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TV is a huge part of modern-day pop culture, and so writing theme tunes for hit shows can help define a musician’s career as much as the show's success. That’s why the process behind their writing is never easy.
English guitarist and Little Barrie co-founder Barrie Cadogan – who has played sideman for Liam Gallagher, Primal Scream, and Morrissey – has written his name into pop culture folklore with his theme for the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul.
But he had to write a bunch of different themes before the showrunners knew they had a winner.
“The music director, Thomas Golubić, liked [Little Barie’s 2006 song] Why Don’t You Do It, and he asked if we would do something similar with that kind of guitar voice and a similar BPM,” he explains to Premier Guitar. “That was the early days of me using the Bigsby.
“The brief was, ‘We want a piece of music we can cut dead on 20 seconds to start each episode.’”
On paper, writing just 20 seconds of music sounds like a breeze. But he needed to blow a gale.
“They asked for 17 at first, so I wrote 17 themes, and Virgil [Howe, drummer and late son of Yes guitarist Steve Howe] and I recorded them all, and mixed them,” he continues. “Then they came back and said, ‘Yeah, they’re great. Can you do another 12?’ They wanted that vibe.
“Thomas was a fan [of Little Barrie], which is incredible, really, because we’re not that known in the US. It was cool that he’d heard our records and he knew the songs, but there were no guarantees we were going to get chosen, ‘cause they were asking other composers as well. You just think that someone who’s already had more breaks in that world would get chosen.”
In the end, submission #7 was picked for the show, leaving Cadogan with a very short but incredibly potent 20-second musical legacy that he often gets asked about more than any other part of his work.
“Someone said to us, ‘Does it bother you that people talk about it?’” he returns. “It doesn’t bother me at all. I love it. It’s been the best 20 seconds of music for us!”
Cadogan will have known all too well what scoring for TV can do. Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand being used as the Peaky Blinders theme earned him a legion of new fans, while the timelessness of Neil Hefti’s Batman theme is epitomized by its key inspiration behind a Metallica riff. Cadogan might feel similar reverberations in the years to come.
A deep dive into TV’s most suspenseful chords, meanwhile, can teach guitarists a lot about songwriting and storytelling.
