Words by Chal Ravens

The dreary days of lockdown had probably left me vulnerable, but I’ve never cried over a cartoon like I cried at the last episode of The Midnight Gospel. That’s your warning: now make sure to experience one of the weirdest, cleverest, most ambitious adult animations ever to hit television screens. Dreamt up by Duncan Trussell and Pendleton Ward, it’s an eight-part Netflix series about the really, really big stuff – love, death, drugs, magic, grief – told through candy-coloured characters, surreal visual gags and dialogue ripped from a real-life podcast. 

Between Ward’s wacky animated multiverse and the free-wheeling script, as voiced by comic Duncan Trussell and his Family Hour podcast guests, The Midnight Gospel is a strange brew indeed. But what ties it all together is the enchanting soundtrack: a rainbow-splattered suite of songs and skits composed by punk drummer turned in-demand TV composer Joe Wong. From zombie singalongs and prog-rock mall muzak to circuit-bent pop songs and tear-jerking harp solos, Wong’s score is as playful and unpredictable as the show itself.

In a blip of synchronicity that suits the third-eye-opening nature The Midnight Gospel, the final song in the series is also the first on Wong’s debut album, Nite Creatures – a long-in-the-making orchestral epic which finally arrived this summer, just a few months after the TV show aired. Dreams Wash Away is Wong’s majestic introduction to an album of widescreen psychedelic pop. 

With two of his most demanding projects arriving at the same moment, 2020 has marked a turning point in Wong’s career. The important thing now, he says, chatting over Zoom from his base in LA, is to “work with people that value my aesthetic, rather than simply want me to enact their will.” His TV hot streak began with his music for Aziz Ansari’s hit comedy Master of None and offbeat comedy-drama Russian Doll, a huge success for its star Natasha Lyonne. “At the time I was thinking about how much music I write and how absurd it was that I wasn’t spending any of that time making my own statement,” he remembers, “and watching [Lyonne] conquer that was very inspiring.” Wong’s conundrum will be familiar to many session musicians and jobbing composers: how could he make time for solo creativity while juggling valuable commissions? And perhaps more importantly, how could he make those TV commissions more personal and rewarding in the first place?

“In the first decade of my career, I prided myself on being versatile,” explains Wong, “but now I’m asking myself, what am I uniquely qualified to offer? What are my strengths and how can I play to those?” After the success of Russian Doll, where his vintage-inspired score provides a subtle foil to soundtrack picks like Love’s Alone Again Or, Wong decided it was now or never for his solo album. He booked a plane ticket for his former bandmate (and Ex Hex front-woman) Mary Timony and brought her to a recording studio in the desert near Joshua Tree. “That gave me a deadline to finish the first batch of songs. Once we did that first session I had a lot of momentum – it felt like the correct thing to be doing with my life at that point.” 

Nite Creatures is a record of grand proportions, employing two dozen guest musicians to pick up a thread of orchestral pop running from the Zombies and Sgt. Pepper’s through to Scott Walker and Kate Bush. But beneath the proggy pomp, Wong’s songs also reveal themselves as gentle meditations on grief and existential dread: “You’re still running from the spirits that haunt you,” as he sings cheerily on ‘In The Morning.’ Matters of life and death have been on Wong’s mind in the last couple of years. After landing the job on The Midnight Gospel, he was forced to pull out of the show’s first spotting session after getting the news that his father, who had been ill for years after suffering a stroke, was nearing the end of his life. “I had to quickly fly thousands of miles to the middle of the country and say goodbye,” remembers Wong, who had done “a lot of processing” since his dad had first got sick. “When you lose somebody to a debilitating illness like that it’s like you’re losing them piece by piece, so the trauma comes in waves.” The experience shaped Nite Creatures in subtle ways. “It wasn’t like, ‘Now that I’ve experienced this trauma I will sit down and write’ – it was more that I knew something had to come out of me.”

