I will start. I don’t have a schedule for it yet, or anything. I haven’t seen anything yet, I don’t know anything, I’m just as excited and curious as everybody else.”

"I generally like to see as much story as possible, so I can really get a good idea. Sometimes, in the past, I’ve started writing based on a conversation with [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss]. But overall, I really like to see things in front of me and have a clear understanding of the full storyline. In this particular case, people keep asking me ‘How would you…?’ ‘Musically, what are you planning to do…?’ And it’s hard for me to say anything, especially, with Game of Thrones, it’s a show that’s known for its surprises and for things that happen, and for me musically, I just literally have to sit and wait and see what comes my way."

We can listen to some of his past hits in the meantime:

Because Djawadi has been composing for the show for so long, he’s had to write new themes and build on old ones for characters as they’ve gone through big changes. How does he decide whether to write a brand new song or just iterate on an old one?

"[W]e kind of take it season by season, and see where the character develops…[S]o, with Daenerys for example, I take her theme and combine it with the dragons theme as the dragons get more powerful. I get to expand that thematically, and then sometimes we get to a point where we go, you know what? We need a new theme, so for example last year, for Jon and Daenerys, we have that big ‘love’ scene, and then we establish a new theme…It’s continuing existing themes and then adding new things on top. Same with the White Walkers last year. It was such a big part of it, so we actually created a new theme. For the Night King, with the whole Wall coming down, we just felt like there needed to be more there than the preexisting White Walker music."

I fully expect the Jon-Dany love theme, “Truth,” to show up in the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience.

That may be part of the reason Djawadi hasn’t been able to compose for season 8 yet; from May to June, he was traveling around Europe playing the music of the show to audiences packed with fans; the North American leg of the tour starts in September.

The Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience was a big success when it toured in 2016, between seasons 6 and 7. Now, Djawadi has a whole new year of music to work with, although old favorites like “Light of Seven” and “Battle of the Bastards” are still in the mix. “[B]ecause I added season 7, there were definitely some things I had to move around or list, and it wasn’t easy, because if it was up to me, I would probably do a 6 hour concert,” he said. “I have so much more I want to perform and I want to play and the show has just so many great moments and it’s just tough to condense it down to a 2 ½ hour show…[T]here is a lot of familiar stuff from last year but there are a lot of new things in there, and I think it’s good.”

"This new concert now is a completely redesigned stage. We took a lot of the things from last year that we thought were really well received by the audience and we actually did even more fun things, like organic elements, for example, we added more pyro, people really love when we get the pyro going, so we have more of that, and we re-modified it. Without revealing too much, for example, there was the ‘Goodbye Brother’ piece, where our violinist is under the Weirwood Tree and this year we did something that I think is even cooler where our violinist becomes the Weirwood Tree and will actually go 35 feet up into the air and play our theme. It’s absolutely stunning. So, we did a lot of reworking, and now the big thing is, now that season 7 is behind us, I updated the show and added material from season 7, so it’s now current with the show itself and the storytelling we have."

The pyro was indeed eye-popping on the last tour…

…as was the “Goodbye Brother” moment:

If they’re upping the ante in those areas, the new should be properly spectacular. “I think if you’ve seen it last year, you will definitely be excited to see it the second time because it is so different, I mean the lighting, everything, is completely redesigned – the stage is actually not in the center anymore, it’s pushed to one side now,” he said. “That enabled us to bring even more focus to the musicians. We still have a massive screen behind us where we show the montages and scenes from the show, but that was something I really wanted to change from last year to put even more emphasis on the musicians and the lighting – so, a lot of things have changed.”

You can buy tickets for the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience here.

Before we sign off, let’s circle back to composing for Game of Thrones. How does Djawadi handle a situation where multiple characters, each with their own theme, gather in one place?

"It’s a big math game. For an example of a lot of themes coming together at the end of season 6, when Daenerys is crossing the sea, and we have several characters coming together, there are 4 or 5 pieces that I combined. We have the main title theme, we have Daenerys’ theme, we have the Unsullied theme, we have the Greyjoy theme, so it’s, the only way I can explain it is it becomes a big math thing of trying to make the harmonies work and the scenes and how to overlay them and it gets quite complex."

We can only imagine how complex the themes are going to get when everyone starts meeting up in the final season.

For more Djawadi’s insights, head to Watchers on the Wall.

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