Words by Sean Wilson

Composer Amanda Jones has enjoyed a meteoric rise in her scoring career – and all within a relatively limited amount of time. She’s now entrenched as the musical voice behind several of our most topical and urgent TV shows, including Home for AppleTV+, Cherish the Day for producer Ava DuVernay (Selma), and Lena Waithe’s Twenties.

So how does Amanda adapt her own musical voice to a host of different contexts? We were curious to find out when we caught up with her but, of course, all composers have to start from somewhere. We, therefore, started with the age-old question: how did she get into the scoring industry in the first place?

“My life is music,” she says. “All I think about is music! I feel like 90% of my thoughts throughout the day are about music. Any sound is music, like when you hear a faucet or something. If water is dripping on a certain surface, you can hear notes on how it’s dripping. 

“When I was younger, I was really drawn to music in film. I could recognize a film without even seeing it, just through those first few notes. That’s always been a part of who I am. I’m obsessed with John Williams. He’s a beautiful example of how to make use of all parts of the orchestra. He also keeps it moving. Up-and-coming composers may sit on the strings too long and it’s kind of boring. They get stuck in a four-bar loop.”

Following college graduation and a later move to Los Angeles, Amanda sought a career based around performance music in live bands. “I was looking for the magical rock star dream,” she laughs. “I then decided to take these online courses through Berklee College of Music, specific to film scoring and orchestration. I’d previously studied Music Composition. I was then plugged into their alumni network. After that, I was able to do a five-week internship with Hans Zimmer and five weeks with Henry Jackman. At the end of that 10-week period, I was hired as a production assistant at John Powell’s studio.”

Recalling Hans Zimmer, Amanda says that she was “in total shock and awe of his organizational prowess… his business head is just incredible.” She adds: “It made me think about how I’d want to scale up and employ musicians of my own. I now have a handful of additional writers and we’ll work together on a lot of different things. Just pulling people up from my community and giving them that opportunity.”

Amanda smiles when recalling her first “9 to 5 job” at movie studio Lionsgate. “My job there was hiring composers, music supervisors, and music editors. My work at the music studio space fused with my work at the Lionsgate production space and I developed a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to be a great composer. What it takes to write a great cue. And what it takes to get hired for a gig.”

Her first feature film came in 2018: One Angry Black Man, directed by Menelek Lumumba. “It allowed me to take the leap from Lionsgate,” she says. “I handed in my notice there and went to work on this film. I finished it in two weeks. I just wrote my butt off. It was a really fun score, a smaller ensemble with strings and woodwinds. I cranked it out so fast and then realized I had left my job in order to write this score! I said to myself that I’m a full-time composer now and I have to keep heading down this path.”

Then came the first meeting with showrunner Lena Waithe, soon to become an important collaborator. “I met her at the NAACP Image Awards where a soundtrack I had worked on for Lionsgate, Greenleaf, had been nominated. She had also been nominated. Six months later, she hired me for my first Hollywood project. It was a pilot called Twenties, which later got picked up. Since then, there has been a flow of amazing work.”

Twenties has generated critical acclaim for its sensitive look at the romantic life of queer black screenwriter Hattie (Jonica T. Gibbs). The show also focuses on Hattie’s two straight friends Marie (Christina Elmore) and Nia (Gabrielle Graham). Amanda was originally enlisted to score the all-important pilot episode before the show was picked up by network BET.

“That was an example of a blank canvas,” Amanda recalls. “What’s cool about getting a pilot is you get to set the tone for the series. You can really dig into what it’s going to be. It was a blend of what I was listening to at the time. I had all these rhythmic voices and looped elements. There are also bouncy hip-hop vibes. I hadn’t really heard that on a TV score. Maybe only with needle drops on a show like Broad City. 

“I mixed the score as if it were something on an album. We wanted the score to be able to compete with needle drops so I mixed it differently from some of the other stuff I’ve done. Lena is another one of those inspiring individuals. I’m so inspired by these insane multi-taskers. I just had a handful of music credits on independent stuff but she let me be the head of my own department. Lena is happy to hire talent and just let them run with it. 

Another of Amanda’s critically lauded projects is the documentary series Home, for which she was Emmy-nominated (she’s the first woman of colour to be recognized in the category). Developed by Matt Tyrnauer, it’s said to take the audience “inside the world’s most extraordinary homes and unveils the boundary-pushing imagination of the visionaries who dared to dream and build them.” Amanda praises Apple TV+ and says it was “100% cool with the music being front and center”.

The process of writing the music for Home was, Amanda says, a process of “coming home” to her early days of performing in a music group. “It was really fun to work on. I used the same drummer from my band, who’s also my husband. It was really magical having that sound in the score. Whenever I have the opportunity to use a guitar or my own voice in a score, that’s when I most feel the overlap with my band days. 

“There’s this indie bedroom pop vibe to it, which is really fun. I was also blending it with the score a bit. One of the tracks has this awesome synth patch, a crazy, wavy synth thing and the drums are doing these angular, pointed sub-divisions. I was thinking, it would be really cool to play this live! It was a little bit in-your-face, a little bit avant-garde, a little bit experimental rock. All of the stuff I loved to experiment with via my band, only I got to do it on Home.”

This contrasts with her recent work for National Geographic Presents: Impact where the emphasis was firmly on “the subjects and their stories”. Amanda says it was important that the audience “didn’t feel pushed in any way”, while also resisting the urge to make the music “overly prescriptive”. 