At the same time, The Midnight Gospel’s co-creator Trussell was laying bare his own grief to create the show’s stunning finale. The extended episode is based on an intimate conversation between Trussell and his own mother, which he recorded for his podcast in 2013, just three weeks before her death from cancer. As Deneen Fendig tells her son about discovering a strange new energy at the brink of life, the score shivers towards a ghostly crescendo performed by harpist Mary Lattimore and soprano Anna Waronker. It’s a unique piece of television, and one that sticks in the mind long after the credits roll. “I think it’s far and away the most profound of the episodes,” he nods. 

Wong’s transition to composing for film and TV began during his career as a drummer in touring bands, starting with hardcore punk as a teenager and branching out into avant-rock, jazz and even a Senegalese ensemble, plus a stint in New York experimental outfit Parts and Labor. In the early days of his soundtrack work, “I’d be up all night in the hotel with my little MIDI keyboard, sending things in,” he recalls. “It wasn’t always easy, but the weird bands that I tended to play in weren’t sustaining me financially, and I was also excited by composing, so the two things did feed each other.” These days his drummer’s instincts serve him well as a composer, enabling him to “find the rhythm of the cut” as he begins the scoring process. “Drummers are there to facilitate, or elevate, a song,” he argues, “just as a composer is there to elevate the vision of the filmmaker – so I think there are lots of parallels.”

Over the years he has honed various studio techniques to maximise his output within the typically limited timeframes of professional scoring. “One of the first things I do when I take on a new project is to narrow down the palette. It’s one of the more time-consuming parts of the process, but once I find something that works then I just stick to it, because it gives the cues cohesion.” For Russian Doll, that meant a warmed-up ‘60s glow using vintage instruments to echo soundtrack choices like Love’s ‘Forever Changes’. With The Midnight Gospel, he came up with a palette that reflected the naive curiosity of the main character, Clancy. Taking inspiration from lo-fi recordings of ‘60s cults like the Source Family and bedroom musicians like Daniel Johnston, he infused the songs with an amateurish charm: think circuit-bent Casio keyboards and wonky recordings with minor mistakes left intact. Vintage synths add a retro-futurist sheen to Clancy’s wild adventures, like the Fairlight synthesizer that soundtracks a zombie apocalypse inside a shopping mall. “I was thinking about ‘Running Up That Hill’ by Kate Bush,” he laughs, “and I was like, what if Kate Bush had a job making music for malls?” 

Any job that involves pretending to be Kate Bush sounds pretty dreamy, but with so much music to create, and in so many different styles, Wong needs to be organised in the studio. That means spreadsheets, timers, standing desks and militant preparation. “I like breaking up my day into chunks,” he explains. “Say I want to write 20 cues in a day, I’ll start each of them and then loop back to each of them later in two rounds. That time between the initial idea and finishing the idea allows me to move much more efficiently once I come back to it. If I set parameters to keep that critical thought at bay, then I can get into the flow.” The most important thing, he adds, is to have everything ready to go at all times, “all my instruments mic’d up, templates all set to go, everything that I can do to eliminate conscious thought from the process – because conscious thought is the enemy of creativity.” Such terrifying levels of personal organisation are perhaps the most powerful ingredient in Wong’s current success; procrastinators, take heed. 

With Nite Creatures finally out in the world, Wong expects a follow-up within the year – a lofty goal made somewhat easier by the continued impossibility of touring. He’s also got a podcast of his own to worry about – a weekly show about the lives of drummers, which is nearing its 300th episode. “I wanted to create a platform where I could have Phil Collins as a guest alongside the drummer from Savages,” he says of The Trap Set, which has also spotlighted non-drummers like Angel Olsen and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. There’s an ulterior motive to making the podcast, he admits – getting invited out to shows. As a composer “you could easily go into a zone where you’re just locked inside in a dark studio, but I think inspiration comes from outside,” says Wong. 

Even with concerts out of the question, the opportunity to commune with other music lovers remains fundamental to his creativity. His experiences making Russian Doll and The Midnight Gospel have made that clear, even if finding the right collaborators is a matter of luck as much as a product of hard work. “Those creators were aligned with my natural sensibility in a way that allowed me to just show up and be the best version of myself and compose the music that I would love to make,” he points out. “I think we’re learning more than ever during coronavirus that human interaction is the fuel, the raw material for music. I’m trying to make sure that I’m setting up a structure where I’m getting as much human interaction as possible.”