Amy Richau, writing at StarWars.com, talks to the Kiner family about scoring Maul, Devon, and Lawson in the latest Disney+ animated series, Maul – Shadow Lord.
Kevin Kiner started scoring Star Wars animation almost two decades ago with the feature film Star Wars: The Clone Wars in 2008. His children, Sean and Deana Kiner, began working with their father in 2014 on Star Wars Rebels and have continued with Star Wars: The Bad Batch and the live-action series Ahsoka. When the trio were approached to work on Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord, they knew from the beginning the series was going to be a bit darker than their previous efforts.
Head Writer Matt Michnovetz wrote many of Maul – Shadow Lord’s episodes while listening to metal music from bands like Iron Maiden, Queensrÿche, Tool, and Ratt, an influence Michnovetz and Supervising Director Brad Rau suggested to the Kiners as a good jumping-off point. “They wanted to push it in a new direction,” Deana tells StarWars.com. “They described Maul – Shadow Lord as a Star Wars version of heavy metal.”
“At first I got out all my guitars and started thrashing things around,” remembers Kevin, “and totally failed.” In the end, the Kiners leaned on a variety of distorted sounds in the score to help bring Maul’s tortured life to the screen.
“I think what we distilled was that Maul feels like he’s constantly tearing things,” says Deana. “He’s tearing with anger. His screams are very visceral, back of the throat. They feel like soul ripping. And I think that’s how we finally found what feels like Maul.”
Distorted synths were used throughout the series score, especially beneath the title card and end credits for each episode. “Sometimes it’s as simple as taking a synthesizer and running it through some guitar pedals or guitar amps,” says Sean, “distorting it that way.”
The team had around 100 different distortion tools they could choose from at different times, including both physical pedals and digital recreations of physical pedals.
“Star Wars music is really hard. It’s extremely dense,” notes Kevin. “That’s owing to the master who set this all up, John Williams.”
Sean adds that Williams’ original Star Wars film scores were not just dense in terms of orchestration, but dense in terms of themes. “He’s going through musical ideas and shifts constantly. In other styles you have one musical thought and you can stretch that out for a pretty long time. Here, you have to be coming up with something new and something good and interesting pretty fast.”
Just a few minutes into the series’ first episode, Maul walks down the ramp of his ship and ignites his lightsaber. It’s an epic moment the Kiners spent a lot of time making sure they got right. “We were going back and forth,” Deana says. “Do we stay true to his animated side, what we’ve been doing since Rebels, The Clone Wars? [Executive Producer Athena Portillo] gave us the direction to try going with The Phantom Menace and see how that plays. And as soon as we did that, it was [like], ‘Of course!’.”
Kevin adds that the music during Maul’s filmentrance helped set the tone for the series and how fans were in for something new, as the “Duel of the Fates” choir transitions into more distorted sounds. “The music is kind of saying this is the Maul you know, and now this is the Maul that this show is about.”
Master and Apprentice
Much of the Kiners’ early work on Maul – Shadow Lord revolved around re-introducing a classic Star Warsvillain and creating a memorable theme for a new character, Jedi Padawan Devon Izara, that honored her complex story arc.
In Maul –Shadow Lord’s first season, Devon goes from a Jedi Padawan in hiding with her Master, to an apprentice of Maul.
“We fell in love with Devon as a character,” remembers Sean, “and we knew that she needed a theme of her own. While we talked about what her journey was going to be we realized we needed it to be really versatile because it was going to take her to some pretty dark places.”
In episode 10 when Devon sees her master Daki die, something breaks in her, and she accepts half of Maul’s lightsaber and works together with Maul to fight off Eleventh Brother. During this moment Devon’s theme and Maul’s motif from Star Wars Rebels also plays. “We actually hid the second half of Maul’s theme in Devon’s theme, so when we play them together, suddenly they line up as they’re united in purpose,” says Sean. “Her theme is expressing it’s coming into its own, but in a really dark way.”
Read the article in full here. The soundtrack for Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord is available digitally featuring selections of the show’s original music, available wherever you get your digital music including Amazon.
Watch the full first season of Maul – Shadow Lord on Disney+ now.
