On this week's Radio Motherboard, How The X Files Theme Song Was Made. Listen here and subscribe on iTunes.Hollywood, California, 1992. Mark Snow was in his garage studio tinkering with some ideas. He was already a pro at TV scores—dramas, procedurals, comedies—when a producer recommended him to Chris Carter, a veteran of Disney TV movies who needed music for his new TV pilot, an unlikely paranormal procedural called The X Files. As he sat at his keyboard one day, stumped in his search for the right theme music, Snow put his elbow on the keys. He had accidentally engaged a delay effect. A spooky electronic echo darted out of the monitors. That's a start, he thought. Advertisem*nt
To get that iconic sound, Snow tells me by telephone in a new episode of Radio Motherboard, he started by heeding Carter's advice: keep it simple. "Just make it that cool little thing that the boy scouts in the middle of the night on a camping trip whistle to each other… and then a monster comes and gobbles them up."Snow also sought inspiration in a pile of CDs that Carter, who lived nearby, brought to his house: Portishead, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, The Smiths, a variety of world music. Snow did about five different passes on the theme song, with an emphasis on minimal, repeating Glass-like phrases. Each time, though, Carter would reply, "That's really great, but it's not quite right." Advertisem*nt
Mark Snow, circa 2016. Photo courtesy Mark Snow
Snow decided to start from scratch. While tooling around in his garage one day, his elbow hit the keyboard while a delay echo was on. That gave way to a now unmistakable four-note arpeggio. From there, he added a sustain combination, some pad sounds, and then began searching for his melody. Flipping through the voices on his Emu Proteus/2 orchestral synthesizer, he tried various instruments—violins, flutes, woodwinds, brass, voices, some more exotic things. Everything sounded either too ordinary or too excessive.Then he stumbled on one of the higher-numbered voices, a patch called "Whistling Joe." It seemed silly at first, but the more he played a simple six-note melody with it, the more he liked it.
"I said, 'Why don't you whistle along? It'll give it a little extra zest.'"
His wife Glynn was walking past the garage, and stuck her head in. "Ah, that's interesting.""She's a very good whistler, so I said, 'Why don't you whistle along? It'll give it a little extra zest.'"He recorded her, mixed it with the synths, and called Carter to let him know he was ready to play him a few versions of a new 40-second piece.
The original version of the opening sequence with Snow's theme music, used in the 2015 productionCarter listens and "he says, 'Well, that's good. Alright. Let's go with that.' No big deal, no fanfare. Nobody knew what was coming next."What came next, among other things, was a new era for television music. Snow's spooky and avant-garde synth work covered most of The X Files' 50-minute episodes, with a rich cinematic flair that would influence the TV that followed. "Oftentimes," Carter told NPR, "what scares you most on The X-Files is not what you see—it's what you hear." Advertisem*nt
Snow has since scored dozens of other TV shows and films, including Carter's cult follow-ups, Millennium and The Lone Gunmen. A few years ago, the legendary art house French director Alain Resnais was so taken with Snow's work on The X Files he tapped him to score his final three films.Last year, when it came time to score the latest season of The X Files—what's likely to be the start of a new chapter for Mulder and Scully—Snow began working on a new version of the theme. He dipped into the wide arsenal of synthesizers, instruments and effects he's collected over decades of scoring work. He also tried to re-record the theme using all of the same components. But nothing sounded quite right."I don't know why," he said. "That original master recording was a definitive sound. It was impossible to replicate." Advertisem*nt Advertisem*nt