Words by Lillian Crawford

In the week of its release, Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler clocked 45.8 million hours viewed across the world. Directed by Felicity Morris, it is a universally engaging tale of romance, deception, and revenge.

That appeal is owed in part to Jessica Jones, whose scoring work on the documentary has been recognised with a nod at the 2022 Emmy Awards. With the film hitting the top 10 most-streamed films in 92 countries at the start of the year, she’s suddenly one of the most listened-to composers in the world.

This is just the beginning for Jess’s career, but we wanted to find out more about her journey so far. She played the piano and violin at school and in youth orchestras but, as a nervous performer, she preferred doing arrangements and compositions for her ensemble from around the age of fifteen. She then studied composition as an undergraduate at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, finding that she connected most readily with music that had a defined narrative rather than classical pieces written for their own sake. 

This led her to the National Film and Television School where she met her partner, Tim Morrish, with whom she formed the band Vanbur and released the EP Human. Influenced by the likes of Wolf Alice and Phoebe Bridgers and contemporary composers, she tries to blend the worlds of popular and classical music together. We sat down with her to hear more about her love of music, and the textures she so beautifully creates.

The violin comes out so strongly in your scores, especially in the BBC documentary Reclaiming Amy. As a violinist, do you build your music around your instrument?

I definitely feel that strings are the world that I feel very comfortable in. I like to do a lot of layering with my own violin, so there’s a fair amount of that in all the music I write. Reclaiming Amy was a really cool project because that was with the BBC Concert Orchestra but it was all done remotely, right in the midst of lockdown. About twelve players sent me recordings from their own houses and then I put it all together with my violin in there too. It worked well because for me an ideal project involves doing a session with a section, then doing some layered solos over the top to get the texture I like. I love the intimacy of solo strings, and I wouldn’t ever want to lose that. I want to keep that rawness in the music even when I have the budget to do a bigger section. I still think it’s nice to have that intimacy.

You also use a lot of vocals in your music and have appeared as a singer on soundtracks for series like Lost Girls and Little Birds. What role does the voice play for you? Are vocals harder to record remotely?

I personally really like recording vocals remotely. It’s a lot more nerve-wracking going into a studio and everyone’s standing there watching you. Sometimes you get things coming back that are unexpected. But then you don’t get to sit in a room with the players and try things out together which I did really miss, that more sociable side of the recording. I did a Netflix series with Anne Nikitin, who's a composer I work with a lot, and we recorded an orchestra in Maida Vale Studios where you get a huge scale. We worked with the Bulgarian Women’s Choir there so it was great to have all those singers together for the recording.

I do enjoy singing for other composers and creating more ethereal vocals. I’m trying to do a lot more with my band, Vanbur. When I started, because I never thought of myself as a singer, I wanted to conceal my voice with a lot of reverb so no one could hear me! But I don’t use it to hide my vocals anymore, I feel I’ve developed a lot of confidence with my voice since starting Vanbur so it’s definitely an instrument I like to use.

You use some of those effects in The Tinder Swindler which gets incredibly distorted as the film gets darker. What was the process like of writing the music for that film?

I wrote a theme for Simon when he seemed to be the perfect man to the women on Tinder, and then I tried to completely subvert it and turn it into something really twisted. We started the film with all the romantic tracks. I loved that project because I’d been on Tinder for a long time and I could relate. I would 100% have fallen for him! Everyone says that they wouldn’t but I feel like most people would! We’re living in a world now where you can have whole relationships through text, so you can see how so many people get catfished.

That was the part of The Tinder Swindler that felt very relatable, how he was so romantic and the women felt a connection with him very quickly because he was saying all the right things. I tried to convey that in the music by creating heightened romance with beautiful melodies and countermelodies with sweeping strings, everything that you’d want from a romantic score. Then as you realise what a deceptive arsehole he is, that’s when the organic synths come in. I was using a Bristol synth called the UDO Super 6, so I was doing a lot of layering, pitching, and granulation with that. 

The tricky thing was to keep that original thread running through so that you still have a connection. The director Felicity Morris wanted the music to be bold and quite layered. She told me to go from romcom to thriller to horror, and then to something like euphoria. A lot of the time you have to be quite sensitive with documentaries so there’s not often room to do that lush, over-the-top romance because it can undermine the subtlety. But because the story of The Tinder Swindler was so outrageous I could be bold.

You’ve done a lot of scoring in the true crime genre like The Tinder Swindler which is incredibly popular. What role do you play in keeping audiences so gripped?

It was great that The Tinder Swindler was so widely watched because as a composer you’re working hard to make sure people aren’t getting lost with the story or turning it off. My main job is to maintain a connection with the audience as it goes through. I just finished a BBC series with Tim Morrish called Red Rose which was a horror. With fear you have to create a world that feels frightening and find what sounds do that. We recorded lots of almglocken, which are like big cow bells, experimenting with bowing them and things like that, which became a big part of the score. And with strings, there’s so much scope to create a lot of really eerie sounds like through sul pont and on the bridge effects. I really like doing that.

When I create that kind of music I think of pieces I used to play when I was in quartets like Dmitri Shostakovich and Henryk Górecki. Then in film scores, I’m influenced by people like Mica Levi and Hildur Guðnadóttir, especially her score for Chernobyl. She’s so great at building tension, and I love what she did in Chernobyl by recording the sounds of the plant and then involving them in the music. With Red Rose, because it’s all about a phone and an app, we did a lot of stuff with synth sounds. But then to keep it human we blended those darker synth worlds with organic string layers. I don’t want to give too much away but there’s always a human behind the screen.

Do you prefer composing on your own or in a more collaborative setting?

I love composing with other people and you see that a lot more now in all genres, collaborations with other artists. We’ve certainly noticed a lot of those kinds of opportunities coming up as Vanbur. I think it’s great, especially as it can be quite an isolating job. Luckily I’m with Tim whereas a lot of composers are there on their own and then you’ve got no one to talk to. Sometimes you think something sounds great in the moment then, when you come back, it sounds like a mess!

I’ve loved working with Anne Nikitin who's been amazing and we’re just great friends now. We just finished scoring a series together and we did a series about Marilyn Monroe before that. I learnt a lot from working with her and how to work as part of a team. I think that having a female role model has been so important because when I was at college it didn’t feel like there were a lot of women in that role. In my undergrad, I was one of two women in quite a big music department, so just having someone I could see who had done it before me was so important.

I had a chat the other day with Nainita Desai and Natalie Holt for the Alliance of Women Film Composers. I think it’s great there are so many women writing scores now, it feels like a world that’s being opened up. I remember being nineteen and thinking it felt almost silly to be composing full-time, which I’m sure was a lot to do with my being in that contemporary music world where it felt like there was quite a lot of judgement. So having people you feel you can look up to is great.

Absolutely, and most of the Marvel TV series have been scored by women like Natalie Holt, as you say, or Laura Karpman and Pinar Toprak, it’s wonderful. Is that the sort of thing that you’d want to be doing?

I would love to do a Disney film, that’s what I’d really love to do. Just saying that now so everyone knows! 

Yeah, and there’s Beauty and the Beast on the phone screen at the start of The Tinder Swindler with your own music over it!

I loved doing that! I grew up listening to Alan Menken just all the time. Doing something like that, working with full orchestras, that would be the dream. We’re releasing The Tinder Swindler score soon so we’ve done a lot of the romantic ones on that. I’d just love to do something of that scale and would speak to a lot of people.