Law & Order’s Mike Post on Bluegrass, the Blues, and Whether It’s “Dun-Dun” or “Cha-Ching”
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The post Law & Order’s Mike Post on Bluegrass, the Blues, and Whether It’s “Dun-Dun” or “Cha-Ching” appeared first on Consequence.
Right now, it takes composer Mike Post an afternoon to write the music for a new episode of Law & Order. It’s only taken him about “30 some odd years” to get to that point.
“It depends on the episode and how much music there is, but I know the lane I’m in pretty well,” he tells Consequence. “Maybe it takes me a day, and then the two guys I work with, Andy [Birkhimer] and Jon [O’Hara], they’ll take at least two days to polish and tweak and fine-tune the thing. But I’m usually done in four hours or five hours, six hours, something like that.”
Post’s ability to work so fast on his two current shows (Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU) comes from both his decades of experience as a composer as well as the way technology has changed the process today. In a pre-digital age — “before VCRs, even,” he says — creating the music for an episode of television would be a multi-day, multi-step process involving a trip to the studio to watch the episode, days of composition, and a live recording session with an orchestra.
Thanks to modern technology, though, his work today is “more like the job began years and years ago in the silent movie houses, with organists looking at the picture and just playing music, classically-based usually, to accompany the picture. Those are our forefathers. We’re doing it kind of the same way they were doing it. We’ve just got a lot more firepower than a piano or an organ.”
What happens when there are no pictures that require musical accompaniment, though? That’s what Post faced in 2020, after the pandemic shut down all film and TV production for several months, and what led to the creation of Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta, a new album of bluegrass and blues compositions.
Post thinks of the album as “two pieces — however, they have a commonality in that they would’ve never happened if it hadn’t been for television taking a [pause].” The idea to explore the bluegrass genre came first, he says, because he realized that “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a concert piece with a five-piece bluegrass band and an orchestra, and have it be a conversation.”
The reason it’s never a conversation, he continues, “is that bluegrass players usually don’t read [music]. And orchestral players never jam.” But he had an idea for how to make his idea work, and decided to work on the project “the old way,” pulling out “my drafting table and my pencils and my score paper. You know, forget the computer, forget all that. And once I’d started, and I had three or four little tiny chunks, pieces, tunes, I thought, you know, if this idea works for a bluegrass band and an orchestra, it’ll work just as well for a blues band and an orchestra — another genre that I’ve dedicated my life to loving.”
Post explains the process like this: “I had the rhythm section guys in for a while, and they took from my bare bones tunes and exploded on them, then I let their performances be reflected by the orchestra and vice versa.” Creating Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta also allowed him to explore the kinds of instruments procedural scores don’t usually require, especially instruments specific to bluegrass music — for his day job, as just one example, he doesn’t get to use the dobro, “except on The Rockford Files.”
Working on the album additionally meant getting to bring in studio musicians considered “giants” in these genres: Message from the Mountains soloists include banjo artist Herb Pedersen, fiddler Gabe Witcher, dobro player Mike Witcher, acoustic guitarist Patrick Sauber, and vocalist Amy Keys. Keys is also featured on Echoes of the Delta alongside slide guitarist Sonny Landreth, electric guitarist Eric Gales, bassist Abe Laboriel Sr., drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., organist/pianist Robert Turner (organ/piano), and keyboardist Jon O’Hara.
Post says “Their reaction was, ‘Great — holy moly, this is gonna be difficult. This guy’s gonna throw us stuff that we’re not used to playing.’ And they were correct. But, I explained to everybody, I’ll get you through this. I won’t write you into a corner you can’t play your way out of.”
The full 80-piece orchestra (“some of the greatest studio musicians in the world, in my opinion”) recorded the album at the Sony studios in Culver City, and it’ll make its official debut on Friday, April 5th. “It’s odd, it’s different, it hasn’t been done exactly like this before, but I think it’s good. And my friends and family seem to like it. So we’ll see what the public thinks.”
Post is open to taking the album out on the road, even though, he notes, “that’s really hard to do — how do you finance 80, 90 pieces and two rhythm sections? And this music’s pretty complex. It’s hard to play. Maybe I might, if this thing catches an audience, if enough people are turned on by this thing and want to see it live. I could probably do it with 25 people in the orchestra and two rhythm sections. I could probably pull that off.”
Meanwhile, Post is back to work on Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, shows he’s been working on from the very beginning — which means yes, he and fellow composer Danny Lux were responsible for creating the signature Law & Order sound effect which punctuates most scene transitions on the long-running procedurals.
“Dun dun, ding ding, chung chung, whatever the hell that thing is,” Post laughs, before launching into the story of its creation: “[Law & Order creator] Dick Wolf calls me on the third day of the dub of the pilot — I’m already finished. They love everything. They love the theme. They love the cues, the dramatic score. [Wolf] goes, ‘Listen, I need a favor.’ I said, ‘Sure, whatever you need.'”
Continues Post, “He said, ‘Well, look, I’ve decided to date stamp scene changes. I need a sound to go with it that’s different.’ I went, ‘That’s terrific. Should I give you the telephone number to your sound effects department? Because I’m your composer. You’re calling the wrong guy. You’ve made a great pilot and I did pretty good music for it. Get outta my life. I’ll come back when you sold the pilot, you know?’ And he goes, ‘Can’t you help me out?’ And I went, ‘Oh, what a pain in the ass.'”
Then, Post and Lux began the quest of “finding some weird samples.” As Post explains, the noise is “a guy hitting an anvil with a hammer. It’s somebody hitting a brake drum with another kind of something. It’s a bunch of men in Japan stomping on a wood floor. It’s a jail door slamming. Then we went in and banged on some crap and some drums and some metal things, and we put all this stuff together, and we sent it over to the dub stage about five, six hours later.”
Later on, Post says, Wolf sent him a note saying “Isn’t it funny — after all the great music you’ve written, what’ll be on your tombstone is two notes. And they aren’t even notes that you wanted to do.”
Not only that… as hinted above, there are many ways people describe the Law & Order noise, but Post calls it “the ching-ching, because I get paid for it.” In fact, like all the other music he writes for television, he gets paid any time it’s used in anything, anywhere in the world.
“We just get paid pennies for that,” Post says. “But it’s a lot of pennies in the case of Law & Order — it just keeps going and going and going. Some places in the world, a couple of pieces of my music are playing 24/7. I’m A BMI writer, and BMI does such a great job as a performing rights organization and collecting for idiots like me that never think about money, that think about music all day.”
So when it comes to money, Post says, “Am I very well taken care of? Yes, I am. Am I grateful? Absolutely. Would I do it for much less? Would I do it for nothing? Yes. As long as I’ve got enough to buy instruments and support my family and feed my family and be a good citizen, I’m fine. That’s all I need.”
In the course of this interview, Post and I talked a lot about what it means to be an artist in any medium, how it’s a regular cycle of “I unzip my chest, expose my heart and my soul, and wait for people to say they don’t like it.”
It’s a process he loves.
“I’m 79, and I started playing when I was six — that’s a lot of years of knowing the difference between F and C,” he says. “It’s a lot of years, and I’m the perfect guy for the job. You’re never going to interview a more fortunate person. I am, and have been for a very long time, exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta drops Friday, April 5th. Law & Order and its spinoffs are everywhere.
Law & Order’s Mike Post on Bluegrass, the Blues, and Whether It’s “Dun-Dun” or “Cha-Ching”
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