Picture Credit: Getty Images / Netflix
Who would’ve thought the likes of rock, Steely Dan, and electronic music would influence the world of Pokémon? They certainly did for Ed Goldfarb, who’s scored more episodes of the franchise than any other composer. He’s scored Pokémon Journeys: The Series, Pokémon: Evolutions, and Pokémon Horizons: The Series, to name a few.
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Through each new iteration of the series, Goldfarb has wanted to respect the franchise’s young viewers and give them a variety of sounds. While speaking with Goldfarb, his numerous influences made sense, as did his journey toward becoming Pokémon’s go-to music man.
“My mother reminded me after I started making music for Pokémon that before I took piano lessons, when I was three, four years old, I asked her to move the TV in our house closer to the piano so that I could play along with Bugs Bunny,” he told What’s On Netflix. “When I started making music for Pokémon, that was the first time that I had ever scored an episode of television from beginning to end, and it seems like I was always leading to that. Much like you can see the journey of a protagonist in a television series or whatever, and then everything starts to add up to what happened.”
Your first job in the Pokémon world was reimagining “Gotta Catch ’Em All.” What are your memories looking back on that first step?
I think the brief that I got was “Be sure it rocks.” We wanted more guitars, and they liked my singer, Ben Dixon, so they’re like, “Let’s do that.” I tried to reimagine the song in 2013. The original “Gotta Catch ’Em All” is unassailable, but it was also made by people who did not know that it was going to be iconic, that it was going to achieve what it achieved.
You went heavier with the guitars, right?
That was something that I wanted to do. I had my friend Lyle Workman, who’s a great guitarist who’s played with everybody from Sting and Pink Floyd on down. I had him play guitar and bass, so everything was tight and rocking. I changed some chords. As we spoke about yacht rock and sophisticated pop music from the late ’70s, early ’80s, I will always use extra voicings and neat little extra notes in chords just to add that level of sophistication.
I’ve learned from having a child of my own that kids do not shy away from weird music.
How so?
You can do all kinds of interesting things, and as long as they’re appealing psychologically, harmonically, psychoacoustically, they’re going to respond to it. So, that’s been something that I’ve followed throughout my career and certainly making music for Pokémon, having the opportunity to write music for children and, hopefully, make their lives richer and more exciting and more musical.
That’s a lovely approach.
I’ve never shied away from the uncommon chord or from weird rhythms or anything like that, so it was fun too.
Couldn’t mess with the rhythms too much in “Gotta Catch ’Em All” because “It’s Gotta Catch ’Em All.” You got to be able to sing along with it even if you’ve never heard my version. But I tried to add just a few interesting things.
And then the following year we started using my theme songs. Except for, I think, two years, they’ve been all mine. My wife was pointing at us like, “Hey, you’ve written more Pokémon theme songs than anyone else.”
Given all the years of working on Pokémon, have you gotten the opportunity to bring a lot of musicians into the studio you always wanted to collaborate with?
Well, my son went to an arts high school up here in Novato, in Marin County, and a lot of his classmates turned out to be really brilliant musicians. My co-writer for the last couple of, or maybe the last three theme songs, Nataan Hong, is actually a fellow student of my son’s. I think he’s about to turn 20, but he is technically 19, and we’ve been working together for three years on both score and songs.
Another kid from The Masa School of the Arts, a drummer and multi-instrumentalist named Lucas Holmes, has been working with me for about the same amount of time. So we formed a neat little band, just the three of us, and we’ve been performing, working at getting good. It takes hundreds of performances to get good at making any kind of music live. And even then you’re like, “Oh man, I can’t even believe that people were there and we got paid a little to do that.”
Picture Credit: Netflix
How big is the library of cues now for Pokémon?
We can’t write 22 minutes of music every week; that’s insane. We keep this database based on characters and vibes, and we write at least a bit of new music for every single episode, but a lot of it, especially once you’re getting into, well, we’re in the third season of Horizons, we’ve done almost 150 episodes.
Over all those episodes, have you found a lot of freedom to get weird as a composer, make some changes that other mediums or worlds maybe wouldn’t call for?