In terms of Amanda’s collaborators, they don’t come more significant than Ava DuVernay with whom she worked on Cherish the Day. DuVernay’s 2015 drama Selma was the first-ever feature film drama on Martin Luther King Jr. (played by David Oyelowo). DuVernay has also inspired artists of color with her fiery, incisive documentary works such as 13th, a blistering account of the institutional racism endemic within America’s prison system. 

Cherish the Day is an eight-episode relationship drama with each instalment spanning a significant day in the lives of Gently James (Xosha Kai Roquemore) and Evan Fisher (Alano Miller). Having received critical praise, the show has just been picked up for its second season. Amanda describes DuVernay as “a juggernaut” who is “not just a fantastic director but someone who has her hand in a million other things”. 

“She was very melodic and wanted themes,” Amanda says of DuVernay’s brief. “Great themes for different characters. I love it when people are so clear about what they want. It just makes my life easier. She was a dream to work with and I’m looking forward to working with her again pretty soon. I love her sense of activism and how she brings people up in their communities. She provides a space for people from all walks of life to explore their artistic sensibilities. She’s so brave. Amidst the power structures of Hollywood, she advocates being true to who you are and what you believe in.”

Describing her scoring process as a “mixture of things”, Amanda elaborates: “Typically, I’ll start by opening Logic, and then I’ll start writing on guitar, my primary instrument, or maybe a piano. Sometimes I’ll use voice memos on my phone when I’m walking around the house and then I’ll start writing them out.” This then has to match with the principles and aesthetics of her fellow creatives, be it on a TV show or a film.

“Film and television music is such a collaboration,” she says. “The editors, the cinematographers, the actors, the licensed songs, the underscore. There’s such a symphony of elements coming together. You need to give space for the other artists involved in the production. It’s about recognizing whether the music needs to be front and center or whether it needs to pull back. We’re all in this together.”

Upcoming projects include the HBO streaming specials Adventure Time: Distant Lands (the latest instalment of which was released on 20th May 2021). The story follows the boy Finn and his dog Jake, a loveable mutt with magical powers. “That was an awesome opportunity to blend orchestra with a band,” she enthuses. “I’m obsessed with Ennio Morricone and his ability to put guitars upfront. It’s like I’ve died and gone to heaven. 

“His sound design aspects too, are incredible – like picking up an amp and slamming it down with the reverb coil. I discovered the origin of that sound by accident once when I was placing my amp down. I couldn’t believe it! If I get to score a nostalgic horror film or something, I will definitely incorporate that. It’s such a classic 1960s sound.

“The first Adventure Time special in particular to Marceline, the vampire witch. She rides around on a bass guitar acting as a broom. There’s punk rock, noise rock, indie rock sound for her character. I love doing stuff like that.”

As a woman of colour, Amanda occupies something of a unique position amidst the largely patriarchal, homogenous film scoring industry. The disparity between male and female film composers, and white composers and those of colour, is, she says, a by-product of “the history of America trickling into Hollywood”. She continues: “Hollywood cinema perpetuates this image of what America wants to be. It’s a monster feeding another monster. That’s why it’s good, as an artist, to put stuff out into the world that’s good for everyone. Art is so powerful for causing a shift in the zeitgeist.”

She acknowledges that addressing the problem is a steady process, albeit a positive one. “There is a slew of organizations that are like a talent pool, including one that I’m a co-founder of,” she explains. “It’s called the Composers Diversity Collective. It helps break down these pipeline problems. In this day and age, it’s so easy for people in positions of power to source talent from all over the world and from all different backgrounds. 

“It’s really about translating that energy into your intention and caring about the next generation. You want to ensure that your art is representative of what you want to see in the future. White males have largely set the prototype for composers and other disciplines. It’s time we realized that the aptitude for being great is present in so many different bodies. It seems so obvious to me, but people are so set in their ways in terms of what they think is right and wrong. But studios are very nervous about hiring talent that doesn’t seem as substantiated.

“We have excellent role models like Ava DuVernay, Lena Waithe, and Issa Rae who have been hiring new, fresh talent. I’ve been a part of that experience. I was excited to take that leap of faith with other folks, knowing that they will knock it out of the park. Just to be willing to give people that opportunity, as opposed to having a scared mentality and worrying if they will fail. I understand that if there are millions of dollars on the line, you don’t want this one aspect of your production to fail. But recognizing the scope and scale of someone’s work, even if it’s on a smaller scale, helps me trust them. It’s always the same basic principles.

“Our group, the Composers Diversity Collective, will host mixers. We’ve had mixers with Netflix, Disney, Nat Geo, and we’re planning mixers with other studios. The moment that you meet someone face to face, all that unconscious bias you may have had, all those preconceived ideas – it debunks all of it. People are getting to know each other one on one. We’re building a community and a culture of trust. Community is everything and getting to know someone is everything. I’m happy that we’re able to create that space for the composers and the musicians in our group.

“I’m happy to have spearheaded a lot of these conversations and to have leveraged the studios to help bridge this gap. I’m so confident in my own music and my own art that I don’t feel threatened by relinquishing my own contacts. It’s really important when these composer pitches happen, when the studios are deciding what they want, and have been on the other side of that, I know what that looks like. I’d rather see progress than be the only one alone in this space.”

To conclude, we ask Amanda what she thinks constitutes a perfect film soundtrack. “For me, personally, I think if the music can stand on its own as a release, that’s so magical and magnificent,” she says. “If the music can carry someone away into that surreal headspace if you can get them daydreaming immediately – that’s my goal. Just to have a standalone piece where the moment people start listening, they’re suspended in reality. They’re taken away to a distant land in their head. I hope I can take people there because that’s where my head is all the time!”