CR 009: Evan Frankfort on Music, Creativity, and AI’s Inevitable Impact
The Emmy Award-winning composer and musician discusses his storied career, his collaborations with Liz Phair, and his passion for innovation.
Evan Frankfort loves music. Over the past 30 years, the seasoned musician has built an impressive portfolio of work. As a composer, he’s provided the score for dozens of television shows, including The 100, Swingtown, and 90210, earning a Daytime Emmy Award (for Guiding Light) and a BMI TV Music Award (for Rules of Engagement) along the way. Through his role as Head of Music for Hearst Media Production Group, he oversees the music for 25 educational series, including Mission Unstoppable and Wildlife Nation with Jeff Corwin. As an engineer, sound designer, and songwriter, he has collaborated with numerous artists, including the Bangles, Rancid, and Liz Phair. And as a performer, he explores creativity through his bands, the Spiritual Machines and Les Friction.
To put it simply, music is just something Frankfort must do. “I can never see myself retiring,” he says. “I could never see myself being over it. I mean, it may not always be music, but it’ll always be music with whatever else it is.”
In advance of the Spiritual Machines’ upcoming LP, Lockhearted, due out on August 16th, I chatted with Frankfort about his upbringing, his process as a composer, and how he envisions a future with AI.
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SANDRA EBEJER: Your website bio says that you’re a sixth-generation Angelino from a family of classically trained musicians. Can you share a bit about your background?
EVAN FRANKFORT: Let me start here: my grandfather and his [siblings] lived in Montana. Their dad was the attorney general of Montana. And in the middle of the night, they had to move because Dad did something bad. Dad was going to go to jail or something. I don’t even know what it was. But they moved to Seattle. [My grandfather and his brother] hated it. They responded to an ad for a cruise ship needing a band. Neither of them played instruments, but they saw this print ad somewhere and they called on a payphone—“Yeah, we got a band.” [Laughs] They bullshitted their way into getting this gig. They scrambled, put a band together. My grandfather learned how to play saxophone; his brother learned how to play drums. They got the hell out of dodge, where they hated it, and they lived a life of adventure. They pulled it off. None were the wiser.
My grandmother was a musician. She came from Russia at the age of three, just dirt poor. She played violin from the time that she was born. She had that four-foot, tough, Russian disposition, where she was going to dominate everyone and everything. And she had absolute perfect pitch. It’s a blessing and a curse because she couldn’t really listen to music. I remember when I was little, we were listening to a philharmonic performance of Beethoven’s Fifth and she was cringing. I’m like, “What are you doing? This is amazing.” She said, “They’re playing it wrong! It’s a triplet. The conductor doesn’t know how to lead the orchestra.” That’s the way it was for most music for her.
There are two kinds of musicians: there are technicians who play instruments, and they’re like surgeons or plumbers or electricians, and the more you practice, the better you get. That’s her world, [whereas] I’m a creative. If you give me paint or blocks, I’m going to make something. She didn’t understand that. Most musicians that are technical musicians, if you take the page away from them, they have no idea what to do. Where in jazz, it’s the total opposite; like, please take the page away so you can let my wings span.
I grew up around the corner from them. They were fascinating people and I was shaped and molded by them, mainly in terms of tenacity. I’m just gonna be who I am.
You’ve provided the score for many television shows. What is the process like when you’re working on a series?
You try to start with a clean slate, where you watch a show, you look at how it’s shot, you look at how people perform, what their rhythm is, and what their flow looks like. And you try to get with that, where you just play music, you listen to the sounds, and you get a feel for who these characters are and how they carry themselves. You’re really trying to be a natural extension of that and you’re trying to heighten whatever they’re going through, whether it’s happy, sad, whatever. And then you have to choose moments. You have to say, “Some of this stuff works better dry and if I step on it with music I’m only doing a disservice to it.”
You have this conversation called spotting. In TV it’s usually with a showrunner; in film, it’s with a director. Usually editors are very creative, and they’ve done a good job temping the score. In other words, they’ll use music from wherever that helps point to a direction. Most composers will tell you temping is their worst enemy because you get locked into whatever somebody has done. But the interesting thing about scoring is that there’s a million ways to do it well. You might have a perfect lock on the way that you approached it, and everybody will agree, like, “You nailed it. That’s amazing! Did you ever think of doing the opposite of that?”
This is where it gets fun to be a creative and not a technician. Because a technician will say, “Do you realize how perfect my performance was and how it emotes? What I did can’t be redone. It was lightning in a bottle.” A creative is like, “What other stones can we turn over? How can we fuck this thing up? How can we turn it over on its head and find a new way to approach this and give it another personality?”
You’ll do a lot of work in the beginning. Then once you hit your stride and everybody knows what the marching orders are, it usually goes quickly. On a show I did called The 100, it was literally 500 tracks of music. I had sometimes two days to write a 42-minute score, record it, and deliver it. It’s brutal under any context. I worked alone. It’s really, really hard to do something like that. Fortunately, I don’t do stuff like that anymore because it doesn’t put anybody’s best foot forward. All you do is struggle. I was very proud of what I did on that show, but 18 hours a day, seven days a week is not sustainable.
Are there types of shows that are more appealing to you creatively?
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