I’ve always been interested in mass market entertainment that’s created by weirdos, and I think that you find that a lot, especially in stuff that’s really popular where there’s a deep core of oddness. I mean, Pokémon itself is… I mean, yes, it’s rock, paper, scissors, but it’s also a great deal more; it almost thrives on its oddness. It sort of leans into, if you look at it not as a mass market entertainment, but just as some dude’s kind of weird idea, it’s really quite fascinating the way that it was adopted by the public. It demonstrates an interesting psychological knowledge of how brains, especially young brains, really operate and what they’re going to respond to. And I’m very interested in that as being a young person at one point and still really open to all kinds of weird art that just somehow affects me.
When do you know if a song works for Pokémon?
Well, if I like it and if I create something and it follows me around, then I know that it works. If I’ve played it and recorded it and it’s in the gestation period, if I hear it the next day in my head unprovoked, I’m like, “Oh, okay, that works.” I don’t have the opportunity to do that with everything that I create because often I’m sort of under the gun just to create a score, and often we have a lot to do on any given day.
And then it’s like what I hear when I look at the screen, often for the first time. If I’m scoring an episode, the first time I see it, I’ve got a keyboard in front of me and I’m recording, and I sort of sometimes let my hands do the talking because at this point I’ve been doing this a long time. When I’m lucky, my ear and my hand, they’re kind of together and I can just start playing.
At this point, I know if it’s going to work. Obviously, it’s not going to be all at the same level of competence, but if I see it and hear it and play it, I usually know, well, that’s not going to get me fired. That’s not going to get kids saying, “Can we watch something else, Mom?”
But as far as weird stuff goes, I took this class with my child when they were maybe three, from the ages of three to four, called Music Together. It uses music from all cultures, not just North American or Western. There’s all kinds of interesting rhythmic things and odd rhymes and odd music structures.
We have 4/4. In Turkey, the groove du jour, all the music that you hear, or a lot of it, is in nine-eight time, and the feel is… it’s the way your heart beats if you listen to music in Turkey and grow up with it, and that’s just one example. So the Kalos theme in XY is in five-quarter time.
And no one ever mentioned anything at TPCI when I submitted the episode. They’re like, “We love the Kalos theme. Great.” And you hear it all kinds of times. I’ve heard covers of people playing it on piano, and that’s a win for me. I did something that maybe you’re not supposed to do, but it just doesn’t come up as a thing that you would do in a lot of cases. But I did it.
What have been some character themes that really let your imagination run loose?
From the very beginning, I’ve created a motif for pretty much every single Pokémon or most of them. So, I’ve got this database, including musical scores of hundreds of them, upwards of 500 that I’ve written for them. And the score has stayed pretty consistent. When we went to Horizons, I didn’t use any of the old score that I had been using for the previous, what was it, like 10 years or so, but I used the motifs and repurposed them.
Sometimes I imagine their name, like writing a tune with the Pokémon’s name in it, for example, Pikachu, and there’s a lot of them like that, but Ash [Ketchum] has this and a trumpet that’s come in from the beginning, and I use it in some of the songs too. It’s in the extended “Be a Hero”, and he’s a young hero protagonist, so kind of like a trumpet fanfare, and Pikachu is just this kind of antic disposition. So hearing strings or pizzicato strings and woodwinds or mallet instruments like a marimba or a xylophone going… It just kind of seems like Pikachu. I mean, Pikachu contains multitudes, but that’s one aspect of that dude’s vibe. Let me get a prop.
Please do.
So kind of a deep cut, and a lot of times when I show [people this memorabilia], it’s like, “Wow, they made a plush of that guy?” Because it was Buzzwole, the Ultra Beast. I had great fun with the Ultra Beasts because I figured, oh, outer space, I often shy away from crazy synth sounds, but I didn’t for the Ultra Beast.
I just went to Autechre, Aphex Twin, just kind of wild-sounding stuff, because why not introduce the kids to it now, right? They’re going to love it when they’re in their teens and 20s. So, I had fun with this guy and the other Ultra Beasts, especially Buzzwole, who’s one of my favorites because of his narcissistic qualities. I mean, he literally loses a battle with Ash because he’s transfixed by his own reflection. And then the next thing he knows, he’s in a Poké Ball.
Pokémon Horizons season four comes to Netflix soon.