Danny Elfman Talks His Early Days with ‘The Simpsons’ & ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’

It’s quite difficult to succinctly describe the recognizability of musician Danny Elfman.

Visually, he could almost seamlessly blend into a crowd. Sure, he’s an evil redheaded ginger, but it’s not like he has an iconic mug like Ron Howard or Carrot Top or someone like that.

By name, he probably sounds vaguely familiar to most people. He possesses a moniker that rings a bell, but leaves some folks without the ability to place him specifically.

Musically, he’s everywhere. If you’ve ever watched The Simpsons or listened to Oingo Boingo, you can probably hum some of his tunes on command.

And if you’ve seen any of the 15 films on which Elfman has collaborated with Tim Burton, you know him intimately whether or not you’re even aware of it.

Now he’s preparing to bring those tunes (which also include Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands) to the live stage, at Lincoln Center in New York from July 6th through 12th.

He recently chatted with Rolling Stone about this endeavor, and reflected on how he got there. Of course we at BubbleBlabber were mostly interested in how he ended up writing The Simpsons opening theme.

“I told Matt Groening, ‘If you want something contemporary – television contemporary – I’m not the guy,’” Elfman said. “‘Cause I didn’t understand TV themes in the ‘80s at all. ‘If you want something really retro, I’m the guy.’”

The result? “It felt like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon that never was,” he continued, “and there was something reminiscent of The Flintstones: going through the city, even though Fred Flintstone was running and Homer’s driving the car. And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for.’ I wrote it in my head in the car on the way back. By the time I got home from the meeting it was all done. I ran downstairs, recorded a demo, sent it out, got a call back, Matt says, ‘Yeah, great.’ It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Now if I died today, they’d probably put ‘wrote The Simpsons theme’ as my legacy.”

Not that that’s a bad thing. “It’s beyond the dream. It’s something that I didn’t think anybody would get. But oh, my God, singing those three syllables for me was one of the most lucrative things I ever did … [singing] ‘The Simp-sonnnns.’ Singing more than writing actually may have been the smarter and unintentional thing to do, ‘cause I had a SAG contract and I was paid as a singer. I never have to worry about health insurance again.”

This wouldn’t be the end of Elfman’s singing for animated entertainment though, as he later wrote, arranged, & provided the vocals for Jack Skellington on The Nightmare Before Christmas score. “That was the one time it was really from the get-go, because the songs had to be written before it could be animated,” he explained. “There wasn’t a script, there wasn’t anything. And neither of us had any clue of how to put together a musical like that. So it was like, ‘Let’s start doing it.’ Tim would come over, show me pictures of the characters that he’d drawn, and I’d say, ‘Just tell me the story, like you’re reading it to a kid.’ As he was describing it, I would start to hear it and I’d run the other room, write and record a song. We did that 10 times until it’s like, ‘OK, we got the songs. Don’t know if it’s enough or if it’s way too many, whatever it is, now we have something to send to [director] Henry Selick so he could start a movie.’”

“I felt a particular relationship to this character, because Jack wanted out of Halloween Town and at that time, I was ready to get out of Oingo Boingo and didn’t know how,” he said. “My band was my Halloween Town and coincidentally, we also performed every Halloween. So as I wrote those songs from Jack’s perspective, I was kind of also writing my own feelings. So I understood Jack, like, ‘I’m king of this little world but I want out.’ I get it.”

He got it so well that he couldn’t picture anyone performing as Jack but himself. “I didn’t think about it at the beginning, but as I did the demos, there was a point where I finally said to Tim, ‘No one else can sing these parts. You’ve got to let me.’ As I started singing the songs more and more, I reached the point where it would have killed me to give it to someone else. Fortunately, he said, ‘Yes.’”

And the rest is cartoon history.

[via Rolling Stone]